Militant Acts

Marcelo Hoffman

Description

Militant Acts presents a broad history of the concept and practice of investigations in radical political struggles from the nineteenth century to the present. Radicals launched investigations into the conditions and struggles of the oppressed and exploited to stimulate their political mobilization and organization. These investigations assumed a variety of methodological forms in a wide range of geographical and institutional contexts, and they also drew support from the participation of intellectuals such as Marx, Lenin, Mao, Dunayevskaya, Foucault, and Badiou. Marcelo Hoffman analyzes newspapers, pamphlets, reports, and other source materials, which reveal the diverse histories, underappreciated difficulties, and theoretical import of investigations in radical political struggles. In so doing, he challenges readers to rethink the supposed failure of these investigations and concludes that the value of investigations in radical political struggles ultimately resides in the possibility of producing a new political "we."
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Sources of the Militant Investigation in Marxism: Marx, Lenin, and Mao

3. Workers’ Inquiries from Breakaway Trotskyism to Italian Workerism

4. Badiou, the Maoist Investigation, and the Party Form

5. In the Shadow of Oedipus: Enquêtes in Foucault’s Theory and Practice

6. Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Trade union
• Movimiento sindical
• Trade Unions

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 27 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438472638
• Langue: English

Extrait

Militant Acts
SUNY series in New Political Science

Bradley J. Macdonald, editor
Militant Acts
The Role of Investigations in Radical Political Struggles
MARCELO HOFFMAN
Cover image: Tarsila do Amaral, Workers (1933). Reprinted with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hoffman, Marcelo, author.
Title: Militant acts : the role of investigations in radical political struggles / Marcelo Hoffman.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in new political science | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007502 | ISBN 9781438472614 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438472638 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism—History. | Social sciences—Research—Political aspects | Communism—Public opinion.
Classification: LCC HN49.R33 H64 2019 | DDC 303.48/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007502
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Caetano
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Sources of the Militant Investigation in Marxism: Marx, Lenin, and Mao
3 Workers’ Inquiries from Breakaway Trotskyism to Italian Workerism
4 Badiou, the Maoist Investigation, and the Party Form
5 In the Shadow of Oedipus: Enquêtes in Foucault’s Theory and Practice
6 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
L ike any other scholarly undertaking, this book sprang to life from the generosity of others. Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts provided me with the initial momentum for the book by allowing me to begin to collate my thoughts about the topic of militant investigations in their coedited book, Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Chad Lavin went out of his way to facilitate a crucial contact for the initiation of the project. Thanasis Lagios provided me with useful materials and supportive words. Stuart Elden went well beyond normal standards of generosity in academe. He discovered and passed on information about an archival source from the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris while conducting his own research there. I am grateful to Timophy S. Murphy for reading a draft of one of my chapters and offering helpful feedback on it. Rebecca E. Karl drew my attention to one of Mao Zedong’s little-known investigations.
I owe a very special debt of gratitude to the professors who kindly invited me to share portions of my research for this book at their institutions. I thank Dan Smith for inviting me to speak at “The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” conference at Purdue University in November 2015. I thank Thomas Nail for inviting me to present my research to the Philosophy Department of the University of Denver in February 2016. I am deeply indebted to Margareth Rago and Sílvio Gallo for inviting me to present my research in Portuguese at the 10th International Michel Foucault Colloquium, “ ‘Is It Useless to Revolt?’ Foucault and Insurrections,” at the State University of Campinas in Brazil in October 2016. I also thank the São Paulo Research Foundation for funding my participation in this wonderful colloquium. The event was quite simply the highlight of my academic life. It has inspired the direction of my future work.
This book has benefited from the comments of Philippe Artières, Çigdem Çidam, Samuel A. Chambers, Kevin Thompson, Todd May, Keith Harris, Jason Read, Darrin Hicks, Robert Urquhart, Karsten Piep, and Diogo Sardinha.
