Historical Materialism

Il mito rappresenta [...] la forza sociale e sotterranea di una immensa rivoluzione che minava nel sottosuolo ovunque il mondo antico.

Era comodo procedere quando il Maestro faceva tacere e tremare tutti, regalando miracoli, sanando infermi, risuscitando morti, facendo cadere l'arma dalla mano dell'aggressore.

Gli operai vinceranno se capiranno che nessuno deve venire. L'attesa del Messia ed il culto del genio, spiegabili per Pietro e per Carlyle, sono per un marxista del 1953 solo misere coperture di impotenza.

La Rivoluzione si rialzerà tremenda, ma anonima.

Au tournant des années 1970, on assiste à l’émergence d’un renouveau féministe au Québec, marquée par la création du Front de libération des femmes du Québec en 1969. Une part du mouvement féministe envisage alors les activités domestiques non plus comme faisant partie d’une « nature féminine », mais comme un véritable travail. Cette démarche s’inscrit dans la recherche d’une oppression commune à toutes les femmes et dans l’idée d’une « communauté de situation ». Le travail ménager non rémunéré apparaît alors comme le « plus petit dénominateur commun » de la condition de toutes les femmes, et ce peu importe leur statut civil, leur classe sociale ou leur occupation. Durant les années 1970 et et 1980, plusieurs débats ont lieu quant à la reconnaissance de ce travail. Si certaines féministes défendent la revendication d’un salaire au travail ménager, plusieurs d’entre elles revendiquent plutôt une socialisation de ce travail par la mise en place de services collectifs (garderies populaires, cantines, etc.). D’autres féministes, enfin, demandent la mise en place de certaines réformes gouvernementales afin de réduire la précarité financière des mères et des ménagères. Dans la présente étude, nous proposons une analyse des discours sur le travail ménager, ainsi qu’un examen des différentes avenues de reconnaissance envisagées par les féministes québécoises. En analysant les publications de collectifs féministes, de groupes de femmes et d’organismes liés à la condition féminine, nous pouvons dès lors affirmer que le travail ménager a été un thème marquant pour le cheminement théorique et militant du mouvement des femmes. Bien qu’omniprésent dans les discours féministes des années 1970 et 1980, des collectifs plus radicaux aux associations féminines réformistes, il a été bien rapidement oublié dans les bilans et dans l’historiographie. Nous tenterons alors de mettre de l’avant les discours féministes sur la reconnaissance du travail ménager comme élément de continuité au sein du mouvement féministe.

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

Owen Hatherley’s 'A New Kind of Bleak – Journeys Through Urban Britain', is an animated narration of Hatherley’s travels through the UK, away from world heritage sites and conservation areas into what is arguably the day-to-day reality of how cities present themselves to their inhabitants.
The message of Hatherley’s materialist critique of the UK's urban and exurban landscapes is that it is deeply regrettable that both the socialist
and modernist projects have been abandoned in favour of the neo-liberal
myth of unfettered wealth creation through free trade, deregulation and
speculation.

I will start with a recapitulation of the approach I took to writing the text in the book, reconstructed in rough terms, and then go into a few methodological reflections that have been working with or through since then.
The text was primarily intended, for myself first of all, as a way of diagramming or even just mapping certain questions that came up for me in the relationship between critical and revolutionary concepts which sounded analogous, in the radicality of their negation, or the intensity of their rejection, and which maybe had decisive links, but were coming out of quite different philosophical trajectories, namely open Marxism and materialist / Marxist feminism on the one hand and left-heideggerianism as articulated in contemporary engagements with the black radical tradition on the other. That might be jumping ahead a bit towards the revised and updated version of the text that I will extract in a few minutes, but basically I was interested, at the time the notes in your reader were presented, that is, in late 2014, in articulating three moments: the notion of abolition and self-abolition in contemporary left communist theory then being discussed under the rubric of communisation, the ‘radical feminism’ of the 1970s in its anomalous French and Marxist variant in the form of Monique Wittig’s One is Not Born a Woman text, and the notion of the ‘nothing’ in always-already de-humanized commodified black life in the historical shadow of chattel slavery as developed by the poet and aesthetic theorist Fred Moten. My aim in this kind of mapping was to look at the vicissitudes of the use of negation in these forms of thought and their implications for communist politics.

