Suchergebnisse

The theoretical problem Bensaïd tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the problem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to politics? Can we talk of 'necessity' in history, of 'laws of history', of 'determination', or 'determinism', or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of 'historical possibility', of 'conflict' and 'struggle'? Bensaïd's contribution will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force.

Syriza won power in January 2015 as an anti-austerity party—the most advanced political opposition so far to the hardening deflationary policies of the Brussels–Berlin–Frankfurt axis. Six months later, the Tsipras government forced through the harshest austerity package Greece had yet seen. This trajectory was a predictable outcome of the contradiction embodied in Syriza's programme: reject austerity, but keep the euro. Why was Tsipras so incapable of envisaging a course inside the eu but outside the Eurozone, the position of Sweden, Denmark, Poland and half a dozen other European countries?

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world's leading Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of Vladimir Lenin. The volume's editors explain that it was Lenin who made Karl Marx's thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in the mode of production. Lenin retooled Marx's thought for specific historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance of the consequences that follow from action.