Libertarian Socialism

Description

The history of anarchist-Marxist relations is usually told as a history of factionalism and division. These essays, based on original research and written especially for this collection, reveal some of the enduring sores in the revolutionary socialist movement in order to explore the important, too often neglected left-libertarian currents that have thrived in revolutionary socialist movements. By turns, the collection interrogates the theoretical boundaries between Marxism and anarchism and the process of their formation, the overlaps and creative tensions that shaped left-libertarian theory and practice, and the stumbling blocks to movement cooperation. Bringing together specialists working from a range of political perspectives, the book charts a history of radical twentieth-century socialism, and opens new vistas for research in the twenty-first. Contributors examine the political and social thought of a number of leading socialists—Marx, Morris, Sorel, Gramsci, Guérin, C.L.R. James, Hardt and Negri—and key movements including the Situationist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and Council Communism. Analysis of activism in the UK, Australasia, and the U.S. serves as the prism to discuss syndicalism, carnival anarchism, and the anarchistic currents in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Contributors include Paul Blackledge, Lewis H. Mates, Renzo Llorente, Carl Levy, Christian Høgsbjerg, Andrew Cornell, Benoît Challand, Jean-Christophe Angaut, Toby Boraman, and David Bates.

Sujets

• Left-libertarianism
• C. L. R. James
• Ideology
• Anti-capitalism
• Civil and political rights
• Cyril Lionel Robert James
• Marx

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629634029
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red
Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red is an invaluable contribution to historical scholarship and libertarian politics. The collection of essays contained in the book has the great virtue of offering both analytical perspectives on ideas, and historical perspectives on movements. The contributions examine classical themes in anarchist politics such as individual liberty, whilst also exploring more neglected thinkers and themes from a libertarian standpoint, such as C.L.R. James and race. There can be little doubt that the volume will be of major interest to historians, theorists, students and activists.
-Darrow Schecter, reader in Italian, School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex
This is a welcome and essential collection that is sure to spark debates and support ongoing efforts to build a liberatory movement in which Marxists and anarchists can find common ground and practice mutual respect and humility. In this period of late-capitalism, survival itself is at stake. Theory and practice, whether Marxism or Anarchism in their many manifestations, lead to dead ends without careful assessment of the world as it is now.
-Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States
An important, redemptive collection of essays that questions narratives of sectarian difference without resorting to easy answers. In exploring the productive frictions, convergences, agonisms and affinities that have created and re-created the black and red, the contributors recover the neglected histories of a capacious Left, one that repudiated ideological rigidity and sterile orthodoxies without abandoning its socialist commons. Itself a model of such capaciousness, this is a stimulating and necessary work.
-Raymond B. Craib, associate professor, Department of History, Cornell University
Just what we need as we move into a new phase of revolt against the obscenity of capitalism: a recovery of the richness of our different traditions of struggle, with their weavings and bumpings. Time to move on, time to redeem the struggles of the past. A valuable and welcome collection.
-John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power and professor of sociology, Autonomous University of Puebla

Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red
Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, and David Berry 2017
This edition 2017 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-390-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959590
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks.com
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PM Press
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Preface
1 Introduction
Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard
2 Freedom and Democracy: Marxism, Anarchism and the Problem of Human Nature
Paul Blackledge
3 Anarchism, Individualism and Communism: William Morris s Critique of Anarcho-communism
Ruth Kinna
4 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalfield before 1914
Lewis H. Mates
5 Georges Sorel s Anarcho-Marxism
Renzo Llorente
6 Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism, Syndicalism and Sovversivismo
Carl Levy
7 Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936-1939
Saku Pinta
8 A Bohemian Freelancer ? C.L.R. James, His Early Relationship to Anarchism and the Intellectual Origins of Autonomism
Christian H gsbjerg
9 White Skin, Black Masks : Marxist and Anti-racist Roots of Contemporary US Anarchism
Andrew Cornell
10 The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Gu rin and the Synthesis of Marxism and Anarchism
David Berry
11 Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters between Critical Marxism and Libertarianism
Beno t Challand
12 Beyond Black and Red: The Situationists and the Legacy of the Workers Movement
Jean-Christophe Angaut
13 Carnival and Class: Anarchism and Councilism in Australasia during the 1970s
Toby Boraman
14 Situating Hardt and Negri
David Bates
15 Conclusion: Towards a Libertarian Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?
Saku Pinta and David Berry
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our contributors to the volume for their patience and for responding so positively to editorial requests. We gratefully acknowledge the support of everyone at PM Press, who have enabled us to bring out this expanded, accessible edition of the book. We would also like to thank all the participants at the Is Black and Red Dead? conference held at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham, UK, in September 2009, which provided the original inspiration for this collection. Sue Simpson and Tony Burns deserve a special mention for their help and support throughout. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the UK Political Studies Association s Marxist Specialist Group and the PSA Anarchist Studies Network, who, in supporting this conference, made it possible for some of the contributors, and many others whose excellent papers could not be included, to meet and exchange ideas face-to-face in a convivial environment.
Contributors
Jean-Christophe Angaut has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the cole Normale Sup rieure de Lyon since 2006. His fields of research and teaching are nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy and connections between socialist, communist and anarchist thought. He has published two books on the young Bakunin s thought: Bakounine jeune h g lien - La philosophie et son dehors (2007) and La libert des peuples - Bakounine et les r volutions de 1848 (2009). He has also published articles on Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the Young Hegelian movement and the situationists. He is a member of the editorial committee of the French anarchist journal R fractions .
David Bates is a principal lecturer and Director of Politics and International Relations in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His interests are focused primarily in the area of radical politics, including anti-capitalist forms of thinking. He has a particular concern with Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to socialist emancipation. More recently he has been interested in the critical relationship between Marxist and libertarian radical politics.
David Berry is Senior Lecturer in History at Loughborough University, UK. He was awarded his DPhil in French labour history from the University of Sussex, UK. His research area is the history of the Left and of labour movements in twentieth-century France. He has worked mostly on the French anarchist movement and alternative Left , and is currently working on the life and ideas of Daniel Gu rin (1904-1988) and the libertarian communist tradition from 1917 to the present. His publications include A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-1945 (2009) and (edited jointly with Constance Bantman) New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (2010). Having been involved for some years with the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (formerly the Journal of Area Studies) , he is currently an associate editor and reviews editor of the journal Anarchist Studies . He is a member of the Centre International de Recherches sur l Anarchisme, Lausanne and Marseille, of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France and of the Anarchist Studies Network.
Paul Blackledge is Professor of Political Theory and UCU Branch Secretary at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is author of Marxism and Ethics (2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (2004). He is co-editor of Virtue and Politics (2011), Alasdair MacIntyre s Engagement with Marxism (2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism (2008) and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (2002). He has written on Marxism and anarchism in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2011) and in International Socialism . He is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.
Toby Boraman is a lecturer in politics at Massey University Te Kunenga Ki P rehuroa, New Zealand. His research interests are labour history from below, (anti-state) communism and extra-parliamentary protest of the 1960s and 1970s. He received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, on the subjects of the New Left and anarchism in New Zealand. Afterwards, he published a history of anarchism and anti-Bolshevik communism in New Zealand from the 1950s to the 1980s called Rabble Rousers and Merry Pranksters (2007). He has also published a book chapter and articles on the subjects of the New Left and working-class resistance to neoliberalism, and historical pieces on strikes and near riots in New Zealand.
Beno t Challand is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research and a lecturer at the University of Bologna, Italy. He works in the field of political and historical sociology, with a particular interest in Arab politics and political theory. His publications include La Ligue Marxiste R volutionaire, 1969-1980 (2000) and Palestinian Civil Society and Foreign Donors (2009). He is co-author, with Chiara Bottici, of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010) and The Politics of Imagination (edited 2011).