In this paper, I analyse the idea of the world as a co-existence of humans and things. I argue that this co-existence should be considered under the conceptual lens of the responsibility. In the first two paragraphs, I argue that a system of artefacts always mediates humans’ experience. In the third and fourth paragraphs, I synthetize two different philosophical approaches, namely the theory of artefacts and materialistic method, which share the thesis of the performativity of the artefacts in the constitution
of human experience. In the conclusions, I show the political and ethical relevance of this possible material hermeneutics of the world.

Pourquoi l'illusion qu'on peut séparer le marxisme de l'athéisme se maintient-elle? Comme l‘a remarqué G.M.-M.Cottier O.P., c'est au moment où le mouvement marxiste donne des signes de crise qu'un nombre croissant de chrétiens semblent attirés par lui. L'effondrement du monolithisme doctrinal est sans doute à l'origine de cette idée qu'il est possible d'opérer un tri entre divers aspects du marxisme isolables les uns des autres, comme l’a essayé notamment G.A.Wetter S.J. L’auteur montre que l'athéisme est une part intégrale de la conception de Marx. C’est valable également pour sa „conception matérialiste de l’histoire“, appelée plus tard „le matérialisme historique“. De plus, comme l’ont formulé les évêques français, le problème n'est pas seulement celui qui oppose l'athéisme et la foi, c'est la divergence entre deux conceptions de la nature, de l'homme, de la société et de l'histoire".

A reconstrução diacrónica do conceito de “história integral” nos Cadernos do Cárcere de Gramsci mostra que duas exigências fundamentais da “filosofia da práxis” são articuladas através desta noção: 1) a necessidade de redefinir o materialismo histórico (isto é, uma teoria da história) a partir de uma perspectiva particular: a perspectiva das massas populares na sua luta política pela emancipação; 2) a necessidade de combater a revitalização da hegemonia burguesa proposta por Benedetto Croce através da sua «história ético-política», que Gramsci lê como uma teoria da «revolução passiva». Se a história ético-política baseia-se na exclusão do conflito da história, a história integral mostra que esta premissa não é um elemento teórico, mas uma necessidade política. Em outras palavras, a história integral revela não apenas a “falsidade” da posição teórica de Croce, mas ao mesmo tempo a sua capacidade de produzir uma determinada “verdade”, isto é uma “hegemonia”.

The article attempts a comprehensive review of the human security concept in order to question its utility for both research and policy-making. It notes the term’s interdisciplinary and extensively normative content that have facilitated its evolution into a successful security discourse. On the other hand, human security’s wide appeal has as a side-effect an extended conceptual polysemy inhibiting the cumulation of knowledge and the development of a relevant theory. Absence of conceptual clarity has also complicated its policy implementation. The article attempts to break the deadlock and move the debate forward by using the work of John Gerring and Paul A. Barresi on concept formation as an organizing device.

Artz, Lee, Dana L. Cloud and Steve Macek, Eds., The Point is to Change It: Marxism and Communication Studies (Peter Lang Publishers, 2006). 263 pages. Cited by 14. Reviewed in European Journal of Communication Studies, Reference and Research Book News; Sociology.

Ensayo introductorio a la publicación de cuatro de las «Conferencias sobre la moderna Ciencia de la Historia» del historiador alemán Karl Lamprecht (1904), así como una selección de fragmentos de «El Ciclo Humano» (1918) del yogui hindú Aurobindo Ghose.

