scholarly journals Rethinking the Category of Class: Tempora Multa of the Plural Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 171-192
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Key Aspects

This article attempts to rethink the Marxist category of class in response to criticism of the progressivist conception of history. The Marxism of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries has typically run into a problem arising from the fact that accepting the proletariat as the subject of history makes any political action aimed at social transformation superfluous. From a political viewpoint, the concept of the subject of history either implies that the working class will spontaneously carry out its historical task without any intervention, or requires the dictate of the party to act as a revolutionary vanguard for the working class. Many theorists (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Daniel Bensaïd, Massimiliano Tomba, et al.) have pointed out that emancipatory politics should abandon the idea that history is linear and that it has a particular subject. Does this then mean that the concept of class itself should be discarded? Althusser’s concept of the social whole as a weave of multiple temporalities allows us to take a new look at the problem of class in Marxist theory and political practice by understanding class as neither essence nor structure, but rather as a conflictual social relation and a political concept. Based on the works of Edward Thompson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Étienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Cinzia Aruzza, etc., the author demonstrates that the multi-temporal structure of capital means that class contradiction cannot be confined to the matters of production because class struggle unfolds at all levels of surplus value creation — production, exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital taken as a whole. Moreover, other social movements — feminist, anti-racist, migrant, etc. — lead to a redefinition of key aspects of class subjectivity related to the concepts of productive labor and exploitation. With left-wing politics now in crisis, class struggle also entails a struggle for recognition that the problem of class is a political one.

scholarly journals Political symbols and symbolic policy of the Western European left radical parties

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-189
Author(s):  
Sergei Sergeev
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Action ◽  
New Left ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Old Left ◽  
Agonistic Democracy ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Left Party

The concept of agonistic democracy put forward by Ch. Mouffe opposes both the understanding of political conflict as antagonistic, the parties of which regard each other as implacable enemies, and the actual denial of the conflict in the consensus theories of democracy. This concept, in which a political conflict is seen as a struggle between two opponents, each of which recognizes the legitimacy of the other, has found its implementation in the activities of new left-wing radical parties that have appeared in Western Europe over the past 10–15 years. Their appearance was a reaction to the crisis and the decline of most of the «old» left-wing radical parties that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. The «new» left-wing radicals seek to develop their own identity, which is different from the communist and socialdemocratic ones, which is also manifested in the new emblematic symbols they invent, which are not like the sickle, hammer, and five-pointed star of the «old» left-wing radicals, and in the new discursive strategies. On the example of the Podemos party (Spain), as well as the Left Party of France and the Party «Unconquered France», it is examined how the «new» left radicals construct the subject of political action – «people», «popular majority» or simply «We», opposed «Those above», «caste», «oligarchy». But with all the harshness of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal rhetoric, the conflict of «new» left-wing radicals with the system is more agonistic than antagonistic: they want not to destroy the old institutions, but to win them back from the opposite side, not to replace democracy with the dictatorship of the advanced class, but to «return» its people and expand it.

The Rise of the Left and Working-Class Voting Behavior in New Zealand: New Methods

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles Fairburn ◽  
Stephen Haslett
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Ecological Regression ◽  
Class Voting ◽  
Total Vote ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Party Voting

The extent to which mainstream left-wing parties attracted working-class votes during the first half of the twentieth century is exceptionally difficult to establish and explain. All of the various methods applied to the subject, including ecological regression of aggregate data, have had their problems, especially the ecological fallacy. A novel solution to these problems, in the context of New Zealand, takes occupational and party voting data at street level as its observations for ten towns from 1911 to 1951, and correlates the data treating each town for each year as a case. The working-class component in the total vote for the Labour Party varied surprisingly by town and followed unexpected trends.

Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854

1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Claeys
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Union Leaders ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Economic Improvement

The relative quiescence of British working-class radicalism during much of the two decades after 1848, so central to the foundations of mid-Victorian stability, has been the subject of many explanations. Though Chartism did not expire finally until the late 1850s, its mainstream strategy of constitutionalist organization, huge meetings, enormous parliamentary petitions, and the tacit threat of violent intimidation seemed exploded after the debacle of Kennington Common and the failed march on Parliament in April 1848. But other factors also contributed to undermine the zeal for reform. Alleviating the pressures of distress, emigration carried off many activists to America and elsewhere. Relative economic prosperity rendered the economic ends of reform less pressing, and proposals like the Chartist Land Plan less appealing. The popularity of various self-help doctrines, including consumer cooperation, also militated against collectivist political action. “Labour aristocrats” and trade union leaders, moreover, preferred local and sectional economic improvement to the risks and expense of political campaigning.Accounts of mid-Victorian political stability have had little to say, however, about the impact of European radicalism on the British working-class movement after 1848. That the failure of the continental revolutions brought thousands of refugees to Britain is well known. But although useful studies exist of the internationalist dimensions of Chartism prior to 1849—and of some of the refugee groups generally in this period—the effects of the exiled continental radicals on British working-class politics in the early 1850s have remained largely unconsidered.

scholarly journals The Political Practice and its Subjects in of New Critical Theories: Complicities and Points of Adversity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graciela INDA
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The People ◽  
Hardt And Negri ◽  
The Subject

These four theoretical bets on the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri), on the political subject as fidelity to an event (Badiou), on the “people” as a hegemonic interaction of heterogeneous demands (Laclau and Mouffe), on the political subject as an emergent subject of an egalitarian irruption (Rancière), illustrate the seek for new political subjectivities after abandoning the Marxist thesis that gives a decisive role to the working-class in the process of social transformation. Apart from this binding nucleus, they present divergences that place the question about the subject of emancipation in a field of confrontations, and bifurcation points. This work aims at delimiting the lines of combat, voices of consent and dissent found in these new critical theories regarding the connection between political subjectivity, and economic relations, the issue of the strategy, the nationalism/internationalism dilemma and the disjunction between statism and anti-statism.

Marxist Theory and Strategy: Getting Somewhere Better

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Panitch ◽  
Sam Gindin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
New Institutions

The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theorisations of capitalist competition, capitalist classes and capitalist states, and in particular the institutional dimensions of these – which is fundamental for understanding why and how capitalism has survived into the twenty-first century. The fourth section addresses historical materialism’s under-theorisation of the institutional dimensions of working-class formation, and how this figures in explaining why, despite the expectations of the founders of historical materialism, the working classes have not, at least yet, become capitalism’s gravediggers. While recognising that a better historical materialism along these lines will not necessarily provide us with a gps route to a socialist world beyond capitalism, it does suggest a number of guidelines for socialist strategy, with which the lecture concludes. This includes the need for building new institutions capable of defining, mobilising and representing the working class broadly, as well as recognising that the types of parties that can transform working classes into leading agents of social transformation have yet to be invented. A strategic priority must be to start anew at creating the kinds of working-class political institutions which can rekindle the socialist imagination, and develop the socialist capacities to get there.

scholarly journals Family and communism in Maria Leitner’s Mädchen mit drei Namen and Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Lina: Erzählung aus dem Leben eines Dienstmädchens

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Katherine E. Calvert
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Communist Movement ◽  
The Impact

This article analyses the portrayal of the impact of capitalism on the working-class family and the promotion of the communist movement as a form of surrogate family in Maria Leitner’s Mädchen mit drei Namen (1932) and Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s Lina: Erzählung aus dem Leben eines Dienstmädchens (1924). Reading these two Weimar-era texts as works of Gebrauchsliteratur, which seek to promote communism to a young female readership, I argue that, despite urging greater female participation in the male-dominated sphere of left-wing political action, Leitner and Zur Mühlen rely on normative ideas about gender to advocate political engagement to a demographic assumed to be politically naïve or disinterested. With reference to Weimar-era cultural discourses and strategies of the communist movement, I contest that both novellas are contradictory in their claim to represent a radically progressive political position while simultaneously failing to challenge fundamentally conservative gender norms.

scholarly journals Insurrection of singularities. A conceptualization of (anti)political action in postanarchism

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Dmitry B. Polyakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Libertarian Theory

