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SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE (1948–67) was a revolutionary group whose journal of the same name helped inspire France's May '68 student-worker rebellion and influenced generations of radicals worldwide. This Anthology, for the first time in print in the English language, restores the collective nature of the group's adventure, where manual and intellectual workers creatively, and not without profound disagreements, reflected and acted together in anticipation of a non-hierarchical, self-governing society. The group radically reoriented critical revolutionary theory by affirming how social change emerges through ordinary people's everyday lives and struggles. In a world divided into two competing bureaucratic-capitalist camps, the autonomous grassroots response to rationalized forms of outside control (State-corporation-trade union-political party) would be workers' management – a conclusion stunningly confirmed, against traditional Left expectations, by the workers' revolts of 1953 and 1956 in the East, and by increasingly widespread challenges to established organizational forms in the 1960s in the West. These texts not only examine the overall crisis of systems of domination, but explore their creative contestation in the workplace, in changing relations between the sexes and between generations, and in movements for national liberation (China, Algeria), to bring out "the positive content of socialism" while remaining clear-eyed about how bureaucratization may be reintroduced into emancipatory struggles.
No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichs about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," dtournement and drive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s. With and Against reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete. With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.
Massive anthology of essays and illustrations published in NOT BORED! between 1983 and 2010.
Looking for the Proletariat is a contribution to understanding the implosion of the Marxist Imaginary. The implosion is staged in terms of the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 to 1957. It explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie was the only Marxist organization interested by worker experience and how the group’s anti-Leninist position on organization led it to privilege first-person worker narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities. Using the only first-person accounts of working-class experience in French industry of the 1950s, the book explores the disintegration of collective investment in the Marxist Imaginary that unfolded at Renault’s Billancourt factory in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution and the contexts that shaped it.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the previous century's most provocative thinkers. Can his work help us address the crisis currently facing the humanities? The dominant economic discourse sees the humanities as “low-value,” an irritation at best. Lyotard helps us to think against this pervasive dismissal of creative activity, not by defending the honor of the humanities, but by inviting critical practices which aggravate this irritation. Critical practices trouble what counts as critique, embrace incertitude, and listen for silenced voices. Twelve essays by artists and researchers take up Lyotard's invitation and begin to develop the idea of critical practice in the contemporary context. Three sections titled “What resists thinking;” “Long views and distances” and “Why art practice?” address contemporary concerns like affectivity, aesthetics, economic imperatives, militarism, pedagogy, posthumanism, and the closure of what in Lyotard's time was called "the West." Four short pieces by Lyotard intervene in and buttress the discussion: “Apathy in Theory” and “Interview with Art Présent,” here published in English for the first time, and “Affect-phrase” and “The Other's Rights” republished here to highlight his prescient concern for that which cannot be articulated.
On the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, paeans to the conquering Bolsheviks will be sung. Bloodstained highlights the darker echoes coming from that event, with a mixture of classic and new essays that expose a murderous dictatorship as it developed, paving the way for Stalin, Mao, Castro, and others to slaughter and starve their opponents. The defense of this criminal enterprise, later categorized as "actually existing socialism," ends here. No more velvet-gloved hagiography. No more Lenins. Includes essays from Mark Leier, Barry Pateman, Alexander Berkman, Iain MacKay, Herman Gorter, Rudolf Rocker, Luigi Fabbri, Maurice Brinton, and more.
Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work.
This book proposes a new interpretation of Claude Lefort’s thought focusing on his phenomenological method. Although all scholars recognize the influence of Merleau-Ponty, so far no one has demonstrated the fundamental coherence between Merleau-Ponty’s theory and the main concepts proposed by Lefort; in particular between the concept of institution and the definitions of social and democracy. If Merleau-Ponty uses the idea of institution to think beyond the division between subject and object, to think together continuity and difference, permanence and change, this same concept allows Lefort to understand society as both conflict and unity. From this starting point, this study will attempt to clarify Lefort’s concept of the political and his interpretations of modernity, humanism, and the work of Niccolò Machiavelli. These very concepts will show the difference from structuralism, Michel Foucault’s contemporary theory and theories of immanence. At the same time this study highlights an internal tension in Lefort’s own thinking: between autonomy and experience, institution and insurgence.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was one of the most important French philosophers of the Twentieth Century. His impact has been felt across many disciplines: sociology; cultural studies; art theory and politics. This volume presents a diverse selection of interviews, conversations and debates which relate to the five decades of his working life, both as a political militant, experimental philosopher and teacher. Including hard-to-find interviews and previously untranslated material, this is the first time that interviews with Lyotard have been presented as a collection. Key concepts from Lyotard's thought – the differend, the postmodern, the immaterial – are debated and discussed across different time periods, prompted by specific contexts and provocations. In addition there are debates with other thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, which may be less familiar to an Anglophone audience. These debates and interviews help to contextualise Lyotard, highlighting the importance of Marx, Freud, Kant and Wittgenstein, in addition to the Jewish thought which accompanies the questions of silence, justice and presence that pervades Lyotard's thinking.
What is life like for workers in the gig economy? Is it a paradise of flexibility and individual freedom? Or is it a world of exploitation and conflict? Callum Cant took a job with one of the most prominent platforms, Deliveroo, to find out. His vivid account of the reality is grim. Workers are being tyrannised by algorithms and exploited for the profit of the few – but they are not taking it lying down. Cant reveals a transnational network of encrypted chats and informal groups which have given birth to a wave of strikes and protests. Far from being atomised individuals helpless in the face of massive tech companies, workers are tearing up the rulebook and taking back control. New developments in the workplace are combining to produce an explosive subterranean class struggle – where the stakes are high, and the risks are higher. Riding for Deliveroo is the first portrait of a new generation of working class militants. Its mixture of compelling first-hand testimony and engaging analysis is essential for anyone wishing to understand class struggle in platform capitalism.