Pueden consultar la obra en el siguiente enlace:
https://www.scribd.com/document/216618256/Roi-Ferreiro-Edades-culturales-y-fases-psicologicas-2010

Em As aventuras da dialética (1955) Merleau-Ponty cunhou o termo "Marxismo Ocidental" para designar certa perspectiva do materialismo histórico que afastava-se de leituras dogmáticas provenientes, principalmente, do partido soviético. Dessa forma, o artigo pretende, em primeiro lugar, revisitar a defesa que Merleau-Ponty faz da noção de práxis na década de 1940 ao apontá-la como conceito fundamental na articulação entre lógica e contingência na filosofia da história marxista. Em seguida, veremos como a aproximação inicial de Merleau-Ponty ao marxismo, na qual considerava-se o materialismo histórico como esquema teórico fundamental para desvelar a cadeia causal da história, ganha novos contornos durante os anos de 1950, quando uma reavaliação de suas posições (a partir do estruturalismo de Saussure) acaba por indicar o marxismo não como a única lente interpretativa da história, mas sim como uma perspectiva dentre outras, por mais privilegiada que seja. Dito isso, o artigo pretende, em sua conclusão, esboçar uma crítica a tal mudança de pensamento em Merleau-Ponty ao defendermos o materialismo histórico como a melhor teoria disponível para o desvelamento da causalidade histórica. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Marxismo. Marxismo Ocidental. Merleau-Ponty. ABSTRACT In The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) Merleau-Ponty coined the term "Western Marxism" to designate certain perspective of the historical materialism that distinguish itself of dogmatic positions coming, mostly, from the soviet party. Thus, the article aims to, first of all, revisitate Merleau-Ponty's defense of the notion of praxis during the 1940's as the core concept for articulating logic and contingency within the marxist philosophy of history. Then, we'll demonstrate that this initial approach to marxism by Merleau-Ponty, where the historical materialism was considered as the fundamental theoretical scheme to unveil the causal chain of history, shifts during the 1950's, when a revaluation of his positions (mostly because of Saussure's structuralism) ends up indicating marxism not as the only interpretive lens of history, but as a perspective among many others, however privileged it may be. That being said, the article tries, in its conclusion, to sketch a critique of such change of position by defending historical materialism as the best available theory for the unveil of history's causality.

This article is a summary of one part of a larger project, which studied war and the resulting production of disabled bodies, analyzed in a dialectical (i.e., not linear, oppositional, binary, idealist, or mechanical) and historical materialist framework. This article comprises a summarized report of one aspect of a case study and a new conceptualization of disability theory from a transnational perspective. The case study examines the social relations behind the production of disabled bodies in the Iran-Iraq war, in which chemical weapons of mass destruction were used. The second part of the article, using the case study report, develops an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, and non-ideological (according to Marx's Consciousness Theory) model for understanding disability. 1 This study uses the global context of capitalist economy and the imperialist politics of the United States and Europe in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through armed conflicts sustained by imperialist and nationalist social relations (always gendered, raced, and classed). This study engages * Sona is final year Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. For the past several years, Sona has been researching the living conditions of people (both veteran and civilian) who have become disabled as a result of wars in the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. As well, she has conducted extensive research on the historical incarceration of intellectuals, political dissidents, journalists, and community organizers in the post-revolution Iran. Additionally, she has worked and organized with Iranian and Kurdish political prison survivors and their families as a trauma counselor and political ally for the past five years. Her research, praxis, and activism focus on imperialism, nationalism, and the acquisition of disability due to violence. Sona's research investigates the nationalist and imperialist politics of nation-building in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through wars and degenerative public-spaces, such as prison, sustained by ideological, gendered, raced, and classed social-relations. Sona's academic research informs and is informed by eight years of community teaching experience, such as teaching English to and social-justice organizing with the newly-arrived (often traumatized) Iranian, Kurdish, and Cuban immigrant and refugee women with mental health concerns. Her scholarship and praxis engage the dialectics of geopolitics, examine them in the context of incarceration and armed conflict, and understand internalized oppression from her standpoint, a war-survivor Middle Eastern woman's standpoint.

