Revolutionary Subject Research Articles

The Different Persons of Amiri Baraka: Collectivity, Singularity, and Becoming-Minor

The Different Persons of Amiri Baraka:Collectivity, Singularity, and Becoming-Minor James Liner (bio) Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always a different person—as are all your present “truths”.… —Nietzsche (1974, 245–46) People always say, “Well, what’s Baraka doing now? He keeps on changing.” —Baraka (1984, 334) …everyone is a little group…and must live as such…. —Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 362) In his texts as in his life, Amiri Baraka refuses closure and takes flight. His career is punctuated by sharp breaks and extreme, often dramatic transitions in form, politics, places and manners of living, even personal identity (successively LeRoy Jones, LeRoi Jones, Imamu Ameer Barakat, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Amiri Baraka). More than just an idiosyncratic predisposition, Baraka makes of this protean flux an aesthetic principle. In his 1964 essay “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” Baraka famously condemns the artifact worship of “academic” literary critics (read: New Critics) and advocates a process-oriented aesthetic emphasizing the active creating expressed in the gerund “art-ing” over the reification of that process in the noun art (1966, 173–78). Art and literature, he proposes, must be viewed as an active unfolding. Contrary to the belletristic desire to seal off a text from history, Baraka’s texts tap into and channel the flows of history, not merely spilling off the page but exploding: his controversial post-9/11 poem, “Somebody Blew Up America” (2002), sounds “Like an Owl / Exploding in fire…/In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog” (2003, 50). Unlike one of his erstwhile [End Page 247] modernist inspirations, T. S. Eliot, Baraka will never be pinned and wriggling on a wall. This refusal to be pinned down is evident in the wide range of Baraka’s literary output: from his literary debut as a Beat latecomer with Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note…(1961) to his death in 2014, Baraka moved through a series of discrete periods, distinguishable both formally and ideologically.1 After an initial Beat period spanning the years 1959 to 1962 and characterized by a free-verse poetic style and a strident antiformalism that insists on absolute aesthetic freedom (exemplified in his early essay on poetics, “How You Sound??” [1959]), Baraka underwent a transition that lasted until his adoption of Black cultural nationalism in 1965. Works of the transitional period evince a progressive “blackening” of both content and form, the emergence and development of what William J. Harris calls “the jazz aesthetic” (1985); introducing Home: Social Essays (1966), which chronicles these years from a later Black nationalist vantage, Baraka famously writes: “By the time this book appears, I will be even blacker” (1966a, 10). This blackening of Baraka’s work would accelerate in 1965, when he fled white bohemian culture and entered into a Black cultural nationalist period that lasted until 1974; Baraka’s centrality to the Black Arts Movement during this time cannot be overstated. Finally, his most recent radical break occurred when he repudiated Black cultural nationalism in his 1974 essay “Toward Ideological Clarity” and began instead to espouse revolutionary Marxism. Baraka henceforth understands Black liberation in a global context and targets not simply white culture but rather monopoly capitalism. His Marxist literature has continued to exhibit the formal innovation and generic hybridity found in earlier periods, but it is now grounded on a leftist revolutionary politics that invokes a global revolutionary subject. Given such variety in identities and commitments, it is unsurprising to find negotiations of subjectivity throughout all four periods. In many instances, those negotiations take the form of an introspective but fragmented or divided self, as in the transitional poem “An Agony. As Now” (1964): “I am inside someone / who hates me. I look / out from his eyes” (Baraka 1964, 15). Similarly, the chapter of The System of Dante’s Hell (1965)—Baraka’s first and, until 2000, only published novel—titled “The Eighth Ditch (Is Drama” portrays a seduction...