I presented drafts of individual chapters of the book at the following conferences: “Capitalism Socialism: Utopia, Globalization, and Revolution” in New Harmony, Indiana, in November 2014; “Time Served: Discipline and Punish 40 Years On” at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham, United Kingdom, in September 2015; the Annual Conference of the Association for Political Theory at the University of Colorado in Boulder in October 2015; the Biennial Conference of the Radical Philosophy Association in Lexington, Kentucky, in November 2016; and the Fiftieth Anniversary Conference of the Caucus for a New Political Science in South Padre Island, Texas, in February 2017.
Chapter 4 is an expanded version of my article “Alain Badiou, the Maoist Investigation, and the Party-Form” in Historical Materialism (2017), © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017. It is reprinted here with permission from Brill. I thank Tom Weterings for offering me reprint permission. Chapter 5 is an expanded English version of my chapter “ Enquêtes na teoria e na prática de Foucault” in Michel Foucault e as insurreições: É inútil revoltar-se? , edited by Margareth Rago and Sílvio Gallo (São Paulo: Intermeios, 2017). Portions of the latter contribution are reprinted here with permission from Intermeios. I thank the editor of Intermeios, Joaquim Antonio Pereira, for offering me reprint permission. Finally, the image on the cover of this book is of Tarsila do Amaral’s famous painting Workers (1933). Amaral was one of the great Brazilian painters of the twentieth century. I thank her heirs for granting me permission to use the image of Workers . I owe Luciana Freire Rangel a debt of gratitude for helping me obtain permission for the use of the image.
I translate extensively from French and Portuguese sources in this book. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
I owe a very special debt of gratitude to Bradley Macdonald and Michael Rinella. They gave this book a tremendous amount of momentum by responding enthusiastically to my initial proposal and answering all of my questions as I was preparing the manuscript.
Last but not least, I want to acknowledge the deep and thoroughgoing support that I have received from my family members. I thank my mother and father, Josenilda and Dan, for nurturing certain obsessions, which are reflected in these pages. I thank my sister, Nelia, for tolerating those obsessions. Above all, I need to thank my wife, Dorothy, and my son, Caetano. Without their unyielding support, this book would never have been written. I dedicate the book to Caetano in the hope that he finds something useful in it as he grows.
1
Introduction
T he topic of the investigation in radical political struggles takes us into familiar and strange territory. It takes us into familiar territory because the investigation has become a banal practice, especially with the advent of the Internet. Investigations of all types regularly constitute us as objects of knowledge. We are regularly enjoined to offer detailed information about our experiences as consumers through consumer satisfaction surveys. A seconds-long telephone conversation with a customer service representative suffices to prompt the solicitation of information about the quality of our experiences as consumers and the predictable plea for a ranking of these experiences on a nauseatingly familiar numerical scale. State institutions also have a long history of launching investigations to determine the truth of a crime through the painstaking accumulation of facts. One need only remind oneself of the very name of the domestic intelligence agency in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, to begin to ascertain a sense of the weight of this history. And it is hardly uncommon to hear politicians call for investigations into the activities of other politicians. Yet the investigation also had another rich history, one inscribed in the annals of radical political struggles and theories in the modern era. Intellectuals, students, militants, workers, peasants, prisoners, patients, and feminists forged this history in a multiplicity of institutional and geographical sites, often under conditions of great duress. This history is not well known even among radicals because the investigation simply does not occupy as prominent a place as it once did in radical political struggles. Yves Duroux, a former Maoist militant once described by Louis Althusser as the “cleverest” student in his seminar leading to Reading Capital , 1 helps us understand this peculiar state of affairs, albeit in rather exaggerated terms. “Today we know nothing about the world of labor,” he laments. 2 Duroux attributes this collective ignorance to the disappearance of the investigation as a militant practice. “There is no longer the investigation,” he declares. 3 “There are,” he hastily adds, “opinion surveys, consumer surveys.” 4
My immediate aim in this book is to rescue the investigation in radical political struggles and theories from this position of an obscurity reinforced by the predominance of investigations tied to the imperatives of capital and the state. To be more precise, this book explores the constitution of knowledge in radical political struggles and theories by focusing on the concept and practice of the investigation in these struggles and t