The “event” has recently emerged among social sciences as a debated concept through which to explore social practices and historical change. Instead of focusing on processes or long term trajectories of natural and social systems, as has been the dominant trend during the last decades, the intention is to grasp the specificity of given moments and to understand their historical relevance. The present text delves into the philosophical background of the concept “event” and its relevance to the present discussion on the natural and ideological construction of reality. Meanings and pitfalls of the concept are explored before a series of definitions are proposed, in order to establish the necessary epistemological background for such an approach.

In deze bachelorscriptie onderzoek ik de centrale plaats die de mens inneemt in Marx’ filosofie. Ik
vertrek daarvoor bij een zuiver filosofische bespreking van de marxiaanse epistemologie, waarna ik
de beweging maak naar haar revolutionaire en bevrijdende betekenis. Marx werkte in een tijd waarin
de subject-object-verhouding een centraal discussiepunt was in de Duitse filosofie. Zijn eigen
materialistisch uitgangpunt brengt hij tot uitdrukking met de slagzin: “Niet het bewustzijn bepaalt
het leven, maar het leven bepaalt het bewustzijn.” Zijn kritiek richt zich in eerste instantie op de
idealistische filosofie die primair de ideeën als werkende kracht in de geschiedenis aanduidt.
Terzelfdertijd hoedt Marx zich ook voor een naïef realisme en een mechanistische
weerspiegelingstheorie. Vanuit het idealisme neemt Marx de activiteit van het subject over. De
erkenning van deze activiteit vormt zijn fundamentele kritiek op Feuerbachs contemplatieve
materialisme. Marx’ primaire epistemologische categorie is dus samengevat niet de geest of het
passieve subject, maar de reële, actieve mens. Marx bevindt zich zodoende in een spreidstand tussen
invloeden uit zowel het idealisme als het klassieke materialisme. Ik bespreek Marx’ originele
oplossing van het epistemologisch vraagstuk vanuit zijn praxis-begrip. Dit laat mij toe in te gaan op de
dialectiek die, aldus Marx, vervat ligt in het menselijke handelen. Namelijk: in het transformeren van
de werkelijkheid tot een humane werkelijkheid, vormt de mens zijn bewustzijn, d.i. in zijn praxis. De
werkelijkheid zoals die de mens in het kapitalisme verschijnt, herkent hij echter niet als de
uitdrukking van zijn eigen wezenskrachten. Zodoende vervreemdt de mens zich in het praktisch-
maatschappelijk leven van deze werkelijkheid, én van zichzelf. Niet enkel de natuur is voorwerp van
uitbuitende objectivering, ook de mens wordt gereduceerd tot een functionele waar in het
productieproces: hij is slechts een fragment van zichzelf. In deze tragiek verschijnt de ideologie op
het podium. Zij toont zich als een systematisch geheel van ideeën die de mens zijn miserabel lot
verklaren. Zodoende vervult zij een dubbele functie: enerzijds als noodzakelijk soelaas, anderzijds als
machtsmiddel om de stabiliteit en de status quo in de samenleving te bewaren. Geheel in de lijn van
zijn epistemologie verklaart Marx de ideologische schijnwerkelijkheid uit de verscheurde sociale
werkelijkheid. Dat brengt hem ertoe te stellen dat niet in het denken, maar in de concrete
werkelijkheid de theorie haar oplossing vindt. Ideologiekritiek wordt dus praktische kritiek op het
kapitalisme, die haar uiting vindt in de revolutionaire praxis, waarin de mens de gehele sociale
werkelijkheid waarvan hijzelf deel uitmaakt bewust tot object van zijn activiteit maakt. Marx ziet hoe
het kapitalisme in zijn ontwikkeling zélf de krachten voortbrengt die zijn opheffing zullen betekenen:
het proletariaat. Het is precies in het dialectisch proces van vervreemding dat de proletariër zijn
notie van menselijkheid herwint, aldus Marx. De ideologische schijn verliest bijgevolg zijn
verbloemende kracht en de werkelijkheid verschijnt als het product van het menselijk handelen, d.i.
veranderlijk. In deze context bespreek ik de spanning tussen vrijheid en bepaaldheid. Marx’ historisch
materialisme speelt hierin een sleutelrol: in de historische dialectiek waarin de mens tot een
vervreemde ‘waar’ gereduceerd wordt, wint hij het noodzakelijke bewustzijn voor zijn bevrijding.
Deze uiteenzetting sluit ik af met een beschouwing over het onderliggende mensbeeld van Marx.
Daar de mens een scheppend wezen is, dient de samenleving de uitdrukking van zijn eigen
Wesenskräfte te zijn. De verwerkelijking van de menselijk natuur zal plaatsvinden in een praktische
beweging die zich de vervreemde werkelijkheid toe-eigent en een vorm van samenleven voortbrengt
die de uitdrukking van de wezenlijk vrije menselijke praxis is: het communisme.

