Introductions To Contemporary European Communist Thought?

[Colfax]

I have a passing familiarity with some of the authors that are treated as contemporary exponents of communism in the realm of academic critical theory. People like Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, Ranciere, etc. However, much of the work I'm familiar with is much more engaged with a critique of contemporary culture and politics than with a constructive project of developing a vision of an alternative society or the policy contents it might contain. Do you know of any works out there which tease out something like a positive politics from authors such as these?

[Mr. Natural]

Colfax, Welcome aboard! Thanks for a potentially valuable thread.

I don't have an answer to your question, though, for politics and revolutionary organizing theories are conspicuously missing from current "left" academia. "Marxism" has abandoned revolution for cultural critique and societal psychoanalysis.

I just thought of one partial exception. Joel Kovel is the head of American ecosocialism, and I find his Enemy of Nature (2003) to be valuable for several reasons. Kovel writes for a popular readership and he nails capitalism and the impossiblity of humanity continuing much longer within capitalist relations. Then to the point of your OP: Kovel sketches an "ecosystemic, ecological, grassroots" revolutionary organizing process in response.

I hope comrades have some other suggestions. We sure need them!

My red-green best.

[The Idler]

Socialism as a Practical Alternative | The Socialist Party of Great ... (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-practical-alternative)



The Alternative to Capitalism (http://theoryandpractice.org.uk/library/alternative-capitalism-adam-buick-and-john-crump-1987)

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

I recommend this guy:
http://libcom.org/tags/gilles-dauve
that guy:
http://libcom.org/tags/loren-goldner
and this marvelous group:
http://libcom.org/tags/tptg

[Sasha]

unless you mean communist in the vanguard party led lenninist way tiqqun/the invisible commitee are maybe exactly what you are looking for; http://www.revleft.com/vb/tiqqun-introduction-civil-t171513/index.html?t=171513

[Colfax]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions. Tiqqun/The Invisible Committee had occurred to me, but I am of the opinion that they are much too exclusively youth-focused to truly fit the bill of what I have in mind. I'll have to look into the Kovel. I'm only tangentially familiar with his work from the eco--socialist manifesto he released with Lowy.

The closes thing to what I so imperfectly requested in the OP is The Actuality of Communism by Bruno Bosteels. Bosteels has translated a number of Badiou's works into English and has quite a good grasp on the literature that interests me, especially those writers who group themselves around 'The Communist Hypothesis' idea (which is to say more Badiou and Zizek than Agamben). In the final chapter he explores developments in Bolivia to try to answer the question of what relationship, if any, there is between this alleged renaissance of communism in the academy and events in the world of actual politics. Unfortunately, there's only the one chapter and entirely too much of it is devoted to examining the writings of Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera.

Maybe the book has yet to be written. Let's all keep our eyes out, though.

[Comrade Jandar]

unless you mean communist in the vanguard party led lenninist way tiqqun/the invisible commitee are maybe exactly what you are looking for; http://www.revleft.com/vb/tiqqun-introduction-civil-t171513/index.html?t=171513


I would warn you that Tiqqun texts while being relatively short, is some of the most confusing literature I've ever read. I read Introduction to Civil War recently and I understood about quarter of it.

[Colfax]

Tiqqun is self-indulgently cryptic, in a way that I find genuinely tiresome. It is part of their cultivated mystique and feels much more like a branding strategy to establish their avant-garde bona fides than a attribute dictated by the requirements of the thoughts they wish to express.