Gramsci’s Imaginary Prisons

In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate the complexity of the Lefebvre’s work and life. In France, Lefebvre engaged in critical discussion of Marx and Marxism with Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser and Guy Debord. He taught urban sociology and participated in important debates with urban planners and architects, criticizing the functionalist model of the city that emerged in the 1950s. He was an intellectual militant who, in the 1930s, traveled to Germany to study how the German labor movement had been corrupted by Nazism. In the 1940s, he was a communist partisan who fought the emergence of Stalinism in the French Communist Party. Finally, the objective is to demonstrate Lefebvre’s position as a fine interpreter of Marx. His work was obscured by more seductive philosophical schools, such as Althusserian Structuralism, and he paid a high price for not having established his legacy as a singular movement or school.

In the period marked by the Second World War and Cold War, a genuine culture of revolt developed in France. This development can be traced back to the inter-war period, and its influences can be felt up to May 1968. Major authors to bring this changes forward were André Breton, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Conceptually, the notion of revolt rivaled the notion of revolution. This was, on various pragmatic and theoretical levels, mirrored by the difficult relationships between these authors and the French Communist Party, which was very powerful at the end of the SecondWorldWar. In different cases, however, it is the revolt which turns out to be inseparably linked to culture and literary production.

In recent years, three posthumous texts by Sartre have been published concerning the problem of the foundation of a non-normative ethics. All of them have allowed us to discover an underground work that Sartre pursued between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. In many ways, that was a crucial time in his intellectual life, because, at that time, he was confronted with a new stage of continental philosophy, particularly in France, where structuralism started to compete with existentialism for cultural hegemony. In the same period, he was breaking his fairly brief companionship with the French Communist Party. This huge endeavor—that appears to the researcher’s eyes like a real building site—corresponds somehow to the promised development of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, whose second volume was dedicated to comprehension of the ‘concrete’ in history and to a renewed philosophical anthropology. Nevertheless, the second volume was never completed by Sartre, even if—as we know following its publication in 1985—it achieved a substantial and ultimately consistent elaboration of its main themes.

Writing Africa into the World and Writing the World from Africa:

If in the irreplaceable bibliographies compiled in the 1960s concerning the Italian and the German Communist parties the chronological period under examination (respectively 1921-1926 and 1918-1933) is perfectly plausible, the periodization of the equally useful and exhaustive work on the French Communist Party (1920-1939) is in need of some clarification. While the Italian and the German Communist Parties were outlawed and forced to operate underground with the coming to power of two totalitarian partyregimes, the French Communist Party was dissolved by the Daladier government only in 1939. As is well-known, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the beginning of the war, the party was oudawed even though it had voted for war credits Sept. 2.

Since the 1930's the French Communist party has faithfully endorsed the policy decisions of the Soviet Union, oftentimes despite disagreement with major Soviet pronouncements. In the 1920's, however, the French Communist leadership was divided over the appropriateness of Soviet instructions on matters that appeared to many French Communists clearly within the exclusive domain of the French party. The intrusion of the Comintern, the Soviet-dominated international Communist organization, into the pre-campaign discussion of the tactics for the 1928 elections to the French national assembly forced French Communists to re-examine their goals, their position in French politics, and their relationship with the Soviet Union. The decisions of the French party leaders, made amid what was perhaps the last animated and freewheeling public party debate, determined the party's relationship with the USSR for a full forty years.

List of Tables - List of Abbreviations - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: Of Chance, and Death, and Mutability P.Heywood - Voluntary Euthanasia: From the Italian Communist Party to the Democratic Party of the Left P.Daniels & M.J.Bull - The French Communist Party and the End of Communism P.Morris - The Spanish Left: Towards a 'Common Home'? P.Heywood - The Portuguese Communist Party: Perestroika and its Aftermath M.T.Patricio & A.D.Stoleroff - The Decline and Fall of the Communist Party of Belgium P.Delwit & J-M.de Waele - The British Road is Resurfaced for New Times: From the British Communist Party to the Democratic Left N.Fishman - German Communism, the PDS and the Re-unification of Germany G.Minnerup - The West European Communist Movement: Past, Present and Future M.J.Bull - Index

Journal Article Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941–1947 Get access Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941–1947. By Alfred J. Rieber. New York, London: Columbia University Press. 1962. 395 pp. Bibliog. Index. (Studies of the Russian Institute.) $7.50. 60s. Geoffrey Warner Geoffrey Warner Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 39, Issue 3, July 1963, Pages 441–442, https://doi.org/10.2307/2611241 Published: 01 July 1963