The Historical Determination of the Capitalist Mode of Production and of the Working Class as the Revolutionary Subject

Prominent Marxist theoreticians conceive the working class as a revolutionary subject based on moral or ethical superiority, a natural will for freedom, self-valorization, the need to avoid barbarism, etc. From a materialist viewpoint, human history consists of the transformation of the material conditions of social life through labor. Capitalism is the historically specific development of human subjectivity by transforming the powers of free individual labor into those of the social labor consciously organized by the collective laborer who privately performs it. Thus, the material product of the labor of the working class increasingly consists of the development of its capacity to scientifically organize production, whereas this capacity goes on confronting it as an alien social power embodied in that same product, that is capital, that falls beyond its control. With its free consciousness thus embodying alienation, the working class carries this absolute contradiction inherent in the socialization of private labor (a contradiction that transcends the contradiction between social production and private appropriation) beyond its limit, until revolutionarily organizing labor as a direct social power. As a historical social relation, freedom is transformed by this revolutionary transformation of the materiality of labor: the absence of personal domination based on the objective consciousness concerning one's own individuality as the bearer of productive social powers annihilates the absence of personal domination based on submitting to domination by the social powers embodied in the product of one's own labor.

So You’ve Converged – Now What? The Convergence of Critique

Given the clear convergence of practices of nature across the traditional East-West divide examined in these essays, it is not surprising to learn that the consequences of the particular practice of nature characteristic of industrial capitalism also converged around similar problems such as deforestation, smog, and water pollution, all with their attendant ill effects on health and prosperity. If we look at the key period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and in Japan we also find a vast, shared reaction to and critique of the destructive aspect of the great convergence. Here I will focus on a particular instance of this global critical movement found in anarchism, specifically the thought and practice of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956). Influenced by Edward Carpenter and the Reclus brothers, Elisée and Paul, Ishikawa did not privilege the newly emerging industrial proletariat as the revolutionary subject as did fellow anarchists Ōsugi Sakae and Kōtoku Shūsui. Instead he stayed in the countryside to focus on the separation of humans from nature as the greatest problem of modern societies, eventually developing a theory of ‘dynamic social aesthetics’ (dōtai shakai bigaku) critical of both the ‘cornucopianism’ of infinite exploitation and later the Japanization of nature during the war. In many ways Ishikawa anticipated the recent neo-Lamarckian ‘epigenetics revolution’ and the current call to consider humanity’s unprecedented ability to intervene in its environment a geological force that defines our age.

2013 Protests in Brazil: The Kite and the Byte in New Forms of Popular Mobilization

2013 Protests in Brazil:The Kite and the Byte in New Forms of Popular Mobilization Anthony D’Andrea Iactively participated in street protests of Rio and Brasília. But that was in the late 1980s, and our collective experience was significantly different from the recent 2013 events, as well as from former 1960s mobilizations, all hallmarks in the modern history of popular movements in Brazil. 2013 was unique in organizational expression and ideological orientation, but even stranger was the socioeconomic timing of the protests, during a period of relative prosperity in the nation. The confusion is evident in the multitude of recent analyses. While agreeing with the general claim that 2013 expresses a “crisis of representation” between society and state, this analysis goes beyond, to argue that this crisis expresses a reemerging type of revolutionary subjectivity which, in turn, is being fueled by the dissemination of digital flexibilities propelling a new media imaginary. While partly singular, the Brazilian case also resonates with the current wave of global popular protests, providing elements that suggest new forms of popular mobilization in the making. The following ethnographic recollection works like a film negative of 2013. Back in the late 1980s, we were middle-class college students involved in modest yet soon-to-boom street demonstrations orchestrated by the National Union of Students (UNE), the nation’s strongest youth organization run by militants affiliated with left-wing parties. In the context [End Page 935] of the gradual redemocratization of Brazilian politics taking place at that time, our goal was specific and clear: to secure rights to free and universal public education against the ongoing specter of privatization. Just as timely, the National Congress was drafting a new Constitution, and its chapter on education was suffering a severe push and pull from various interest groups. An old-school member of the Communist Party, the Rector of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Horácio Macedo facilitated a caravan of 20 buses to shuttle students and public servants to Brasília, where we joined a myriad of other young activists from across the country. Our role was to publicly express our stance on education and, whenever possible, infiltrate and lobby Congress during the 1988 constitutional proceedings. It felt like a historic moment, but we didn’t want to rock the boat too much. Following two decades of repressive military rule, political analysts warned us in elegant fashion that “the possibility of repression is determined by the speed of decompression.” As in a chess game, our actions were calculated, seeking optimal alignment across grassroots mobilization, public opinion, and media visibility, mutually influencing backstage politics. Meanwhile, we wondered whether those photographers parading alongside us on the streets were actual journalists or secret agents of the National Intelligence Service (SNI), the data-gathering arm of the still lingering surveillance apparatus. Those demonstrations eventually escalated into the “caras pintadas” (painted faces) of 1992, a massive youth-led movement that joyously pressured Congress to impeach President Collor de Mello, whose demise was brought on by his own reckless dismantling of large swaths of state bureaucracy. Our collective experience was, in turn, quite different from that of our teachers’ as students during the 1960s and 1970s. They had incisively pushed for radical structural changes (“reformas de base”), embodied in impressive mass mobilizations vertically organized by the left-leaning People’s Mobilization Front (FMP) and main labor unions. However, amidst Cold War tensions, the progressive push horribly backfired when a full-blown reactionary military coup abruptly took power in March 1964. President Goulart was ousted; the Congress pacified, and then shut. Resistance fled the country, was silenced, or squashed during desperate guerilla attempts ending in arrest, torture, or death. In this light, the “caras pintadas” of the early 1990s gratefully recognized the much more favorable conditions to reinstate democracy in the country. [End Page 936] It is along this historical arc of sociopolitical developments following a class logic that the nation’s intelligentsia instinctively sought to understand the 2013 protests at first. However, as it quickly became clear, in contrast to the class conscious, ideologically oriented, and strategically organized protests of the 1960s and 1980s, what we recently witnessed neither followed master...

