Alexandra Kollontai’s Many Lives | by Michele Masucci

2022-09-19 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Alexandra Kollontai · Charles Fourier · Friedrich Engels · Karl Marx · Mariarosa Dalla Costa · Selma James · Silvia FedericiLeave a comment

In Alexandra Kollontai’s own words, she lived many lives.1 Her life, brimming with events, relationships and disillusionment, is fascinating in itself. Reading Kollontai means tracing the life of a revolutionary through the numerous books, pamphlets, articles, speeches and actions that she took part in organising. We may differ with Kollontai on many of her choices, yet it is critical to contemplate the difficulties one always faces in being part of a movement with the passionate goal of forming a better world. Kollontai lived many lives surrounded by many loves, the greatest one perhaps being the 1917 October Revolution, which…

Michael Löwy | Incandescent Flame: Surrealism as a Romantic Revolutionary Movement

2022-04-262022-04-26 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: André Breton · Friedrich Engels · Karl Marx · Michael Löwy · SurrealismLeave a comment

What is romanticism? Often it is reduced to a nineteenth century literary school, or to a traditionalist reaction against the French Revolution—two propositions found in countless works by eminent specialists in literary history and the history of political thought. This is too simple a formulation. Rather, Romanticism is a form of sensibility nourishing all fields of culture, a worldview which extends from the second half of the eighteenth century to today, a comet whose flaming “core” is revolt directed against modern industrial civilization, in the name of some of the social and cultural values of the past. Nostalgic for…

Alain Badiou | The Four Principles of Marxism

2021-02-16 Categories: Philosophy & PoliticsTags: Alain Badiou · Communism · Friedrich Engels · Karl Marx · MarxismLeave a comment

[…] What do you retain as essential of the thought of Marx for thinking the present period politically? What has been and what is today your conception of communism? For me, communism resides in the final instance in four principles, established and legitimated by both the Marxist theoretical analysis of human societies and by the militant heritage of Marxism throughout the last two centuries. These principles are all concerned with the possibilities of transformation of what constitutes, for at least five thousand years (since the formation of the Neolithic Era), the principle of class in human society. First,…

Keston Sutherland | The poetics of ‘Capital’

2020-12-272020-12-27 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Antonio Negri · Friedrich Engels · Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel · Karl Marx · Keston Sutherland · MarxismLeave a comment

A year before the first English edition of Capital was published under his supervision in 1886, Engels issued a brief polemic against the pretensions of anyone reckless enough to think that this great work could be translated into English by a mere amateur man of letters. The target of the polemic is Henry Mayers Hyndman, identified in the essay by his pseudonym John Broadhouse. After reading the French translation of Capital in 1880, Hyndman had published in 1881 a short book, England for All, two chapters of which were so thoroughly plagiarized from Marx’s work that they in effect…

Carla Lonzi | Let’s Spit on Hegel

2020-11-182021-11-13 Categories: DériveTags: Antonio Gramsci · Carla Lonzi · Clara Zetkin · Friedrich Engels · Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel · Karl Marx · Martha Bernays · Marxism · Rivolta Femminile · Sigmund Freud · Sputiamo su Hegel · Vladimir Lenin1 Comment

The feminine problem is the relationship of any woman – deprived as she is of power, of history, of culture, of a role of her own – to any man: his power, his history, his culture, his absolute role. This problem calls into question the whole of man’s work and thought; man who has had no awareness of woman as a human being on the same level as himself. In the eighteenth century we demanded equality, and Olympe de Gouges went to the scaffold for her Declaration of the Rights of Women. The demand for equality of women with…

Keston Sutherland | Free Dissociation/Logic

2020-04-022020-10-30 Categories: Philosophy & Politics · Poetry & PoeticsTags: Anna Mendelssohn · Friedrich Engels · Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel · Karl Marx · Louis Althusser · Ludwig Feuerbach · Marxism · Pierre MachereyLeave a comment

pladd. (you who say either) nothing can be clear when knowing the associations are read by unread people, exposées, exposures. new poems for old. groovy. associations and world societies of interactive growth. groan. a place full of untrained actors absorbing dimensions of cradling pain securing test periods of temperature change. sewing elbes to harare, scratch luck. nothing matches the theoretical tuck. nutmeg. primus stove. raised eyebrows. work sharing. retreat into the forest. the silver conifers. the crumbs. chums. biceps & musical hairs. plaesthetics. planna vanne. plin plor plon pladverbially plodding along with a net in sturdy boots, add…

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