Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement
Author: Gilles Dauvé
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2015-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1629630551

In the years following 1968, a number of people involved in the most radical aspects of the French general strike felt the need to reflect on their experiences and to relate them to past revolutionary endeavors. This meant studying previous attempts and theories, namely those of the post-1917 German-Dutch and Italian Communist Left. The original essays included here were first written between 1969 and 1972 and circulated amongst left communist and worker circles. But France was not the only country where radicals sought to contextualize their political environment and analyze their own radical pasts. Over the years these three essays have been published separately in various languages and printed as books in both the United States and the UK with few changes. This third English edition is updated to take into account the contemporary political situation; half of the present volume is new material. The book argues that doing away with wage-labor, class, the State, and private property is necessary, possible, and can only be achieved by a historical break, one that would certainly differ from October 1917… yet it would not be a peaceful, gradual, piecemeal evolution either. Like their historical predecessors—Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Amadeo Bordiga, Durruti, and Debord—the authors maintain a belief in revolution.

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement
Author: Gilles Dauvé
Publisher: Revolutionary Pocketbooks
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781629630434

The original essays included here were first written between 1969 and 1972 by people involved in the most radical aspects of the French general strike and circulated among left communist and worker circles. Over the years these three essays have been published separately in various languages and printed as books in both the U.S. and the UK with few changes. This third English edition is updated to take into account the contemporary political situation; half of the present volume is new material. The book argues that doing away with wage-labor, class, the State, and private property is necessary, possible, and can only be achieved by a historical break, one that would certainly differ from October 1917, yet it would not be a peaceful, gradual, piecemeal evolution either. Like their historical predecessors, the authors still believe in revolution.

From Crisis to Communisation

From Crisis to Communisation
Author: Gilles Dauvé
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1629633038

“Communisation” means something quite straightforward: a revolution that starts to change social relations immediately. It would extend over years, decades probably, but from Day One it would begin to do away with wage-labour, profit, productivity, private property, classes, States, masculine domination, and more. There would be no “transition period” in the Marxist sense, no period when the “associated producers” continue furthering economic growth to create the industrial foundations of a new world. Communisation means a creative insurrection that would bring about communism, not its preconditions. Thus stated, it sounds simple enough. The questions are what, how, and by whom. That is what this book is about. Communisation is not the be-all and end-all that solves everything and proves wrong all past critical theory. The concept was born out of a specific period, and we can fully understand it by going back to how people personally and collectively experienced the crises of the 1960s and ’70s. The notion is now developing in the maelstrom of a new crisis, deeper than the Depression of the 1930s, among other reasons because of its ecological dimension, a crisis that has the scope and magnitude of a crisis of civilisation. This is not a book that glorifies existing struggles as if their present accumulation were enough to result in revolution. Radical theory is meaningful if it addresses the question: How can proletarian resistance to exploitation and dispossession achieve more than aggravate the crisis? How can it reshape the world?

The Council Communist Reader

The Council Communist Reader
Author: Paul Mattick
Publisher: Pattern Books
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-05-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 5143124174

" 'Workers' councils' does not designate a fixed form of organization, elaborated once and for all and for which all that remains is to perfect its details; it concerns a principle, that of workers' self management of the enterprise and of production. The realization of this principle can never occur through a theoretical discussion concerning the best means of execution. It is a question of the practical struggle against the apparatus of capitalist domination." - Anton Pannekoek The Council Communist Reader is a collection of selected writings from a few council communists. Council Communism emerged in Holland and Germany in the 1920's as an alternative to Bolshevik and Marxist-Leninist thought up to the Third International. Council Communist theory was derived from workers' experiences in the German Revolution of 1918, the early years of the Weimar Republic, and the study of the early council movements in Russia in 1905 and 1917. They sought not to impose a kind of organization upon the workers' movement, but instead to uplift the form of "councils" as spontaneous and self-emancipatory for the working class. This was a throughline for the council communists to connect back to Marx's understanding of proletarian revolution in maintaining "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves." Council communism was not to be a new ideology for the working class, but to take a critique of state socialism back to the roots of self-emancipation towards theoretical coherence which can combat all forms that hinder emancipation and move this theoretical coherence into practice. From this, and their understanding revolutionary consciousness develops as a result of crisis, revolution is not a choice but a necessity. The works included in this book have been chosen to reflect the developments of Council Communism over decades; this is not an exhaustive, encyclopedic collection of all councilist texts, but a collection of key texts. This book in the Radical Reprint series from Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

Communization and Its Discontents

Communization and Its Discontents
Author: Benjamin Noys
Publisher: Minor Compositions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Anarchism
ISBN: 9781570272318

"Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present? 'Communization' is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the 'human strike', autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure. Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, strategies, and tactics of struggle"--Publisher's description.

The Romance of American Communism

The Romance of American Communism
Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178873551X

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

Your Place Or Mine: A 21st Century Essay on (Same) Sex

Your Place Or Mine: A 21st Century Essay on (Same) Sex
Author: Gilles Dauvé
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781629639451

In a fascinating and radical critique of identity and class, Your Place or Mine? examines the modern invention of homosexuality as a social construct that emerged in the 19th century. Examining "fairies" in Victorian England, transmen in early 20th century Manhattan, sexual politics in Soviet Russia as well as Stonewall's attempt to combine gay self-defence with revolutionary critique. Dauvé turns his keen eye on contemporary political correctness in the United States, and the rise of reactionary discourse. The utopian vision of Your Place or Mine? is vital to a just society: the invention of a world where one can be human without having to be classified by sexual practices or gender expressions. Where one need not find shelter in definition or assimilation. A refreshing reminder that we are not all the same, nor do we need to be.

Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-09-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190692693

Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose -- and, if at all possible, cure -- the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical investigations. This Very Short Introduction sheds light on the cluster of concepts and themes that set critical theory apart from its more traditional philosophical competitors. Bronner explains and discusses concepts such as method and agency, alienation and reification, the culture industry and repressive tolerance, non-identity and utopia. He argues for the introduction of new categories and perspectives for illuminating the obstacles to progressive change and focusing upon hidden transformative possibilities. In this newly updated second edition, Bronner targets new academic interests, broadens his argument, and adapts it to a global society amid the resurgence of right-wing politics and neo-fascist movements.

The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia
Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2012-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674256522

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.