Debt: The Sublimated Object of Capital

In psychoanalysis, a ‘sublime object’ is one that signifies the transformation of a condition of impossibility into one of possibility. On the one hand, it represents a moment of internalized prohibition that transforms an impossibility into something possible: the sublime object turns the impossible sexual object, for example, into something that is prohibited, and therefore possible. On the other hand, a sublime object represents the objectification of a lack. Or, in other words, it is lack in object form; it is the objective correlative of nothingness itself. What better definition might we have for the role played by debt in capital, particularly in its financial stage? Debt is the sublimated object of capital in the sense that it is, itself, a pure nothing that attains object form. It is in its object form that this pure nothing makes possible the global expansion of capital and the class interests that pertain to the latter. Debt operates similarly to the Lacanian the sublime object as the ‘objectcause of desire’. If we subtract this object from capitalist system we lose the system itself. Debt is in this sense the object that, on the other side of its ‘normal’, everyday operation contains both a nugget of the truth of the system itself and the mechanism by which the capitalist system may be overthrown. Debt is the lack in the capitalist system that overlaps with the lack that is the exploited subject. In my paper, I use the Lacanian concept of the sublime object to demonstrate how debt represents the sublimated object of capital; and, as such, it is the central, universal cause that has the potential to open up a space for the interpellation of radical revolutionary subjectivity.

Re-Imagining Revolutions

In our original call for papers for this issue on ‘Revolutions’, we foregrounded our interest in reading work that documented revolutionary moments, movements or impulses, and that theorised the difference that gender makes both to revolutions themselves and to how we conceive of them. We were keen to highlight the ways that revolutions are gendered and also how our accounting of and for them makes and extends gendered meanings. As editors of this themed issue of Feminist Review, our concern was to think through what might constitute a ‘feminist revolution’, and what a feminist perspective on revolutions might inaugurate in analytical and political terms. The articles in the following pages make a key contribution to how revolution is conceptualised in relation to gender and the political, asking us to consider ways in which gender is always already part of the revolutionary process and struggle. Hence, these pieces urge us to consider the gendered politics of revolution as concept and practice, and to delve deeper into the figurations of masculinity and femininity that shape the idea of a revolutionary subjectivity.

