Viewpoint Magazine
Robert Linhart and the Circuitous Paths of Inquiry
A dossier tracing Robert Linhart’s approach and commitment to militant research through new translations of texts spanning the late 1970s to the 2000s.
Introduction to Robert Linhart: Concrete Analyses in the Spider’s Web of Production
Consistent with his rejection of a romanticization of the working class, Linhart insists that workers’ knowledge is fragmented and partial, if also profound. The task of the inquiry is, thus, to collect via dialogue and participation, this disjointed state of collective memory and oral testimony in support of a systematic understanding of the whole.
Introduction to “Lenin, Communists, and Immigration”
“Lenin, Communists, and Immigration” is a crucial text in Balibar’s trajectory, as it demonstrates that the focal points of his research in the 1980s and 1990s, and continuing into the present – on nationalism, xenophobia, class identity, imperialism, the persistent racialization of immigrant populations, and the ways these phenomena sustain working-class divisions – did not come from a break in his thinking, but rather emerged from his long-term engagement with an open “knot” of questions within the Marxist problematic.
The Crisis of Marxism
In 1977 Louis Althusser gave a famous speech in Venice on “the crisis of Marxism,” a thesis almost as scandalous as that of an epistemological break in Marx’s thought.
Introduction: Althusser’s Theoretical Experiments
By reading his work as animated by antagonisms and countervailing tendencies – where fundamental concepts are open to translation into different registers – we can detect the nodal points of Althusser’s oeuvre.
A “Struggle Without End”: Althusser’s Interventions
By reading Althusser’s work the way he read others, we see an image of Althusser not as irredeemably “theoreticist,” but as a theorist entangled with the complex legacy of Marxism: its history, its debates, and analytical and political currency within his own conjuncture.
Insurgent Practice and the Black Panther Party: an Interview with Joshua Bloom
The Black Panther Party was able to sustain disruption because the character of the practices that they had developed, that cultural technology of armed self-defense coupled with this anti-imperialism. It meant that the more authorities repressed them, the more they were able to gather broad allies, who otherwise wouldn’t have supported the party in the first place, but also had their own reasons to really feel threatened by the status quo.
Young Patriots at the United Front Against Fascism Conference (1969)
The YPO was a Chicago-based group of poor, white, and revolutionary southern transplants, who played a crucial role in founding the original 1969 Rainbow Coalition, a groundbreaking alliance initiated by the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. But on what grounds could the Patriots see themselves as specifically white revolutionary nationalists?
Remembering François Maspero (1932-2015)
As one of the most important French editors and publishers of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, François Maspero helped shape an entire intellectual terrain.
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 →