04/2023 – Genesi e sviluppo del neo-marxismo europeo/2

Abstracts

Marco Cerotto, Raniero Panzieri, the «Quaderni rossi» and the Italian neo-Marxism Season

In the second half of the 20th century, Italian Marxism went through a thriving period – from both a political and a theoretical point of view. And this thanks, above all, to the growth of new peculiar Neo-Marxist experiences. Neo-Marxist intellectuals suggested exploring the Marxian theory about the technological factory in order to revitalise worker’s democracy, inherited from consiliarismo, against the latest developments of neo-capitalism. Raniero Panzieri, perfectly embodying the ambiguity of the Marxist intellectual-militant, is the most inspiring figure in the 1950s and 1960s. By criticising the political strategies of the historical organisations of the Italian worker’s movement as well as by founding in 1961 the journal «Quaderni rossi» in Turin – Italy’s epicentre of neo-capitalism –, he ushered in the so-called Workerist period.

Keywords: Raniero Panzieri, Neo-Marxism, Italian Workerism, «Quaderni rossi»

 

Franco Milanesi, Mario Tronti: Workers’ thought and Transformation of the Present

“Operaismo” (Workerism) has been an expression of political thought but, above all, a link between workers’ theory and action. In this paper, I shall analyse three categories, closely linked to each other: the “Copernican revolution”, the class “point of view” and the “political plan of capital”. Together with the intellectual group orbiting around «Quaderni rossi» and «Classe operaia», Mario Tronti worked out these concepts by referring to the class struggles developing in the early Italian 1960s. In this context, I argue that the concept of “class composition” hints to the relationship between the structuring process of the workforce and antagonistic subjectivity. It indeed brought all these issues to the point of maximum tension. However, with the defeat of the so-called working class’ “assault to the sky”, a new phase opened up. Henceforth, Tronti’s thinking focused on the “autonomy of the political”, turning to the theorisation of a new kind of relationship with the workers’ movement.

Keywords: Mario Tronti, Italian Workerism, «Quaderni rossi», «Classe operaia», Capital

 

Raffaella Limone, Andrea Pascale, Antonio Negri: the Question of Law and State in the Seventies

The essay traces the fundamental stages of Antonio Negri’s thought, referring to the developments and the debate of the 1970s about the problem of law and state. For Italian Workerism, the twenty years spanning from the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s represented a historical turning point with regard to the relationship between capital and work. These intellectuals elaborated the fundamental thesis of Italian Workerism, according to which it is under the pressure of struggles that capital requires continuous reconfiguration in order to survive.

In some historical passages of the twentieth century, Negri recognised a crisis of the role of the state. Hence, this is no longer understood as a planner of capitalist development, but rather as a capitalist tool to induce crisis and control over the factory-society. In this paper, we shall analyse such a debate by retracing its key points.

Keywords: Antonio Negri, Italian Workerism, State, «Classe operaia»

 

Franck Engster, The Neue Marx-Lektüre in (West) Germany. Logical-categorial Reading and its Critical Content

The Neue Marx-Lektüre has its roots in the new interpretations of Marx as well as in the re-readings of the Capital that arose in the milieu of the student movements of the mid-1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Following, on the one hand, Hegel’s dialectic and, on the other, the results of Marx-scholarship, the aim was to redeem what among the intellectuals of the first generation of the Critical Theory had remained rather an intuition and a mere postulate: the structural identity of Hegelian Spirit and Marx’s capital. Accordingly, a new reading – either called “logical-categorial” or “form-analytical” – arose, mostly directed at the value-theoretical analyses of the Capital. Classical Marxism read out of Marx’s Capital a rejection of the objective labour theory of value, whereas the Neue Marx-Lektüre sees itself either as a critique of “pre-monetary conceptions of value” (Backhaus, Reichelt) or as a “monetary theory of value” (Heinrich).

Keywords: Neue Marx-Lektüre, Marx, Federal Republic of Germany, Hegel, Capital

 

Elia Zaru, Critical Theory and Political Practice: Hans-Jürgen Krahl and the Frankfurt School

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and analyze Hans-Jürgen Krahl’s reflections on the nexus between theory and praxis in light of the critiques he addressed to Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. According to Krahl, Habermas, Adorno (and, more broadly, the Franfurt School) failed to develop a concrete nexus between critical theory and political practice. The thesis, exposed in the final paragraph, affirms that Krahl represents a possible alternative path within the Franfurt Institute for Social Research.

