In its brief life, the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) became the symbol of class struggle and influenced the ideas of millions of workers all over the planet. The 158th anniversary of its birth (1864-2022) offers an important opportunity to reread their resolutions, to learn from the experiences of its protagonists, and to better theorize solutions to our contemporary issues.
Acompanyats per marxòlegs de rellevància internacional, ens endinsem en debats, l’actualitat dels quals, ressona a través de la història. Amb Marcello Musto, Mónica Clúa, Clara Ramas i Xabier Gràcia
Presentem un espai per lliurar la batalla de les idees, obert a la participació de totes aquelles persones que es senten properes al projecte de construcció de la Unitat Popular.
Escritos entre 1857 y 1858, los Grundrisse son el primer borrador de la crítica de la economía política de Karl Marx. A pesar de sus vicisitudes editoriales y publicación tardía, estos manuscritos contienen numerosas reflexiones acerca de temas que Marx no pudo desarrollar en ninguna otra parte de su obra y son, por lo tanto, de extrema importancia para una interpretación general de su pensamiento.
Despite the predictions that consigned it to eternal oblivion, Karl Marx’s thought has returned to the limelight in recent years. Faced with a deep new crisis of capitalism, many are again looking to an author who in the past was often wrongly associated with the Soviet Union, and who was too hastily dismissed after 1989. After the waning of interest in the 1980s and the “conspiracy of silence” in the 1990s, new or republished editions of his work have become available almost everywhere. The literature dealing with Marx, which all but dried up twenty-five years ago, is showing signs of revival in many countries.
While political science has probed the ideological, political, economic and even psychological motivations behind the drive to war, socialist theory has made a unique contribution by highlighting the relationship between the development of capitalism and war. There’s a long and rich tradition of the Left’s opposition to militarism that dates back to the International Working Men’s Association. It is an excellent resource for understanding the origins of war under capitalism and helping leftists maintain our clear opposition to it. In this article, the author examines the position of all the main currents (socialist, socialdemocratic, communist, anarchist and feminist) intellectuals (Engels, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jaurès, Luxemburg, Lenin, Mao and Khrushchev) of the Left on the war and its different declinations (‘war of defence’, ‘just war’, ‘revolutionary war’).
Seit den 1970er Jahren heißt es immer wieder, marxistische Theorie würde Menschen im Globalen Süden geringschätzen. Es fallen Argumente wie: »Marx hat die britische Kolonialherrschaft in Indien verteidigt« oder »Marxist:innen sind der Meinung, afrikanische Länder müssten sich erstmal wie der Westen entwickeln«. Marcello Musto zeigt in seinem Vortrag, dass sich Marx gegen Ende seines Lebens mit nicht-westeuropäischen Gesellschaften beschäftigt hat. Er erklärt, warum die Vorwürfe falsch sind – und warum gerade der Marxismus eine Lösung für eurozentristische Annahmen bietet.
The priceless materials of MEGA² – many available only in German and therefore confined to small circles of researchers – show us an author very different from the one that numerous critics, or self-styled disciples, presented for such a long time. Indeed, the new textual acquisitions in MEGA² make it possible to say that, of the classics of political, economic and philosophical thought, Marx is the author whose profile has changed the most in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Join us for an interview with Marcello Musto.
“Scornful neglect and intemperate hostility, haughty dismissal and marginal course adoption, selective co-optation and selective bowdlerization: these are some of the strategies of establishment intellectuals over the years in response to the challenger of the thinker born 204 years ago in Trier. Yet, here we are near the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, and it sometimes seems that Karl Marx’s ideas have never been as topical, or as commanding of respect and interest, as they are today.” —Marcello Musto, from the Preface, The Marx Revival
On His Birthday, Let’s Celebrate the Old Man Karl Marx. Karl Marx’s final years of life are often overlooked as a period of intellectual and physical decline. But his thought remained vibrant to the end, as he addressed political questions that are still relevant to us today.
As Europe, broadly the West, goes to war and the media grimly predicts a third world war, this panel discussion asks pertinent questions about the meaning of this war for the working people of the world and in particular the rest of the world. The ‘third’ world or the ‘global south’ has historically been crucial in the construction of Europe as the dominant and civilized other. What are the geopolitical implications of the present war in Europe for the rest of the world? How does this war hinder the prospect of global peace and people’s security? What is the impact of the war on food security, energy security, and in general security of nations? Is there any necessity for the weaker and smaller nations and the working people to take side in the war? Must they support military alliances? Is this war, which includes weaponised policies of economic sanctions and discriminatory policies of protection of refugees, essential to save “democracy”? What, in fact, will be the definition of peace in this context? How can we articulate the politics of peace in this time?
The speakers of the panel discussion are :
Professor Marcello Musto, Professor of Sociological Theory, York University, Toronto.
Professor Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Bologna, Italy.
Professor Ranabir Samaddar, Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, India.
Professor Paula Banerjee, Professor and Head in South and South-East Asian Studies, University of Calcutta & Calcutta Research Group, India will moderate the panel discussion.
“The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.” —Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three
The postcapitalist system of production, together with scientific–technological progress and a consequent reduction of the working day, creates the possibility for a new social formation in which the coercive, alienated labor imposed by capital and subject to its laws is gradually replaced with conscious, creative activity beyond the yoke of necessity, and in which complete social relations take the place of random, undifferentiated exchange dictated by the laws of commodities and money. It is no longer the realm of freedom for capital but the realm of genuine human freedom.
—Marcello Musto, Introduction to Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation
Marcello Musto is a professor of Sociology at York University (Toronto, Canada) and is acknowledged globally as one of the authors who has made significant contributions to the revival of Marx studies over the last decade. His major writings comprise Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (Bloomsbury, 2018); and The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford, 2020). Among his edited books there are Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014); Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism, (Routledge, 2019); and The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations (Cambridge, 2020). His writings are available at www.marcellomusto.org and have been published in 25 languages.
MICHAEL HARDT is a professor of Literature at Duke University, and a political philosopher whose writings explore new forms of domination in the world as well as social movements and other forces of liberation that counter such domination. In the Empire trilogy—Empire (Harvard, 2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire(Penguin, 2004), and Commonwealth (Harvard, 2009)—he and Antonio Negri investigate the political, legal, economic, and social aspects of globalization. Their most recent work, Assembly (Oxford, 2017), challenges social movements having traditional, centralized forms of political leadership and instead advocate a social unionism—a combination of mixing labor organizing with social movements.
En los últimos treinta años se han sucedido grandes transformaciones políticas y económicas. Los cambios sociales generados por la globalización neoliberal, el auge de las cuestiones ecológicas, una de las peores crisis económicas mundiales de la historia y la pandemia del COVID-19 nos obligan a reflexionar urgentemente sobre la necesidad de alternativas al sistema capitalista.
En su breve vida, la Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores se convirtió en el símbolo de la lucha de clases e influyó en las ideas de millones de trabajadores de todo el mundo. Los programas políticos, las resoluciones y los documentos de la Primera Internacional nos permiten aprender de las experiencias históricas de sus protagonistas y, al mismo tiempo, teorizar mejor las soluciones a nuestros problemas actuales.
Marcello
Musto