Testimonio literario latinoamericano: prefiguraciones históricas del género en el discurso revolucionario de los años sesenta

The foundation of testimonio in Latin American literary field, initiated at the end of the ‘60, makes part of the institutionalization of the Cuban revolution, process where its projection to the rest of Latin America constitued a central problem. This paper studies political preconditions of testimonio. In particular, it analizes certain aspects of Cuban revolutionary discourse that anticipate features eventually developed by the literary genre, in the ways the relation between literature and politics is represented, and in the subjects of discourse that are proposed as embodiments of such relation. The paper introduces the question of Cuban revolution, as regards the exemplary status it acquired in Latin America during the sixties. Then, it examines the literary positioning represented by testimonio, as the corollary of a reflexive reconsideration operated by some Latin American writers and critics, concerning their historical role. Finally, it considers three representative documents of Cuban revolution and its continental projection: History will absolve me, by Fidel Castro, and Reminiscences of the Cuban revolutionary war and Bolivian diary, by Ernesto Guevara. We show the textual configuration of a revolutionary subject whose legitimity emerges not only from a political experience which testimony enunciates, but also from particular ways of living and representing literature in the context of a revolutionary practice. In the end of the sixties, the continental literary field would reaffirm such features as its discourse legitimating criteria, during the institutionalization of testimonio as its privileged genre.

Women on Fire: Immolation, Consent, and the Revolutionary Subject

The years between 1930 and 1933 saw a dramatic rise in anticolonial violence in Bengal. Young women who participated in this violence, caught between competing masculinist discourses of colonial authorities and nationalist communities that deemed them either dupes or martyrs, recognized an incongruity between their revolutionary insurgency and the conditions of possibility for its memorialization. This essay follows Pritilata Waddedar, the first woman to die in the commission of an anticolonial terrorist attack, as she is incarnated into legal, historical, and cultural evidence by colonial authorities and nationalists alike. It responds to Gayatri Spivak’s canonical question of whether the subaltern woman’s voice can be excavated from the historical archive by suggesting that Waddedar augurs and undermines the future narratives of her death and allegorically calls herself sati as a political strategy of refusal and illegibility. Waddedar’s iteration of sati relies on its peculiar status in nineteenth-century colonial law, where it was classified as “voluntary culpable homicide by consent.” This legislation inaugurated a new juridical index of female desire that shaped the political conditions of possibility for revolutionary women decades later. Waddedar prophesies the ways in which her death, like that of the immolated widow, will come to be the object of disputed meaning making and insistently jams the gears of systems of evidence that promise an epistemological clarity of the terms by which a woman lives or dies.

True Requirements or the Requirements of Truth? The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou

The main purpose of the essay is to claim that Badiou has developed a distinctive understanding of “communism” which is very different from the Marxist one. Several scholars have noticed the differences between Badiou and Marx, sometimes striking ones, but have generally failed to go beyond describing them. Here an attempt is made to trace these differences back to the—largely—Nietzschean footing of Badiou's philosophy. I claim that we are dealing in fact not with different tactics, but with two different projects, envisioning distinct strategic goals. Marxist communism is about a dialectical overcoming of the capitalist present, in a way which transcends capitalism but which is predicated on the social, political and cultural transformation brought about by capitalism. Badiou's project, by contrast, aims at achieving a clean break with history. Nietzsche is useful for Badiou inasmuch as he provides a critique of mass society and aims to create a new man, the Overman. The essay discusses the differences between these two projects, focusing on a number of topics, among them the nature of capitalism, the meaning of revolutionary subjectivity, and the attitude to history and to historical possibilities. Marx's political project is vindicated vis-à-vis the elitism and anti-humanism, which vitiate Badiou's alternative approach. A dialogue with Badiou's position, however, is not foreclosed.

Marx et le lumpenprolétariat

Marx’s use of the word “lumpenproletariat” first strikes us by its violence: the term functions as a derogatory stigmatization of heterogeneous groups whose social position is essentially one that is determined by the sphere of exchange and pure circulation in a service economy. The study of Marx’s use of the term demonstrates that it is not a concept: it alludes to the problem posed by the participation of proletarians in the repression of June 1848 or by the lazzaroni in the failure of the liberal revolutions. The term does not designate a “class”. Its use is rather to identify a type of behavior evident at all levels of the society: predation, enrichment by misappropriation, the improductive speculations undertaken by the “declasses” of a society’s “Bohème”. The hypothesis advanced here is that Marx’s articulation between the lumpenproletariat and the importance of the ethical evaluation of its tenuous relation to work partly derives from the Hegelian conception of poverty (the “social question”). An analysis of the “inhuman” needs and the speculative deduction of the proletariat in 1844 demonstrates that the negative determinations of the proletariat establish the lumpenproletariat as the proletariat of the proletariat. The difference is then located in the revolutionary subjectivity of the proletarians, to which the members of the lumpenproletariat do not accede.

