Cento anni dalla Rivoluzione d’ottobre: rivoluzione sociale e rivoluzione anticoloniale

One hundred years after the October Revolution, we can try to make an assessment of its outcomes and heritage. But if we just focus on the construction of a post-capitalistic society, of socialism, our evaluation will be partial, incomplete and unable to allow an understanding of the past and the current times. So, we have to tackle this issue from a double perspective: looking to the construction of socialism but looking also to the struggle against colonial domination, against imperialism. The result of a reflection on these two levels is on one side that the movement started from the October Revolution led to the vanishing of the colonial classic system, and on the other side that the construction of socialism is a troubled process of political, economical and intellectual apprehension that is unavoidably full of contradictions. This process is still in progress – in China, for instance. On the other hand, today neocolonialism carries on the tradition of exploitation and domination, generating the premises of a new large-scale war. The construction of a post-capitalistic society is once again strictly connected with the cause of peace.Keywords: October Revolution; Socialism; Colonialism; Anti-colonial Revolutions; China.One hundred years after the October Revolution, we can try to make an assessment of its outcomes and heritage. But if we just focus on the construction of a post-capitalistic society, of socialism, our evaluation will be partial, incomplete and unable to allow an understanding of the past and the current times. So, we have to tackle this issue from a double perspective: looking to the construction of socialism but looking also to the struggle against colonial domination, against imperialism. The result of a reflection on these two levels is on one side that the movement started from the October Revolution led to the vanishing of the colonial classic system, and on the other side that the construction of socialism is a troubled process of political, economical and intellectual apprehension that is unavoidably full of contradictions. This process is still in progress – in China, for instance. On the other hand, today neocolonialism carries on the tradition of exploitation and domination, generating the premises of a new large-scale war. The construction of a post-capitalistic society is once again strictly connected with the cause of peace.Keywords: October Revolution; Socialism; Colonialism; Anti-colonial Revolutions; China

the class struggle poised between marxism and populism

The Marxian class struggle is often misunderstood as exclusively the struggle of the poor against the rich, of the humble against the powerful. It is an interpretation that is dear to populism, prisoner to a binary logic that closes its eyes to the complexity and inclines towards the celebration of poverty and want as a place of moral excellence. In Marx and Engels, however, the theory of class struggle is a general theory of social conflict. Only if it breaks away from populism can Marxism develop the ability to interpret and change the world

overcoming binary logic a difficult unfinished process

While condemning property as 'theft', and therefore, supporting the lower class struggle, on the other hand Proudhon claimed that the feminist movement was synonymous with 'pornocracy'. The followers of Fourier, a socialist who supported both the movement for women's emancipation and the worker's movement, tried to make their socialist dreams come true in Algeria, in the land that had been grabbed from the Arabs whose class struggle was not at all taken into consideration. Marx's greatness lies in his ability to unify the three forms of class struggle and to unify them in one gigantic movement for emancipation

La communauté et la mort : la culture allemande devant la première guerre mondiale

Le début de la Première guerre mondiale est ressenti par d’assez nombreux intellectuels européens, et surtout allemands, comme une nouvelle preuve de la crise irréversible non seulement du matérialisme historique, mais aussi de toute « manière de sentir et de penser de façon exclusivement naturaliste » (Husserl). Il s’agit d’un conflit pour lequel il n’y a pas d’explication économique ou utilitariste, et cela d’autant plus qu’il semble se dessiner en Allemagne, à l’heure du danger, une communauté organique dont Tönnies avait déjà esquissé la théorie, et qui dépasse tous les intérêts et toutes les différences de classes. Il semble par ailleurs qu’on assiste également dans un autre sens à un renouveau du spiritualisme : la guerre et l’expérience du danger rendent impossible de refouler l’idée de la mort, comme cela se fait de façon tout à fait typique dans la réalité quotidienne. La vie dans les tranchées et au front fait donc naître une communauté qui considère avec mépris la bourgeoisie et sa « lâche » exigence de se soustraire au danger et au « destin ». Nous retrouvons ces thèmes de façon explicite chez des auteurs comme Sombart et Jünger, mais aussi chez Simmel, Scheler, Weber, Freud et chez le jeune Thomas Mann, ce dernier adaptent cependant par la suite une attitude explicitement critique dans son analyse de cette idéologie de genre.Der Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs wird von nicht wenigen europäischen und vor allem deutschen Intellektuellen als erneuter Beweis für die irreversible Krise nicht nur des historischen Materialismus, sondern auch einer jeden «einseitigen naturalistischen Denk- und Fühlweise» (Husserl) erlebt. Es handelt sich um einen Konflikt, der nicht auf eine ökonomische oder utilitaristische Erklärung zurückgäführt werden kann, und das um so mehr, als sich in Deutschland in der Stunde der Gefahr die schon von Tönnies theoretisierte organische Gemeinschaft herauszubilden scheint, die über jedes Klasseninteresse und über alle Klassenunterschiede hinausgeht. Auch in einem anderen Sinn scheint man einer Art Wiederaufleben des Spiritualismus beizuwohnen: der Krieg und das Erlebnis der Gefahr lassen die Verdrängung des Todes, die typisch für die Alltäglichkeit ist, unmöglich werden; das Leben in den Schützengräben und an der Front hebt daher eine Gemeinschaft aus der Taufe, die voller Verachtung auf das Philistertum und dessen «feigen» Anspruch blickt, der Gefanr und dem «Schicksal» auszuweichen. Diese Themen finden wir ausführlich bei Autoren wie Sombart und Jünger, aber auch bei Simmel, Scheler, Weber, Freud und beim jungen Thomas Mann behandelt, wobei letzterer jedoch in der Folgezeit zu einer eindeutig kritischen Analyse dieser Kriegsideologie übergeht

