Category Archives: Gramsci

Asad Haider: “Pessimism of the Will”

Posted on May 30, 2020 by

“Optimism of the intellect, because we have to start by recognizing that all people are capable of thought, that they are able to not only form conceptions of the world but also to experiment with new possibilities. … But pessimism of the will, because we know that the will has to take a material organizational form, and that across the history of revolutionary politics the classical form assumed by the young Gramsci is no longer available to us. We lack the concrete basis for organizations on the model of the twentieth century revolutions, and we know from the history which followed these revolutions that the emancipatory potential of the party seizing the state has been exhausted. … Our subjective horizon is the optimism of the intellect; our objective, structuring condition is pessimism of the will. Without optimism of the intellect, we have the party without the people. Without pessimism of the will, we have the illusion of power. Until we recognize this there is no path for action.”

Posted in defeat, ethics, freedom, Gramsci, melancholy, Nota Bene, power, resistance, the Left, tragic politics

The Marxist Long Goodbye to the Revolution

Posted on May 3, 2018 by

Bruce Robbins on Perry Anderson’s Gramscian hegemony between Thucydidean realism and Stoic melancholy.

 

 

Posted in Blog, defeat, Gramsci, melancholy, power, tragic politics, violence

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Chris Maisano: “Politics without Politics”

Posted on November 28, 2017 by

“Four decades of defeat and marginalization means that a new generation of socialists is now joining a Left in serious need of inspiration and guidance. We would be well served to mine our own tradition’s rich vein of history, theory, and practice, including that of Gramsci himself. The alternative is a politics without politics, the substitution of technique for strategy.”

Posted in defeat, Gramsci, Nota Bene, power, resistance, the Left

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Josep Maria Antentas: “Strategic imagination and party”

Posted on June 18, 2017 by

“A party oriented towards a policy of emancipation must be conceived as a strategist-party. A movement-strategist-party. Addressing reality strategically is a precondition for victory, although there is no guarantee of it. Planning a strategy does not mean that it is correct. Or that it is useful for advancing the cause of emancipation. Or that its implementation is tactically correct. Or having a correlation of forces that leads to victory. But thinking strategically is the first step.”

Posted in democracy, Gramsci, Nota Bene, power, revolution

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Joseph Fronczak: “Hobsbawm’s Long Century”

Posted on June 15, 2017 by

“Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century was hard and horrific. Today it is a century since his birth, and it has been a long one. Long enough that Hobsbawm’s vision of humanity-encompassing Enlightenment ideals expressed politically in the form of socialism, seemingly dead at his short century’s end in 1991, now in 2017 suddenly appears once more in surprisingly sturdy shape, fortified for what looks to be another long century.”

Posted in defeat, freedom, Gramsci, hubris, Nota Bene, revolution, the Left, tragic politics

Alvaro Bianchi & Daniela Mussi: “Gramsci and the Russian Revolution”

Posted on April 29, 2017 by

‘For Gramsci, the Russian Revolution was very different than the Jacobin model, seen as a mere “bourgeois revolution.” In interpreting the events of Petrograd, Gramsci exposed a political program for the future. In order to continue the movement, to move towards a workers’ revolution, the Russian socialists should definitely break with the Jacobin model — identified here with the systematic use of violence and with low cultural activity. … Gramsci saw in Lenin and the Bolsheviks the embodiment of a program of renewal of the uninterrupted revolution. A revolution that he wanted to become real also in Italy.’

Posted in Gramsci, Nota Bene, power, revolution, the Left

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Chantal Mouffe: “Mélenchon: A Radical Reformist against Mounting Oligarchy”

Posted on April 21, 2017 by

‘At stake in left-wing populism is how we can articulate these demands in the construction of a collective will. Its objective is to put an end to the domination of the oligarchic system: not through a “revolution” destroying republican institutions, but through what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) called a “war of position” leading to a profound transformation of the existing power relations and the establishment of a new hegemony. This, in view of recovering and indeed radicalising the democratic ideal.  Indeed, what is at stake in France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s project of a “citizen revolution” is a refoundation of left-wing politics in a perspective that distinguishes itself from both social-democracy and the radical Left [gauche de la gauche]. Far from being an avatar of the far Left, we could term this perspective a “radical reformism” that takes up a position within the horizon of the great democratic tradition.’

Posted in democracy, governance, Gramsci, Mouffe, Nota Bene, revolution, the Left

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Panagiotis Sotiris: “How do we create a people? Rethinking resistance, solidarity, and transformation in the European South”

Posted on March 28, 2017 by

The formation of the people “as the collective subject of emancipation, as the unity in struggle of the subaltern classes, as the collective process of making possible an alternative future, is not something spontaneous or autopoetic but the contingent result of political interventions and projects.”  We should see the people as a process, not as construction or performance.”

Posted in Deleuze, democracy, founding, fraternity, Gramsci, Nota Bene, resistance, the common, the Left, Uncategorized

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