"War Power, Police Power" advances a Marxist analysis of the connection between international law and war. Law embodies the discursive field through which the innate violence of liberalism has always been obscured. International law is revealed as a means of, and justification for, class war.

La noción de ciencia en Manuel Sacristán, de José Sarrión Andaluz, comprende el desarrollo de esta idea en el pensamiento de Sacristán a través de los estudios que éste realiza sobre lógica y filosofía de la ciencia, así como de las implicaciones que esta concepción tiene en la problemática ecológica y la función de la ciencia en las sociedades contemporáneas. Además, también se exponen algunos de sus debates con autores clásicos en el ámbito de la filosofía de la ciencia-como Kuhn, Popper o Carnap-y de la tradición marxista-como Lukács, Gramsci o Engels-. A nuestro juicio, el reto del libro consiste precisamente en ofrecer una perspectiva que complemente sus estudios lógicos, epistemológicos y metodológicos con su pensamiento marxista en la explicación de su concepción de ciencia. Además, trata de hacerlo en consonancia con algunos de los elementos definitorios de su pensamiento, como la honestidad y el rigor científico, la orientación revolucionaria o el compromiso de Sacristán a la hora de hacer la complejidad accesible a la generalidad. Manuel Sacristán ofreciendo una conferencia en la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. (Fotografía: Jordi Soteras).

Chociaż termin "totalitaryzm" jest przedmiotem wieloletniej debaty akade-mickiej, w której niejednokrotnie był dyskredytowany, w krajach postsocjali-stycznych, które miały w pewnym okresie cierpieć pod tegoż "totalitaryzmu" jarzmem, wciąż potrafi wzbudzać spore emocje jako oręż polityczny (Conelly 2010). Celem artykułu jest pokazanie ograniczeń funkcjonalności tego terminu na bazie istniejących studiów krytycznych, jak również przykładów niespójno-ści koncepcji tych myślicieli, którzy go szczególnie afirmują i propagują. Za-sadniczym punktem wyjścia są tutaj znakomite analizy, które wykonali włoscy badacze-Domenico Losurdo (2004) i Enzo Traverso (2017). Ponadto w ni-niejszym artykule wykorzystano szereg innych studiów odwołujących się do badań historycznych, analiz politologicznych i społecznych, a także refleksji filozoficznej poświęconej "totalitaryzmowi". W pierwszej części została przed-stawiona geneza terminu "totalitaryzm" i zarysowany stan debaty akademickiej towarzyszącej jego konceptualizacji. W drugiej części została zakwestionowa-na słuszność esencjonalnego utożsamienia nazizmu z komunizmem. W trze-ciej przeanalizowano próby prezentacji marksizmu jako "ideologii totalitarnej" w zimnowojennej filozofii politycznej. W ostatniej zaś zostały podkreślone niektóre rasistowskie i imperialistyczne konotacje związane z koncepcją "to-talitaryzmu". Prowadzi to do konkluzji, gdzie pokazano główne kontrowersje "modelu totalitarnego".

