Humans’ capacity to abstract from nature, which they belong to as corporeal individuals, is their capacity for emancipation. —Hans-Jürgen Krahl Introduction My hypothesis in this essay is that a line of continuity runs between the thought of Raniero Panzieri and Hans-Jürgen Krahl. Both share implicit and explicit concerns and insights with the Frankfurt School. It is well-known that Krahl… Read more →
“Why do those who have no need for it take up the red flag?” “It is humanity that understands itself in activity.” 1 With this quote from Bloch, Hans-Jürgen Krahl concludes the brief political autobiography he wrote while facing the trial that saw him and several of his comrades tried for protest actions against the conferring of the peace prize… Read more →
For Krahl, constitution is the engendering of modes of thought – knowledges, ideology, practical reason, arts, etc. – in and through the originary synthesis of the social totality.
What will it take to move from #MeToo to #WeStrike? As the Latin American movements have shown, it is in the practice of this politics in feminine that a new collective subjectivity is born. It is not our experiences of violence that define who we are, but our struggle against violence that defines a collective we.
When feminist activists and intellectuals published a collective statement calling for a feminism for the 99% and for a day of action in solidarity with the International Women’s Strike in 2017, the response was heart-lifting: after only two weeks, and after countless hours of frantic collective work, a national network of grassroots groups, informal collectives, national feminist and labor organizations… Read more →
The strike appropriated by the women’s movement is literally overflowed: it must account for multiple labor realities that escape the borders of waged and unionized work, that question the limits between productive and reproductive labor, formal and informal labor, remunerated and free tasks, between migrant and national labor, between the employed and the unemployed. The strike taken up by the women’s movement directly targets a central element of the capitalist system: the sexual and colonial division of labor.
There was thus a transversality to the political composition of the strike (unions, grassroots territorial organizations, queer collectives, student groups, health centers, migrant collectives, self-organized individuals, etc.). There was also an intersectionality of problematics that were able to make a concrete critique of renewed forms of capitalist exploitation, through their focus on labor.
Overcoming the fragmentation imposed by the state and so-called “international agendas” has been very complicated. Thus we must turn our differences into the harmony of diverse women who launch their voices in varied scales, in a pluralized choreography that nurtures and does not separate: “Together and strong, always feminists.”
The problems of Althusser’s text and other recent interventions appear to me to lie elsewhere. What does it mean that “the party must be fundamentally outside the State,” with the clarification that it is “through its activity within the masses”? What does it mean to “tear the party away from the state”? Do we not find here an ideal (and idealist) conception of a party?
Tags: In Translation
The paradox we are experiencing consists in the fact that today the critique of capitalism and the state is produced in real social conflicts, advances through real political subjects, material practices: here we already move in the zone of the “screen,” beyond the categories inherited and taken from the traditional workers’ movement, in the profile of another which is expressed as a need and seen in clips of experience.
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