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The Margins and the Center: For a New History of the Cultural Revolution

The Margins and the Center: For a New History of the Cultural Revolution

At the end of the Qing dynasty and in the early twentieth century, a significant number of Chinese revolutionary activists and theorists believed that anarchism was China’s most promising revolutionary path, and that was in part because it corresponded most closely to the actuality of social existence. The vast majority of the population, after all, lived their lives with next to no relationship with the state, whose functionaries almost never reached the village level, and whose levies and regulations were for the most part administered by members of the local elite, with ties to their communities that were many and varied. 

The Philosophy of History and the Authoritarian State (1971)

The Philosophy of History and the Authoritarian State (1971)

Historical materialism’s critical economic prognoses on the natural course of the capitalist world order have been confirmed. The conditions for the economic breakdown and crisis of capital have been fulfilled; the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation has long since reached the degree of concentration and centralization that Marx and Engels designated as its naturally produced historical terminus.

The Deep State: Germany, Immigration, and the National Socialist Underground

The Deep State: Germany, Immigration, and the National Socialist Underground

Nearly three years ago, in November 2011, news of a double suicide after a failed bank robbery developed into one of the biggest scandals in postwar German history. 1 Even now, it remains unresolved. For thirteen years the two dead men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, had lived underground, together with a woman, Beate Zschäpe. The three were part of… Read more → 

Commune, Party, State

Commune, Party, State

We asked several contributors to write on the theme of the state and revolutionary strategy, for a roundtable discussion revolving around the following prompt: “In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the socialist movement spilled a great deal of ink debating the question of state power. Lenin’s work was perhaps the most influential, but it also provoked a wide… Read more → 

Seven Theses on Workers' Control (1958)

Seven Theses on Workers’ Control (1958)

In the workers’ movement there has been for a long time, and in successive periods, a discussion of the question of the modes and temporalities of the transition to socialism. One tendency, which occurred in various forms, believed it was possible to schematize the temporality of this process, as if socialist construction had to be preceded, always and in every case, by the “phase” of construction of bourgeois democracy.

The Biology of Citizenship: Immigration, DNA Testing, and the State

The Biology of Citizenship: Immigration, DNA Testing, and the State

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The past twenty years have witnessed a “return of the citizen,” 1 resulting in manifold proposals to redefine and expand the notion of citizenship and its links to the nation-states, giving rise to terms like post-national, denationalized, and transnational citizenship. 2 In the last decade, a new concept has emerged that has received particular attention in the citizenship discourse: “biological” 3… Read more → 

Rethinking Political Power and Revolutionary Strategy Today

Rethinking Political Power and Revolutionary Strategy Today

We asked several contributors to write on the theme of the state and revolutionary strategy, for a roundtable discussion revolving around the following prompt: “In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the socialist movement spilled a great deal of ink debating the question of state power. Lenin’s work was perhaps the most influential, but it also provoked a wide… Read more → 

The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin (1968)

The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin (1968)

I. The Revolutionary Crisis 1. Attempts at a Definition In several places throughout his work, Lenin tries to define the notion of a “revolutionary crisis,” especially in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and The Collapse of the Second International. However, he outlines a notion more than he establishes [fonder] a concept, as the descriptive criteria that he enumerates remain subjective assessments.… Read more → 

Crisis and Strategy: On Daniel Bensaïd's "The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin"

Crisis and Strategy: On Daniel Bensaïd’s “The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin”

The English translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s autobiography, Une lente impatience, is a welcome event in the Anglophone Marxist world. 1 Not only does it contain a rich history of some of the most decisive moments for the French Left from the ’60s to the present, it also deepens our understanding of the heterodox sources that coexisted within Bensaïd’s unique form… Read more →