It was in the 1960s that I began to ask myself a number of questions on the paths leading to socialism, and about existing socialism. I reflected not only on what the revolution in Morocco might be, but also on what socialism could be across the world.
The citizenist world is a homogeneous world, populated by individuals who look very much like those of the neoclassical economists: we picture them going to voice their political preferences during referenda just like the economists picture consumers going to the market to voice their preferences, without taking into account the power relations in which they are caught up, or the social antagonisms which shape them.
“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.
Lenin’s analysis forces us to consider immigration – the living and working conditions of immigrant workers – starting from the theory of imperialism, outside of which the contemporary forms of immigration remain unintelligible. The concrete knowledge of the causes and effects of immigration is, reciprocally, a guiding thread towards an understanding of imperialism.
If the figure of the worker can no longer be deduced from the forms of collective consciousness of a group (workers’ consciousness) otherwise objectively constituted – the working class – then it is necessary to build a new dispositif of investigation and analysis of the intellectual field of workers.
It was necessary to put in place a practice, capable of determining displacement and at least of alluding to an “offensive” move, beyond the necessarily defensive character of the resistance – why not buy a ship, put it at sea?
The sphere of social reproduction will be central not simply to defining schisms within the movement, but to defining the horizons of the struggle and the multiplication, both possible and preferable, of its sites. The battlefield of social reproduction is one on which we can move beyond the triptych: prices of petrol, buying power, and tax revolt.
On October 23, thousands of Glasgow cleaning workers kicked off the union demonstration for equal pay organized by Public Services International, Unison, and GMB with a minute’s silence, in memory of the women workers who died before being able to see the day when their work would be finally granted the same dignity and value as the work of their… Read more →
Few media accounts have bothered to understand or record the multiple organizational processes and dynamics that underwrite it as a powerful social movement. The diverse, entwined histories behind the caravan-form – assemblies and related tactics and strategies for cultivating solidarity – seem beyond the frame of most discussions.
Fifty years ago, Dan Georgakas wrote dispatches on developments in Black Power and New Left movements for European comrades eager to follow the evolving political scene in the United States. Until now published only in Italian in Quaderni Piacentini and in French in Les Temps Modernes, we are excited to offer one of these transmissions in English for the first time.
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