Contenu du sommaire : Crises, révoltes, résignations

Food Problems and Economic Problems in America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia : Struggles and Resignation What are the various dynamics of crisis, revolt, and resignation currently operating on the American and African continents, in the Middle East and in Asia. What effects do they have on the policies adopted to “get out of the crisis” ? These are the issues which Greg Albo (Canada), Kako Nubukpo (Togo), Rhina Roux (Mexico), Marie Noëlle Abiyaghi (Lebanon) and Son Youg Woo (Korea) address in this article. They examine the consequences of neo-liberal capitalism and the succession of crises in food, oil, finance, and in the economy, before going on to explain how they emerge in their regional contexts where they take on their specific guises.

Crisis, social revolts, revolutionary moments in Marx and Lenin The examination of the link between crises and social revolts in Marxism is a task which is deeply problematic. « Revolt » would seem to have the status of a « hidden object » within the more general question of the relation between crises and revolutionary opportunities. The article begins by considering a series of preliminary questions : what do we mean by « crisis », « revolt » and by « revolutionary conjuncture » ? What is the role played by revolts within the revolutionary conjunctures opened up by crises ? The article then focuses on the Marxian analysis of the conjunctures of 1848 and 1870 and on Lenin's analysis of 1905 and 1917. Marx and Lenin put forward two strongly contrasting ways of dealing with the problem of articulating crisis, revolt and revolution. Whereas Marx envisages the passage from revolt to revolution as a process of self-transformation and self-emancipation accomplished through the praxis of the masses, Lenin envisages this passage as a « leap » that only accomplishes itself through the dialectical relation between the avant-garde Party and the masses.

Crises and social revolts in the historiography of contemporary France Refusing to apprehend the category as a simple empirical fact, the article examine the notion of crisis against the perspective offered by the series of French Revolutions : (1789, 1831-1834, 1848, 1870,1968). This enables the authors to question these « moments of crisis » in relation to the historiographical contribution of successive generations of historians. In opposition to a liberal vision where social revolts are devoid of any political project, such an approach on the part of the historian places the focus on a people, a proletariat, a group which, above all, reveals itself to be a political subject. To be effective, and to avoid stifling the comprehension of a revolutionary phenomenon, the concept of conjunctural crisis is thus combined with the invocation of a longer temporality and with a comprehension of the organic movements of society. The focus placed on the moment of crisis enables the authors to propose a different way of apprehending revolution, to grasp its rootedness in time that is both profound and immediate, organic and circumstantial,

The dynamic of social struggle in the French Caribbean What are the dynamics and the context, who are the agents of the major social movements which marked the spring of 2009 in the French Caribbean ? What is the link between the struggle against exploitation and the struggle against the permanence of the region's colonial structures ? What differences are to be identified, in this respect, between Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana ?. These are the principal questions addressed in this interview.

Crisis and student struggles : the dialectics of politicisation and questions of method The article considers the current revival of large-scale mobilisations within the student population in Europe. It advances the hypothesis that these waves of mobilisation reactivate a process of politicisation reflecting a much longer-term temporality which provides them with their foundation and which casts light on the problems and the ambivalence inherent in the phenomenon. The article thus outlines a framework for the analysis of this process that is based on the following dialectic : a) the structural integration of the university institution of advanced capitalism within a process of reproduction of the prevailing socio-economic and socio-ideological relations ; b) the conjunctures of struggle which have invested the university as institution. The article goes on to focus on two factors contributing to the intensification of this antagonism : a dialectics of politicisation and depoliticisation of the practices of knowledge in relations within the institution ; an « intrusion » of the international conjuncture within the sphere of student mobilisation. This latter factor catalyses the process of de-identification with the framework of the national State and confers a particular importance, precisely because of the fragility and the ambiguity of the phenomenon, to the European dimension of the current struggles.

How the new spirit of capitalism confronts the new modes of workplace radicalism The period 2008-2009 has seen a spate of workplace conflicts obeying a common logic in terms of the modes of mobilisation. The conflicts emerge inside the sphere of production. They occur in the wake of the announcement of a partial or total suspension of production and their stated goal is to save jobs and/or to negotiate redundancy payments going beyond the legal entitlement. The aim of the article is to confront the paradigm which Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello formulated in The New Spirit of Capitalism in order to articulate the concepts of the civic and the critical to the features of the new discursive protocols which have emerged in the context of these recent conflicts. The article addresses two questions. The hypothesis put forward is that the discursive protocol which those promoting militant action draw upon goes beyond a model of intelligibility that is fundamentally built around the reference to a corrective critique and thus fails to take account of the place in which the discourse of radical critique is actually rooted.

