Contenu du sommaire : Partis / mouvements

Parties, Trade-unions, Social
Movements : Relations and Articulations How are we to explain the resurgence of the question of political parties, when the question of social movements seemed to have eclipsed it ? What is the role to be played by parties, trade-unions andby social movements in a project of radical social transformation ? What are the modes of alliance, of collaboration and convergence, to be constructed between them ? These are some of the questions addressed in the present article.

The Marxist Theory of the Party This paper examines the conceptions of the revolutionary party among some of the most important. Marxist thinkers of the XXth century, through three interrelated essential issues : 1) the levels of class consciousness ; 2) the relationship of the party to the masses, in particular during a revolution ; 3) theinternal structure of the party. In our view, the chosen authors – Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs, Trotsky – belong to the same « current » in Marxism, a current which tries to develop, considering the conditions of the XXth century, Marx's theses on the communist revolution and the proletarian self-emancipation ; a current which is contradictory and diverse, inside of which Leninand Luxemburg represent two partially opposed and partially complementary poles.

Philosophy of History and Theory of the Party in
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty The article revisits the famous dispute between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the 1950s, which unfolded through texts such as Humanism and Terror, The Communists and Peace, and The Adventures of Dialectic. The central question that divided the two philosophers concerned the position that non-communist intellectuals associated with the working class should take towards communist politics and the Party. The response to this question engaged nothing less than the full articulation of their respective social ontologies and their corresponding conceptions of radical politics and historical emancipation. In particular, the polemic forced them to focus their attention on the relationships between class experience and class politics, social movement and political organisation. Many of these old arguments remain highly suggestive for contemporary concerns, not least Merleau-Ponty'suncanny, critical pre-empting of the shift to liberalism.

Political Parties and Social Movements : From the illusions of « current affairs » to a sociological perspective. Two competing stereotypes can currently be identified in the debates within the radical left and in social movements. One of these stereotypes postulates the death of political parties and prophesies a political renewal animated by social movements. The other stereotype projects a resurrection of the party-structure and considers the role of social movements to be merely subaltern. The present article adopts a position which is sociologically antithetical regarding this issue : it begins by examining the numerous similarities between political parties and social movements and, more particularly, their shared vulnerability to the traits of professionalisation and the monopolisation of power. Contemporary social movements are not immune to such trends, despite repeated protestations of their commitment to horizontality. The article goes on to examine the process of differentiation which caused social movements to establish a specific space, separate from the political sphere. In the wake of this process, the political and the social appear to constitute two distinct universes, traversed by their own specific logics, while at the same time retaining relations which are both close and fluctuating.

Trade-Unions, Social Movements, and the Dynamic of Emancipation : the
Challenge of the New Radicalism. The article analyses the relations between trade-unions, associations and partisan movements in France today. These relations would appear to be characterised by a degree of mistrust which the crisis affecting political projects of emancipation has accentuated. The growing autonomy of the French labour movement in relation to the existing political movements represents a major shift. Trade-unions now cling to their independence, regarding it as an essential element of their legitimacy. The principle according to which there is no prior hierarchy governing the relation between the agenda of social issues and the agenda of the political is the precondition for any form of cooperation. If trade-unionists and activists in associations call for a « normalisation » of their relations with political parties, they refuse any invitation to engage in any “co-elaboration” of projects, which would cause them to assume responsibility for decisions which are not their prerogative. What they urge is a strategy of resonance rather than a strategy of alliance : confrontation rather than subordination.

The Crisis of Capitalism and the Crisis of Political Representation History has taught us that there is no direct link between economic crisis and political revolution. The failure of Soviet socialism and the failure of European social-democracies can be traced to a common origin : the lack of intervention by the popular masses in the processes of social transformation which have been monopolised by the bureaucratic or technocratic elites. For want of a genuine democratisation of the political representation and of the modes of government, state centralisation has created a persistent fracture between a caste of professional politicians and the mass of citizens, workers, and recipients. A new bond must be created between the social movement “from below” and the instances of political representation.