Tres notas sobre el sujeto anticapitalista polimórfico

With the purpose of thinking revolutionary change, we expose certain notions oriented towards accounting for the crisis of the classical subject of the revolution and the emergence of a new way of thinking class struggle. Thus, the author begins with some concepts developed by Benjamin in his thesis on the concept of history, particularly those which allow us to see the concept of class struggle with an anti-progressive lens and to think the revolutionary subject not as part of the historical continuum, but as part of its fracture. Furthermore, he draws on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, according to which the “system” is the negation of human liberty, hence the impossibility of thinking a society emancipated from domination when there are categories within her which are identified with the system. The developed concepts are finally articulated with the idea introduced by the Zapatista movement of an anti-capitalist subject of polymorphic and plural character, constituted by multiple struggles and subjects, for which collective dialogue is a method which allows him to establish horizontal agreements.

The intimacy of insurgency: beyond coercion, greed or grievance in Maoist India

The Maoist movement has been presented as one of the most powerful forces of resistance against policies of economic liberalization in India. This paper explores how and why the movement has spread in recent years. Analysing beyond theories explaining insurgent action in terms of coercion, greed or grievance, the article draws on long-term ethnographic research in a Maoist guerrilla zone to explore an important aspect of mobilization that has been underplayed to date in the literature: the relations of intimacy which develop between the mobilizing forces and the people in the area of struggle. The paper shows how bonds of family and kinship, exchange and its expectations, caste and its manifestations are crucial for understanding the social dynamics of revolutionary mobilization. Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between ideology and political organization is significant in shaping the kinds of relations of intimacy developed, and that in turn this can explain the reach of the organization. In the Indian case, the paper thus compares the spread of the Maoists with competing political organizations in their guerrilla zones – the Indian State and the Hindu right. Just as relations of intimacy may help explain why people support and join radical movements, the paper suggests that their conflictual relationship with revolutionary subjectivity may also become the Achilles’ heel of such movements, explaining why people distance themselves from, leave and betray them, leading in part to their decline.

Las mujeres en la política revolucionaria. El caso del PRT-ERP en la argentina de los años 70

The left revolutionary movement during the ‘60s and ‘70s in Argentina had a large number of women participants. Many of them were young women who emerged in politics at the same time as the organizations in which they participated. This article explore the press and the documents from the PRT-ERP through an analysis that takes into account two aspects. On the one hand, the participation of women in the guerrilla, both regarding their actual incorporation in number and quality of the members, and the questions that the organizations put to them, through the creation of spaces and the production of material specifically meant for women. On the other hand, the second aspect deals with how concerned the organization was in thinking of the revolutionary subjectivity intertwining daily life with politics, in a context where the creation of an activism model implied considering all the aspects of the daily life.

Retour sur les critiques anarchistes du marxisme

There is a tendency evident in the various strands of contemporary anarchism to ignore both Marx, Marxism and the history of Marxism, and the critiques formulated by the anarchist tradition. Against this tendency, the aim of the present article is to emphasize both the contemporary relevance of these critiques and the contribution of Marxism to a radical critique of all forms of domination. It therefore recalls the role played by the critique of Marxism in the elaboration of the anarchist movement, whether for the philosophy of history, the status of the political, the role of organization, or the postulate that the revolutionary subject is to be exclusively identified with the proletariat. While some of the critiques are aimed more at the Second International than at Marx himself, they do however retain their relevance in our present situation. They are, furthermore, here coupled with the attempt to go beyond the exclusive partiality of these two traditions, the Marxist and the anarchist. The question of self-emancipation thus finally emerges as the most important and problematic heritage of the conflict between Marxism and anarchism.

What Makes the Working Class a Revolutionary Subject?