Das, Raju. Marxist Class Theory For a Skeptical World. Chicago: Haymarket, 2018. Marxian class theory, as the world knows it, has long been declared dead. Its obituary, although premature, was written both inside and outside of Marxism. Those in denial of class-divided capitalist society have triumphantly heralded the 'end of history.' But those who still clung to class theory and its explanatory potential forged new ways to understand social reality. They, however, refused to accept the proletariat as the historical agent of revolutionary reconstitution of society. As a result, different variants of Marxism have sprung up that challenge traditional Marxism and its putative fixation on class. Of these, analytical Marxism and post-structuralist Marxism are the most prominent. Both questioned the foundational concepts of classical Marxism, and attempted to bring it into alignment with the contemporary human condition. The challenge to traditional Marxism also produced its stout defenders. Among them Raju Das, a professor of Geography at York University, Canada, is a leading thinker of class. He has written a magnum opus in defense of classical Marxism. His work is a critique of different versions of contemporary Marxism that tore themselves away from original Marxian theory. While critiquing growing neo-Marxist traditions, which tend to draw less and less upon classical Marxism, Das's approach has been that of a sympathetic scholar and a dispassionate social scientist who drinks deep at the scientific theory of class as conceived by Marx. He productively engages with analytical Marxism and post-structural Marxism. He faithfully describes the basic tenets of each, and diligently identifies key figures and their major contributions to these traditions. How carefully he treads this path is evident from the fact that he waits almost 200 pages, detailing key ideas and key disagreements of analytical and postmodern Marxisms, before he offers their critical evaluation. Das is unfailingly generous in acknowledging many worthwhile contributions that these traditions and their key figures make. Sometimes he digs deeper into the neo-Marxist literature to uncover the obscure insights that even their authors might not have thought much of, or failed to recognize their significance in a given argument. Nuanced clarity is a hallmark of Das's splendid writing style. Also, he dutifully presents his interlocutors' ideas with the same clarity that they themselves could not have mustered. This meticulous and methodical approach further lends credibility to Das's monumental work, and opens up productive space for an engaged dialogue with his interlocutors on the other side of the debate. Sometimes he pithily makes declarative statements to undo what he sees 'conflation' of divergent ideas by contemporary Marxists: neoliberalism is not capitalism as Marxist geographer David Harvey would have us believe; class is not a set of monopolizable skills as analytical Marxist Erik Wright would argue; or class is not reducible to 'positionality' as anti-essentialist post-modern Marxism deems. Das applauds Wright for getting it right that "the explanatory capacity of the theories we construct depends to an important extent on the coherence of concepts we deploy within them" (p. 162). Yet, he argues, Wright's own intellectual practice, especially his methodological thinking does not "cohere with his class theory thinking" (p. 162). Despite denunciation of skill and organizational exploitation in his work, Das thinks, Wright still deploys these ideas in his class theory. Similarly, in spite of various problems with Wright's concept of middle class, some of which Wright himself recognizes, Das argues, he still continues to use them and indeed thinks that we need not wait until we have completely coherent concepts.

This article explores the ways in which Gramsci's engagement with Machiavelli and The Prince in particular result in three significant developments in the Prison Notebooks. First, I analyze how the 'heroic fury' of Gramsci's lifelong interest in Machiavelli's thought develops, during the composition of his carceral writings, into a novel approach to the reading of The Prince, giving rise to the famous notion of the 'modern Prince'. Second, I argue that the modern Prince should not be regarded merely as a distinctive (individual or collective) figure, but rather, should be understood as a dramatic development that unfolds throughout 'the discourse itself' of the Prison Notebooks, particularly in the crucial phase of reorganisation in the 'special notebooks' composed from 1932 onwards. Third and finally, I suggest that the combination of the two preceding themes is decisive for understanding the modern Prince as a distinctive form of political organization. Rather than equated with a generic conception of the '(communist) political party', this notion was developed as a part of Gramsci's larger argument regarding the necessity for anti-Fascist political forces in Italy in the early 1930s to grow into an antagonistic collective body guided by principles of 'living philology'.