Class, Party, Social Movement - Class, « Race », Gender The ruling class is a hydra with two heads : “finance” and “elite”. The popular struggle for emancipation is thus not merely a confrontation between two classes. It is rather a game with three players. It sultimate horizon is not “socialism”, a term which still carries the connotation of a “top-down” process, but “communism”. It presupposes the convergence between the apparently disparate conflicts which are being played out in modern society. And, to begin, the struggle calls for the deciphering – drawing on a concept from contemporary materialist feminism- of the “consubstiantiality” of the social relations of class, “race”, and gender. In such conditions, the party of emancipation is not merely aclass-based organisation. It is also, and equally, a feminist, an internationalist, and an ecological party. This party of social movement presupposes a “new ethos of party”.

Crisis and the Revolutionary Moment : Marx and 1848 How are we to assess the role played by the 1848 revolution in the evolution of Marx's thought ?The hypothesis developed here is that the 1848 revolution helped to fill in a “theoretical gap” and to resolve what was a conceptual inconsistency in the Marxian theory of the 1840s. The revolutionary moment thus contributed to the formulation of a consistent theory of revolution. Marx's analysis led to the formulation of two new theoretical principles : that of the link between economic crisis and revolution, and the concept of “the intensity of the crisis”. This consolidated his analysis of the relation between the cyclical crises of capitalism and the revolutionary moment. The article begins with an attempt to specify the nature of these Marxian theoretical principles. It goes on to examine the precise implications of the new coherence of the Marxian revolutionary theory. In conclusion, by way of a confrontation with Althusser's conception of the revolutionary moment, the article seeks to spell out the theoretical and political implications of this “new theory of the revolutionary moment”.

Marx and his Deflationist Conception of Philosophy What is the status of philosophy in the Marxian project ? To answer this question, we must examine the place of philosophy in the Marxian opus and we must qualify the nature of the philosophical position which can be attributed to Marx. The thesis put forward in the article is that the specific nature of the Marxian enterprise is less the result of its being a defence of a new philosophical principle (materialism, dialectics, or praxis), and more a case of its having formulated a new practice ofphilosophy. This practice is one which is characterised by its deflationary thrust. A comparison with pragmatism and with critical theory can help us to spell out the issues which are involved here.

Marx or Tocqueville : Capitalism or Democracy Marx and Tocqueville were the conceptual icons and rallying-points of the two sides in the cold war. It is common today to consider that the outcome of this confrontation saw the victory of the latte rover the former, to the extent that Tocqueville had shown greater prescience in the analysis of the evolution of western societies. However such an evaluation presumes that there is a substantial degree of overlap between these two competing paradigms, whereas there is in fact a fundamental opposition between them regarding the point of view deemed to be pertinent for the task of the qualification and conceptualisation of modern societies. Are these societies to be qualified as democratic societies, increasingly subject to the empire of equality, or as capitalist societies which are increasingly subject to the empire of capital ? The article examines the theoretical consequences stemming form the difference in the problematic that is adopted. Tocqueville's perspective involves a polemical appropriation of the vocabulary of democracy in order to interpret the “nature” of the latter in what is a liberal perspective. This enables us to understand that the task of examining the relation between Marx and democracy does not simply mean the attempt to situate his position in relation to a stable and predefined object. It involves the critique of the polemical strategies for the appropriation of the term of democracy, a strategy from which Marx distances himself by way of the reference to communism.

Labour, Liberty and Necessity in the Communist Utopia : André Gorz and his Reading of Marx
What are the relations engaging labour and liberty, when the former is no longer essentially experienced as the social mark of the alienation of liberty in the economic order ? It was Marx who first formulated these questions consistently and rigorously. He did so by formulating the theory of the two orders, necessity and liberty, in the framework of the communist utopia. For all this, Marx's formulation of the issue failed to dissipate a whole series of ambiguities concerning the relation between these two orders. Drawing on André Gorz's critical reworking of the Marxian framework of the project of social transformation, our aim is to show that a project of emancipation requires a philosophy of liberty, one which recognises a degree of irreducible density in all human collective groups. Or, to put things differently, which acknowledges a certain ineluctable heteronomy of the human condition.

Some Remarks on the Crisis of Capitalism What are the causes and consequences of the crisis of capitalism ? What are the plausible scenarios for the outcome of the crisis ? To what extent is the current crisis comparable to that of 1929, and to what extent does it differ from the crisis of the 1970s ? To what extent can one speak of a crisis of neoliberalism ? These are some of the questions which the authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism address here.