the multiplicity of struggles for recognition and the conflict of liberties

The various forms of class struggle can be in conflict one with the other. During the American Civil War, President Lincoln, determined at any cost to win the struggle destined to emancipate black slaves, did not hesitate to impose a military dictatorship in the South of the USA and harshly put down the popular revolt that in the North opposing the introduction of compulsory conscription. The leaders of a revolution (bottom up or top down) have often to identify the form of class struggle that is decisive for the process of emancipation

introduction the return of class struggle

Nowadays, on the wave of the economic crisis of 2008 and of increasing polarisation between rich and poor, there is much talk of 'the return to class struggle'. Had it actually disappeared? After WWII, renowned thinkers have inferred the demise of class struggle from the advent of the Welfare State. They have not realized that the advent of the Welfare State was the precise result of class struggle. Moreover, they have not lent attention to the conflicts that have raged in countries like Algeria, Vietnam, or Cuba and to the struggles of the blacks in South Africa or in the USA. Has the revolt of colonial peoples or of peoples of colonial origins nothing to do with class struggle? Or rather, have these thinkers (Habermas, Dahrendorf) a limited vision of Marx's class struggle

Gramsci e la Russia sovietica: il materialismo storico e la critica del populismo

After the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, an attitude spread inside Marxist movements and parties, according to which every mass movement of the subaltern classes was celebrated as an ascetic redemption of the “last” and of the “poor” men, while every prosaic and “bourgeois” demand for a development of the productive forces was ignored, in a sort of messianic wait for a bourgeois society's palingenesis. Antonio Gramsci was reluctant towards this tendency. He was interested instead in building and defending the new revolutionary State (Bolsheviks as a sort of “aristocracy of statesman”), being aware of the arduous and contradictory process of construction of the new social order. Hence it springs the concern of Italian historical materialism in phenomena such as Americanism and Fordism and towards the industrial production’s techniques of organization. A concern shared by Gramsci with Lenin, according to whom the revolutionary State needs to assimilate every scientific achievement as a useful tool to ensure the development of the Soviet country and to overcome a generalized misery and a backwardness that endangered its survival.Keywords: Populism; Pauperism; Americanism; Fordism; Historical Materialism

after the revolution the ambiguities of class struggle

But what social class held power in Soviet Russia? This question, already apparent with the victory of the October Revolution, became more insistent and painful after the introduction of the NEP and the emergence of a class of capitalists who lived in luxury while the great majority of the population was forced to live in poverty and want. An international debate began. Gramsci suggested that the economically advantaged class (the NEP capitalists) should not be confused with the politically dominant class (the proletariat represented by the Bolshevik party). But of course not everybody agreed

after the revolution discovering the limits of class struggle

As often occurs when there are great revolutions, the enthusiasm for the overthrow of the Old regime ended up attributing to the revolutionary action a prodigious capacity of producing a political and social reality that was completely new and without any conflict. The history of socialism and the 'socialist camp' is a difficult and painful process of learning that leads to the overcoming of original messianism and to the rediscovery of realities (state, nation, market, religion) and conflicts believed to have been overcome and to a less exalting and more realistic interpretation of class struggle

A Revolução, a nação e a paz

Procura-se aqui analisar a noção de "paz perpétua" e de "exportação da revolução" à luz das experiências da Revolução Francesa e da Revolução de Outubro, considerando o debate precedente e sucessivo a essas experiências revolucionárias, acentuando a novidade representada pela Revolução Francesa e, enfim, criticando as análises segundo as quais a tradição política que vai da Revolução Francesa à Revolução de Outubro forjou, com o universalismo, o instrumento ideológico para justificar um intervencionismo universal