Zohran Mamdani is the model of a political actor and thinker who is engaged in a new practice of philosophy. He is a critical theorist/political actor who is constantly confronting concrete political projects with philosophical principles, and vice versa. To elaborate on what I have in mind, I draw on the writings of the postwar French philosopher Louis Althusser, who, throughout his deeply problematic and troubled life, constantly struggled to provide the Left with a philosophical foundation and, in the process, developed one model of what he called “a new philosophical practice.”
Lenin
4 posts
In this essay, I explore the far Right’s embrace of Lenin. I return to the Hegelian roots of Lenin’s politics to explain what he meant by “smashing the state machine.” I then argue that the Left should reclaim Lenin’s dialectics and his call, in the April Theses, for a second wave of social movements to overcome President Trump’s revolution. [Read more…]
Lenin’s April Theses can be seen as a rewriting and completion of the Communist Manifesto. This continuity becomes apparent in two prefaces Marx and Engels wrote for later editions of the Communist Manifesto. Let me begin with the preface to the edition of 1872. [Continue reading here…]
For the longest time, I thought that Marx and Engels were basically right. It seemed to me that our history was that of a constant struggle between a dominant class and a dominated class. The feminist, gay, queer, and trans* revolutions, Black Studies in the US, abolitionism – all these social and intellectual movements transformed the idea of class struggles. But I always managed to fit them roughly into a certain binary, between the dominant and the dominated, between the unjust and the just. Whether it was historically dominated women versus dominant men, or African-Americans versus Whites; whether it was historically dominated queer people versus historically dominant straight people, and so on. I was always in the grip of a certain binary class struggle between dominant and dominated. Today, I am no longer convinced… [keep reading here]