The article reveals the political and philosophical core of contemporary anarchist thought using the example of such its theoretical variation as postanarchism. Seamlessly engaging into the current left-wing radical discursive context, postanarchism at the same time reflects the micro-political, localist and largely spontaneous tendencies that characterize today’s forms of political protest and resistance in many countries of the world. Having arisen as a reaction to the crisis of legitimacy of political and economic institutions, these tendencies lead to a rethinking of standard political categories by modern philosophy: “class”, “revolution”, “democracy”, “sovereignty”, “political”, etc. The postanarchist perspective, revealing distinctly anarchic features in current forms of radical politics (decentralization, network character, distrust of official institutions), also offers its own reinterpretation of a series of concepts on purpose of radicalizing and updating libertarian theory. In particular, this article focuses on the logic of differentiating the concepts of revolution and insurrec­tion, which is carried out by the leading theorist of postanarchism S. Newman, who starts from the philosophical individualism of M. Stirner and also proceeds from the crisis of metanarratives proclaimed by the postmodern. Furthermore, within the framework of an at­tempt to define a new political subject, that is common to Western left thought, Newman develops the concept of singularity in a number of his texts, actively using the philosophical studies of some continental thinkers. Finally, in terms of postanarchism, the conceptualiza­tion of political action and the subject of this action through the concepts of rebellion and singularity not only contributes to the clarification and revitalization of anarchist discourse but is itself a subversive gesture that destabilizes the normative political language.

scholarly journals Contesting Working-Class Politics in Turkey: Social Transformations, Islam, and the Left

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1025-1040
Author(s):  
Ahmet Bekmen ◽  
Ferit Serkan Öngel ◽  
Vedi R. Hadiz
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
The North ◽  
Union Leaders ◽  
Islamic Politics ◽  
The One

This article examines transition in Kocaeli, an industrial city in the north-western part of Turkey, away from left-wing politics and trade unionism in the early 1970s, and toward Islamic politics from the mid-1990s onwards. It does do by investigating the ideological, political, and social transformation of the working class. Based on fieldwork involving in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with current and former workers and trade union leaders, the article analyzes the various aspects of, and limits to, the hegemonic relationships between workers and left-wing politics on the one hand, and with Islamic politics, on the other.

scholarly journals Functions of Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-295
Author(s):  
Sikiru Adeyemi Ogundokun
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Creative Art ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Political Economic

Literature is an open concept and a creative art which expresses human history, experiences, imagination, observations, predictions and suggestions at a particular time in a given society. Either as fiction or non-fiction, literature can be rendered in both spoken and written words. It is often argued whether literature is for itself or the development of the society that produces it. This study, therefore, interrogates how the selected Francophone African novels, namely Sembène Ousmane’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu, Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, Ferdinand Oyono’s Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Aminata Sow Fall’s La grève des bàttu, Patrick Ilboudo’s Les vertiges du trône and Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle, depict the function of literature. The novelists are selected because of their inclination towards the social transformation paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to raise people’s awareness and mobilize them towards positive change. Based on close reading, the paper is built around Marxist theory which is interested in the class struggle as demonstrated in a literary text, with a view to deconstructing the existing capitalist tendencies in a given society. The findings reveal that the selected novels are focused on the poor conditions socio-politically, economically, culturally and psychologically that exist both during and after the colonial era. The paper concludes that literature helps readers to cope with the socio-cultural, political, economic, religious and other challenges of their immediate as well as remote environments through the process of self-discovery. As such, positive social change is possible through literature.

scholarly journals Fundamental Pedagogical Aspects for the Implementation of Models-Based Practice in Physical Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (13) ◽  
pp. 7152
Author(s):  
Alejandra Hernando-Garijo ◽  
David Hortigüela-Alcalá ◽  
Pedro Antonio Sánchez-Miguel ◽  
Sixto González-Víllora
Keyword(s):  
Physical Education ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Effective Implementation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Pedagogical Models ◽  
Improved Learning ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Educational Field ◽  
Common Action

The implementation of pedagogical models (PMs) in the subject of Physical Education (PE) is presented as a pedagogical approach that is based on the educational context as a means to overcome the serious limitations that arise from traditional approaches. The effective implementation of this approach has demonstrated benefits in terms of student motivation, student involvement and improved learning. Thus, its application and international relevance, the variability of content covered, the possibility of replicability in a variety of contexts and the fact that it favors a reflective framework and common action by teachers are some of the reasons that justify its use. In this sense, the need for teacher training, as well as the intention to generate more scientific evidence based on its application in the classroom, are some of the key aspects to be taken into account for its implementation and consequent consolidation in the educational field.

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