There is a war afoot. One fought with pins and needles, cameras and cartoons. In the following article, I will begin with the history of the corset as an object plagued by misinformation, then I will introduce the misrepresentation of the corset in moving pictures as an abuse of history. To conclude, I will look at the corset's treatment in media as a case study for the capacity of visual media to shape popular perception of history, offering a possible answer to the question: should ahistoricity in film be treated as a dangerous trend, or artistic expression?

Much has been written about the "cinema effect" in contemporary art. One symptom of this effect was the recent ascendancy of the remake as genre and strategy. Remakes of movies—classic, cult or obscure—have taken on the form of the video installation to invade museums for well over ten years. The works of Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, and Douglas Gordon provide the most sophisticated examples of this practice. At their best, remakes rework films to extract structures and arrangements that speak to the film's historical moment as well as to the context of the remake. Many other works are much less fortunate.

Published in Art Papers in 2006.

El objetivo de este artículo es ahondar en la reflexión filosófica de Walter Benjamin sobre el coleccionismo, detallando al mismo tiempo su íntimo vínculo con la particular noción de materialismo histórico desarrollada por el autor del Passagen-Werk. Tomando como base el análisis de los diversos textos y documentos en los que Benjamin se refirió al problema del coleccionismo, escritos principalmente entre 1928 y 1940, postulamos que una manera posible de entender la conexión entre la práctica del coleccionista y el materialismo histórico, es mediante lo que hemos denominado aquí anarchivismo. Con dicho término, nos referimos básicamente a la alteración radical del orden y las clasificaciones institucionales que conforman los archivos históricos y culturales. Nuestra tesis finalmente apunta a que la noción de anarchivismo permite comprender no sólo la reflexión filosófica de Benjamin sobre el coleccionismo y el materialismo histórico, sino que también la manera en que su propio pensamiento los pone en práctica.

The formation of Karl Marx´s thought went through different moments
and had different influences. Among these, the so-called “three sources” stand out: German philosophy, English political economy and the revolutionary perspective. In the case of political economy, it is possible to visualize three central periods that demarcate important differences in Marx´s relationship with this science: up to 1844, between 1845 and 1849, and after 1857. If, during the transit of these periods, some important categories stand out, the forms of treatment given to the categories of labour power and abstract labour announce important
theoretical and political mediations.

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is 'feminized' in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the 'weakness' or 'otherness' of the 'failed'/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the 'weak' state's masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the 'war puzzle'.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, it has become a fashionable practice for left intellectuals to distance themselves from the traditional left, often this divorce has come as a complete rejection of the entire basis of post enlightenment thought. In this process all European thinkers from Locke, to Rousseau, and even Marx have been grouped together as if they were all members of a similar school of thought that would reproduce the ideology of European superiority. This is done through a series of intellectual gymnastics that rather than analysis of ideas and their origins within their specific historical contexts. This process denies the unique history of the composition of ideas leaving an intellectual practice that is as problematic as the actual Eurocentric views the thinkers attempt to critique. Quijano, as a particular example, works in his article “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” attempts to challenge traditional dogmatic views that look at Europe as the pinnacle of modernity, the last line in a linear progression of historical stages, But in the process of his critique Quijano clouds over the distinctive differences in forms of domination, the relations between dominators and dominated both at home and abroad, and the origin and logic of capitalism and how it manifests. Due to his oversights Quijano tends to fall into a common practice within the eurocentered world of naturalizing capitalism within the traditional commercialization model which limits his ability to recognize its universalizing tendencies as well as its specific logic and role as a specific historical form that has a beginning and will have an end. Ironically the historical materialist tradition which he attacks can shed a great amount of light on the issues with his specific argument and provide important answers to problems and questions which Quijano highlights. In the following pages through the lens of historical materialism I will look at some of the core assumptions of Quijano, and their implications, and deconstruct his arguments and assumptions to show the structural flaws in the foundation of his thought, when these weaknesses are brought to the surface it begs a rethinking of many of the conclusions which he had reached.