Keywords: Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Critical theory, Praxis, Adorno, Habermas

 

Irene Viparelli, Althusser’s Neo-Marxism?

Can Althusser’s theory be defined as “Neo-Marxist”? As I shall argue, “Neo” encounters “Marxism” by looking at contemporaneity as a “long conjuncture”, rooted in a class struggle conducted within the absence of existential conditions for communism.  Indeed, the present is the outcome of the “premature death” of communism in the 20th century. This circumstance is due to the inadequate character of the encounter occurred between revolutionary theory and political praxis. In this context, the thinking of the eternal possibility to repeat the “aleatory encounter” in other “historical features” shapes Althusser’s Neo-Marxism.

Keywords: Louis Althusser, Neo-Marxism, Structuralism, Revolution, Materialism

 

Panagiotis Sotiris, Rethinking the contribution of Nicos Poulantzas to a Marxist theory of the State and Politics

Nicos Poulantzas offered one of the most original contributions to Marxist theory of the State, the political and politics. The aim of this article is to retrace Poulantzas’s unique theoretical trajectory, assessing his perspective on such issues in order to present something much more complex than a simple “structuralist” version of Marxism. Quite on the contrary, we are here dealing with the emergence of a relational theory of the State that takes account of social and political antagonism as the very materiality of the State itself. In light of this as well as of Poulantzas’s elaborations on authoritarian statism, his reflections on a democratic road to socialism, however contradictory, do acquire a meaning reaching beyond any mere “reformism”.

Keywords: Nicos Poulantzas, Neo-Marxism, Fascism, Structuralism, Reformism

 

Giorgio Cesarale, Italian Marxism in a European Perspective

The aim of this essay is to contribute to a critical and thorough comprehension of Italian Marxism, primarily tracing the links along which it partook of a European history that cannot get easily compressed into national and stadial historiographies. The trajectory of Italian Marxism is then depicted against the background of the main capitalist transformations of the last century. The hypothesis here formulated is that one can not only investigate the reciprocal influences within the vast Marxist theoretical consciousness of the 20th century, but also assess the extent and limits within which Italian Marxism has been able to cope with the new configuration of the process of reproduction of total social capital worldwide, thus advancing in the understanding of the relationship intercurring between the latter and class struggle.

Keywords: Italian Marxism, Neo-Marxism, Revolution, Reformism

 

Stefano De Luca, Social War, Cyberwar, Cognitive War, Killer-robot. The Transformations of War in the Digital Age

The article aims to offer a conceptual map of the transformations triggered by the Digital Revolution in the domain of Warfare, distinguishing them into incremental, innovative and revolutionary. After recalling how the attempt to apply Artificial Intelligence to Warfare dates back to the 1980s, and after specifying the meaning of terms such as Information War, Infowar, Cyberwar, Social War and Cognitive War, the article details some of the main transformations: the transition from Infowar to Social War (a change of incremental nature), the characteristics of Information War and Cyberwar (an innovative change), and the appearance of autonomous weapons or LAWS (representing a revolutionary change). In conclusion, the debate on LAWS is reconstructed, in which consequentialist, deontological and realist arguments are confronted.

Keywords: Infowar, Cyberwar, Cognitive War, Digital Revolution

 

Alessandro Campi, What is the Nation for? A Functionalist Perspective

In a world dominated by globalization, nations still paly an important role. The idea of nation is still today a political formula or idea capable of creating – at an individual and collective level – consensus, mobilization and identity. The essay illustrates a theory of the nation based on a realistic, functionalist and pragmatic perspective.

Keywords: Nation, Globalisation, Europe, State-nation

 

Federico Poggianti, National Socialism on the screen: Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph des Willens’

As of 1933, Leni Riefenstahl became one of the most important figures in National Socialist cinema. Her film about the 1934 Nuremberg Congress Triumph des Willens represents a milestone in the construction of Hitler’s political myth. The paper traces the genesis of one of the most famous propaganda films ever, the zenith of this genre in Germany. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the political elements in the movie with Riefenstahl’s film shot for the 1933 congress – Der Sieg des Glaubens – which reflects the changing balance in the National Socialist Party in those years.

Keywords: Leni Riefenstahl, Nazist Regime, Hitler, Propaganda