When a mind is as fertile and alive as was Daniel Brower's, it is even more tragic to lose it in the prime of its continuing contribution. My memory tells me that I met Dan in 1968 when as a newly minted Ph.D. I traveled out to Oberlin, Ohio, to interview for my first job. Dan was just leaving Oberlin for the University of California, Davis, where he would spend the next 38 years of his career. He was my host and mentor as I tried to convince the suspicious faculty and discerning students of that earnest little institution that I was the right replacement for their tall, gaunt, erudite historian of Russia. First impressions last. Sometimes a book can be told from its cover. The man I met was sophisticated in a way that Ohio did not seem to be to this easterner, Philadelphia-born and New York--educated. When I asked whether one could receive the newspaper every day there, he knew I meant the New York Times. Moreover, his wife was French! Dan Brower was born in the Depression and died in a rather depressing period of American history, but his energy and intellectual curiosity, his sense of the ironic, and his love for the discipline of history and the field of Russian Studies kept him going even through devastating losses and merciless illness. He studied at Columbia under Alex Dallin, where he wrote a dissertation, not on Russia but on the French Communist Party--his first book The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front. (1) This was a political--institutional study of the party and French politics that argued that the Communists in France never successfully freed themselves from national political traditions. Ideology, and even subservience to the Comintern, was trumped by the political values and institutions of France. The need to preserve social calm often overwhelmed the call of workers for social justice. Yet the party fused the ideals of Jacobinism, at least as loosely understood at the time, with notions of proletarian revolution, and in that amalgam a new jacobinism emerged. Dan was extraordinarily restless intellectually, and he soon turned from France back to Russia. His puckish iconoclasm, while not quite radical revisionism, was evident in his odyssey from 19th-century intellectuals through Russian urban history to the deserts of Central Asia. He tried his hand at intellectual history, labor history, urban history, and the study of ethnicity, borderlands, and empire. His very eclecticism enriched his studies, even as his colleagues wondered where he would land next. Already in 1965-66 he was exploring the education of Russian populist revolutionaries as an exchange student in Leningrad and Moscow. It turns out that I, too, spent that year in Russia, and we must have met. Perhaps that led him to recommend me to Oberlin. But he was primarily based in the old capital while I was in the new, and for a time in Armenia, and my memory of that year does not include him. So much for reliance on that part of the brain as a historical source! From that initial year in the USSR, he published his ruminations on the Russian intelligentsia in Slavic Review--and then his second book, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism ih Tsarist Russia. (2) The book was written over the decade in which the American student movement rose to its greatest influence and radicalism and fell just as precipitously once the military draft was abolished and the U.S. war against Vietnam collapsed. As in his first book, so in his second, Dan eschewed ideology as a principal explanation. Rather, he argued, a school of dissent, by which he meant the radical community of young people alienated from the tsarist order and--for some bur not all--their parents, was the primary cause of the massive recruitment of young people into the revolutionary movement of the 1870s. His study of a radical generation proposed that a counter-society had formed that protected and supported its members and provided them with a lifestyle and a set of ideals. …

Journal Article The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front and Crisis and Decline: The French Socialist Party in the Popular Front Era Get access The New Jacobins: The French Communist Party and the Popular Front. By Daniel R. Brower. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1968; London: Oxford University Press. 1969. 265 pp. Bibliog. Index. 76s.Crisis and Decline: The French Socialist Party in the Popular Front Era. By Nathanael Greene. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; London: IBEG. 1969. 361 pp. Bibliog. Index. 105s. Douglas Johnson Douglas Johnson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 46, Issue 3, July 1970, Pages 572–573, https://doi.org/10.2307/2613254 Published: 01 July 1970

The Communist Party had commandeered the cultural high ground of revolutionary Marxism and had imposed its own brand, Marxism-Leninism, as the orthodox version. At the Liberation, the French Communist Party was one of the big three political parties along with the Christian democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) and the Socialist Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO). It It came to be seen as a patriotic, reformist and 'modern' national party, while its rivals, notably the Socialists, were afflicted with a 'cultural cringe' when faced by the Parti Communiste Français's penetration of working-class milieux. It was the intrusion of the big Communist Party into the French Party system that frustrated the bipolar development in the Fourth Republic. Charles de Gaulle's politics gave the Communist Party the real opportunity to promote the coalition of the left, which it had demanded after 1956.

This chapter examines the condition and situation of the French Communist intellectuals in the wider tradition of political activity in France. Though the French Communist Party (PCF) occupied the same terrain as the republican tradition, it was also deep-rooted in Leninist and syndicalist origins, which ensured that the initial political culture of French Communism differed in a number of ways to the core principles and values of republicanism. Thus, the position of intellectuals in the party differed considerably from the republican paradigm. Bourgeois were welcome in the party but they were kept away from the levers of power in the organization, and the party's leadership remained in the hands of working class political activists.

The author examines the methods used by the French Communist party (FCP) during the Cold War to control and neutralize the effects of anti-Communist or heretical texts as challenges to its ideology. The FCP was faced with a free publishing market and therefore followed a symbolic censorship action plan. This involved denouncing critical texts as enemy propaganda, either as forgeries or as part of an anti-Communist project, and discrediting their authors to avoid discussion of the arguments put forward. The climate of the Cold War with its bipolarization of ideology, perceived threat of a Third World War, idealization of the U.S.S.R. by Communists, and their world vision of history as a conspiracy against Communism contributed to successful implementation of the plan. The blurring of truth into opinion, the encouragement of Zhdanovjan campaigns denouncing other intellectuals, and the FCP's prohibition of critical confrontation encouraged intellectuals within the party to suspend their professional and scholarly critical mindset and accept plausibility over truth. Internal censorship was practiced through controlled reading programs that limited the exposure of other party members to heretical writings.

This article reconstructs the economic expertise of the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party from the second post-War period to the 1950s. It analyses the workings of the Parties' internal and external structures in charge of economic studies and their cultural currents, and studies the role of economists and economic experts, their sociological profile, and their militancy and status in the communist partisan organization. The study shows the presence of a common economic culture in French and Italian communism during the period. Some differences bear highlighting: the more intellectual profile of the Italian communist leadership group, and a different relationship between Party and intellectuals; the importance of trade-union economic expertise and a greater influence of Soviet economic literature in the Fcp

Examining the emergence and subsequent demise of intellectual identification with the French Communist Party between 1945 and 1989, this book argues that, after 1978, political conflicts between the Communist leadership and party intellectuals led to an erosion of support. These conflicts were sharpened by the party's institutional decline during the 1980s. The author links these internal factors with wider ideological changes during the 1970s and 1980s: the decreasing relevance of class-based politics, the explosion of the myth of radical change, the reconsideration of the goals of political commitment, and, finally, the rejection of the Soviet model. All these factors contributed significantly to an altered political climate. Based on a critical examination of the available literature, in both French and English, this systematic exploration of the role of intellectuals in French politics also explains why this social group has been so prominent in public life throughout the modern era.