Revolutionary Leadership↔Revolutionary Pedagogy: Reevaluating the Links and Disjunctions Between Lukács and Freire

Abstract

INTRODUCTION A major problematic in Marxist theory is how to conceptualize, or reconceptualize, revolutionary organization. A useful topography of the various historical modes of organization is provided by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their highly controversial and conceptually rich book Multitude. Here the authors suggest that any theory of counterhegemonic resistance must be framed by a historical materialist understanding wherein (a) resistance is always in relation to a specific form of oppression, (b) resistance is determined in the last instance by changing forms of economic and social production, and (c) each new form of resistance organization is an attempt to correct the antidemocratic failures of the previous forms. Thus we see correspondences between the formation of people’s armies and the rise of an industrial working class out of a peasant/feudal system. While these hierarchically organized armies might very well have been necessary at that historical phase, they had increasingly antidemocratic tendencies that negated their stated goals of liberation. In the nineteen sixties, there was a turn to guerrilla organizations in response to the failures of the “party” and the growing restructuring of productive relations on a global scale. Yet even here, the supposedly democratic and decentralized form of organization led to reterritorialization by the guerrilla leader. Now a new crisis/historical opportunity has opened up calling for a reimagining of revolutionary organization. According to Hardt and Negri, transnational, networked production acts as the material precondition for a struggle against “Empire” capable of finally articulating a democratic praxis of revolution. Yet the question of what this network looks like remains vague and, as many have suggested, highly allegorical. So Hardt and Negri open up a line of inquiry — pinpointing possible tendencies — rather than offer a solution. It is their urgent framing of the issue rather than their final model that remains most important for current grass-root struggles and political theorists.