A análise de obras de Marx, desde os Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos de 1844 até cartas escritas no início dos anos de 1880, demonstra mudanças e continuidades na formação teórica e política desse pensador. Essa dinâmica, por sua vez, também se revela na apresentação que Marx fez em relação ao comunismo. Este artigo apresenta elementos chaves da visão de Marx sobre o comunismo, examina as suas nuances e a sua coerência teórica interna e se refere a aspectos da relevância atual dessa concepção marxiana de organização social. (The analysis of Marx's works, from the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to letters written in the early 1880s, shows changes and continuities in the theoretical and political formation of this thinker. This dynamic, in its turn, appears also in the presentation that Marx about the communism. This article presents some key elements of Marx's communism view, examines its nuances and its internal theoretical coherence and refers to aspects of the current relevance of this Marxian conception of social organization).

Liev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, or, as he was better known from some Brazilian translations, Leo Tolstoy, was undoubtedly one of the greatest writers of world literature. But, beyond his impressive literary curriculum, the author of War and Peace also became well known for his controversial ideas, in which he won admirers and followers and, also, persecutors and detractors. Within the aesthetic complex, if it is true that Tolstoy was able to figure a part of his characters with a great subjective wealth, presenting them from the social determinations that involve them and consubstantiate them; it is also a fact that he, at other times, (in a much lower literary quantity), he had mystifying and prejudiced conceptions. In the great majority of his books, Tolstoy bases his figuration on a conception that mixes, on the one hand, precepts of a materialist ontology and, on the other, elements of religious and mystification, just like a mixture of true and false ontologies. And when, in the later part of his life, in which the writer was surrounded by a resigned and, in a certain way, nihilistic religious thought, among the values prophesied by Tolstoy, one seems to have been more prominent: misogyny. The aim of this article was to present and analyze, briefly, some indications about this relationship in the works of the Russian writer. From examples extracted from the artistic figurations of this author, it could measure the degree of approximation or distance with a conception of the humanist and historical world, which was embodied by various aesthetic, philosophical and political contradictions.

The Tweed Ring spawned a vibrant financial sector that was integral to its brief success but has never been previously examined. William “Boss” Tweed and his allies employed banks controlled or comanaged by Tammany politicians to embezzle funds, build political alliances, and invest in a wide array of business ventures. The capital of these savings and commercial banks—city money, deposits from Catholic charities, and the savings of immigrant laborers—was accumulated through political channels. During their operation between 1867 and 1871, politician-bankers engaged in a mix of patronage deals and profit-driven financial speculation. In effect, Tammany banks were ground zero for the Ring's conversion of political hegemony into a windfall of economic capital that fueled party activities and buoyed personal fortunes. Importantly, the anti-Ring mobilization by upper-class reformers was more than a revolt of wealthy taxpayers concerned with abstract goals of good government or rescuing city credit; it was also a reaction by old-line bankers in direct competition with Tammany upstarts. A dramatic bank run catalyzed by reformers in November 1871 drove them into bankruptcy, bringing this novel experiment in political capitalism to an end.

I vivaci studi italiani degli scritti di Benjamin sulla poesia di Baudelaire (editi da Solmi nel 1962) hanno spesso trascurato l’importanza di allargare la propria prospettiva all’edizione francese del 1974 (Payot), contenente tre importanti saggi noti in Germania dalla fine degli anni ’60. Poiché tali testi sono stati finalmente tradotti in italiano solo nel 2006 (Einaudi) e ripubblicati nel 2012 in un’edizione più articolata (Neri Pozza), ci proponiamo di rilanciare un nostro studio a partire dalla versione italiana, per mostrare come essi gettino le basi della sociologia materialista della letteratura di Benjamin, ancora insufficientemente esplorata. Formatasi proprio muovendo dalla pratica traduttiva dei Quadri parigini, essa ha analizzato il ruolo della bohème, del flâneur e della modernità nell’eroismo lirico di Baudelaire all’apogeo del capitalismo.