This paper is concerned with the deployment and the transformation of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the purpose it serves. I argue that, in its travel from Rome to London, this notion acquired something like a truth-value. In London the notion yielded what I call ‘hegemony thinking’: a distinctive style of thinking that focused on strategy to carry out effective political interventions. To demonstrate my claim I trace the Marxism Today discussion on the crisis of the Left and strategy in (...) the UK. In particular, I look at the engagements of the late historian Eric Hobsbawm and the cultural theorist Stuart Hall with Gramsci’s work, and examine the appropriation of the coordinates of hegemony by the entrepreneur and Blair policy advisor Geoff Mulgan. (shrink)

Within the current resurgence of interest in E.V. Ilyenkov, the influence of Engels on Ilyenkov’s work is either overlooked or denied, making Ilyenkov seem closer to Western Marxism than he actually is. In this paper, by considering Engels’s place in his philosophy, I show that Ilyenkov’s approach is fundamentally hostile to many of Western Marxism’s main views. Ilyenkov, like Engels, conceives philosophy as Logic and affirms the ‘alliance’ between philosophy and the natural sciences against speculative metaphysics. In this regard, he (...) develops an original cosmological hypothesis based on Engels’s insights on the hierarchy of matter’s forms of movement and provides a remarkable account of the ideal as an attribute of nature that reproduces its concrete universality through social labour, the active transformation of nature’s phenomena into objects stamped with the seal of our subjectivity. (shrink)

It is typically held that Sartre is a thinker of transcendence, inasmuch as he retains a subject–predicate structure via intentional consciousness and ruptures an otherwise insular domain through his dialectic of the self. Against such interpretations, this article argues that in following the progression of Sartre’s thought, we will come to see a deepening engagement with, and development of, immanence in the spirit of Deleuze. Specifically, Sartre steadily develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is construed (...) as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the in-itself and for-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a take on politics that prefigures and is concomitant with Deleuzian micropolitics, while also serving to complement it through the retention of the ego as a practical function. (shrink)

Abstract The goal of social explanation is to understand human action, both individual and collective. To do so successfully we must explain action on three distinct (but intertwined) levels: the actors? intentions, the meaning that actors and interpreters ascribe to action, and the structural ideals that govern action. Each level of explanation has certain types of rationality associated with it. Only on the level of intentionality does instrumental rationality assume a prime importance, yet even there it must compete with normative (...) and expressive accounts of action. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples are, in the current historical conjuncture, leading the opposition to the capitalist state in Canada. The specific features of Indigenous cultures, history and struggles demand of historical materialism a regional theory that deploys existing concepts and categories in reinvigorated and sometimes different ways. Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes a critically important contribution to this project by offering a creative, materialist-leaning reading of Frantz Fanon as a lever to criticise those prominent liberal arguments of Indigenous conflict that (...) are based on notions of recognition. While Coulthard’s argument and project would be significantly advanced by raising Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’ from the secondary status it enjoys in the work to a more foundational role, in part because this moves the problem of totalisation to the core of strategies of resistance, he nevertheless in his affirmative project rightly centres returning to aboriginal cultural forms as a critical feature of decolonisation. (shrink)

Empty space. The body started off again, heavy and hot, with tremors and flushes of anger assailing the throat and stomach. But no one inhabited that body now. The streets were emptied as though their contents had been poured down a sink: something that a while ago had filled them had been swallowed up. The usual objects were still there, intact, but they had all become disrupted, they descended from the sky like enormous stalactites, or towered upwards like fantastic dolmens. (...) All their usual little appeals, their shrill cicada-chirpings, had vanished into thin air, and were silent. A man's future had once challenged them, and they met it with a scatter of diverse temptations. That future was dead. (Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason.). (shrink)