The crises of neo-liberalism, modalities of revolt and adaptability The aim of the article is to locate the current crisis within the history of neo-liberalism with its successive crises. The authors point to the fact that the crisis is the latest in a series of financial and economic crises, to which must be added energy and food crises. The article analyses the social effects of neo-liberalism by way of its return to a logic focused on the production of absolute surplus-value, following the revolt of the financial bourgeoisie against the social State. It concludes with an examination of the effects of the various forms of resistance to neo-liberalism upon the modes of legitimation that are in operation. Focusing in particular on the situation in France, the article argues that the reactions to the crisis, between revolt and resignation, are to be explained by way of the structural effects of neo-liberalism and in terms of the crisis of legitimation now affecting it.

Marx and the question of the concerted plan : a brief retrospective The article proposes a broadbrush rehearsal of the controversy of a socialist accounting, that is, the hypothesis of a method of rational accounting proper to a communitarian economy, which opposed socialists and liberals in the 1920s. The aim is to show that (1) the terms of this somewhat arcane controversy hinge on certain assertions by Marx, in particular regarding the modes of association in the future ; (2) that the debate which, contrary to superficial impressions, is not dead, cannot be formulated without also addressing the question of property. The article's brief review of the liberal case in the debate enables us to shed light on the Marxian representations of a communitarian association.

« The form within which contractions can move ». The case for a reconstruction of the materialist theory of law The article begins with an appraisal of the legacy of Marxist legal theory in the last century as the starting-point from which to update the various attempts to grasp the connection between the capitalist mode of production and modern law. By way of a critical inquiry of its merits and failures, the article tries to re-construct the findings of Marxist legal theory and thus propose an updated version of a materialist legal theory. The main argument is that law in capitalist societies takes the form of a technology of cohesion which possesses its own logic of self reproduction. Law's ´relational autonomy` is both an effect of its autonomisation from social relations, behind the back of its producers, and the main condition for a deferral of power. Under the structural conditions of the legal form, juridical intellectuals organise hegemony via the infrastructure of a seemingly neutral legal argumentation.

« Real politics » : Some remarks on justice and politics The focus of the article is on the foreclosure of justice from the constellation of modern political concepts, that is, the erosion which modernity operates concerning the conditions which would enable us to pose the question of justice. The failure of all modern attempts to formulate the right of resistance shows the collapse of the idea of justice, henceforth reduced to being either a purely formal procedure or the will of majority. From this point of view, justice is merely the advantage of the stronger, as we can see in the position of Thrasymachus, already criticised by Plato. The essence of the crisis we are facing today involves more than just economics. It also involves law and politics. The moment is thus an opportunity to re-open the question of justice. To do so, we must go beyond the principle of majority decision. True politics, an idea which traverses Kant and Walter Benjamin, envisages the question of justice beyond the doxastic horizon. It re-opens the Socratic conflict between truth and opinion. The core of the problem hinges on the possibility of a real political change in this political form, the form of a modern democracy which represents itself as absolute and un-transcendable.

Michel Foucault in this Post-Colonial Time In our time of globalisation and post-colonial existence what do the writings of Michel Foucault represent for us ? The article discusses the reception of Foucault in India. It shows how new research in the areas of law and extra-legal powers, into the nature of sovereignty and exceptions, combines Foucault's ideas in a creative way, with a non-conformity and radicalism that post-colonial society is generating now. We cannot help remembering that this is not the first time that existing social inquiries about the body and about the physical aspects of our political life have taken on an interesting new turn. This is nothing new. The entire tradition can be described by way of Lenin's phrase, “militant materialism”.

Critical theory : tradition and current issues In this interview Axel Honneth reviews his personal trajectory, starting out from Marx and proceeding by way of critical theory. He defines his relation to the various currents of contemporary political philosophy and to the various research agendas which are today to the fore in critical theory. Honneth examines the place which a social philosophy can today claim and the question of the current renewal of interest in Adorno.