Those who conclude that the working class is not a revolutionary subject because capitalism has changed the working class reveal that they do not understand the ABCs of Marxism. The working class makes itself a revolutionary subject through its struggles—it transforms itself. That was always the position of Marx—his concept of "revolutionary practice," which is the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. The working class changes itself through its struggles. It makes itself fit to create the new world.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Seeking what?

Hardt and Negri's transvaluation of violence into the sign of emergent revolutionary subjectivity begins in a philosophical dream, not any actual historical anthropology. Negri's politics of subversion attempt to articulate the ongoing constitution of a new multitude but actually constitute the alter ego to Pax Americana's vision of nation-state sovereignty and finance-dominated capitalism. Thorstein Veblen's critique of the finance-dominated, postmodern new order, first rendered in 1919, draws similar conclusions about fictions in sovereignty by nation-state and contradictions between vested interests and the global commons. But Veblen correctly warns against romanticizing violent tactics. An anthropology of situations will better help scholars clarify contemporary predicaments and potentials than will search for an insurgent global multitude. The issue is urgent in the situation of globalized counterinsurgency. Anthropology can and should mount a better critique of actual global politics than it can find within the values of any philosophy, even one committed to the Spinozan celebration and amplification of immanence.

Zeferino Ribamar das Mercês: uma representação do ator revolucionário na ditadura militar brasileira

O artigo analisa o personagem Zeferino Ribamar das Mercês, criada pelo caricaturista Henrique de Souza Filho durante os anos 1970, explorando a representação do sujeito revolucionário proposta pelo autor. No intuito de demonstrar o caráter político e crítico da produção humorística de Henfil, serão explorados os recursos visuais e discursivos empregados, bem como as temáticas abordadas por esse personagem.

Dialectical materialism and the ‘feminine sublime’

Drawing primarily on Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian reading of Kant and Hegel, but also taking up arguments made by Joan Copjec and Fredric Jameson, this article asserts a conception of the ‘feminine sublime’ in accordance with the political-philosophical approach of dialectical materialism. The article begins by distinguishing between historical and dialectical materialism in order to assert what is at stake in the Marxian critique of ideology, followed by a discussion of the Lacanian conception of the feminine subjective position. The conception of the ‘feminine sublime’ articulated here draws connections between the feminine and proletarian subjective positions, and proposes a way of articulating an ethics of revolutionary subjectivity.

D'une conjoncture l'autre : Guattari et Deleuze après-coup

This text addresses some difficulties encountered reading Deleuze and Guattari “in situation”, in order to suggest a “symptomal reading” of their historico-conceptual moment. It first reexamines the distinction between a “history of revolutions” and “revolutionary-becoming”, in order to explain the meaning of the latter in connection with the Deleuzian concept of event and in the context of the historical sequence which demanded this new concept. The concept of event involves a foreclosed reference to the problem of the revolutionary situation in Marxism; it acknowledges the theoretical difficulties of elaborating a materialist notion of revolutionary situation, but also the political impasses which, in the post-war decades, had brought about a crisis in the representation of the revolutionary subject which Marxism believed it could guarantee. In the light of this double crisis, theoretical and political, the article concludes with an examination of the contemporary reflections of Althusser and Guattari concerning the connection between revolutionary circumstances and political subjectivation.

Between mass society and revolutionary praxis: The contradictions of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

In 1967, Guy Debord published his landmark analysis of the spectacle. Building on Marx’s theory of alienation, the spectacle describes our passive, quasi-visual relation to the social world. The individual, divorced from the collective praxis that constructs our social world, is reduced to consuming corporate-supplied entrancing narratives. This article explicates and assesses Debord’s theory. Its most serious defect is Debord’s rejection of the necessary intermediation of social life by culture and communication. Furthermore, his analysis subscribes to the trope of mass society, which sees the populace as culturally denuded, divorced from community and subject to the imposition of false needs. Against this alienated world, Debord pits the ideal of a collective revolutionary subject that freely creates society. However, both terms – alienated masses and revolutionary collective – are implicitly dependent upon liberal individualism, which abstracts individuals from the cultural traditions and social relations in which they are embedded.