Miroslav Kusý (1931–2019) was a Marxist-orientated Slovak philosopher who, after the crackdown on the Czechoslovak reform process in August 1968, applied a critical reading of the official interpretation of Marxism. An example of this is the short essay “To Be a Marxist in Czechoslovakia,” from 1984. Like other of his critical statements written in the 1970s and 1980s, it was published only in samizdat. In this text, published here for the first time in English, Kusý summarizes, explains, and criticizes the official interpretation of Marxism and counterposes his own understanding of it. In doing so, Kusý fits into the tradition that revolves around finding a correct interpretation of Marx. Dirk Mathias Dalberg, after a biographical outline and a short overview on the political thinking of Miroslav Kusý in the 1970s and 1980s, introduces the text and names Kusý’s main arguments. Dalberg places Kusý’s thinking into the broader context of contemporary dissident thinking in Czechoslovakia and offers further readings which show Kusý’s understanding of Marxism in concrete examples. and Dirk Mathias Dalberg, ed.
The article is prefaces by a biographical note by Jan Zouhar, Remembering Jaroslav Šabata. In the article itself Šabata, “in the outer margins of Czesław Miłosz’s Theological Tract”, offers a profoundly personal confession of lived dynamics of faith, be it Christian or Communist. He understands faith as a stance of willingness to measure oneself by more than personal interest. He speaks of an unconditional trust which makes for a historical catharsis. Rejecting neither the Communist nor the Christian ideal, heraises them to the level of a transformation of historical subjectivity intensified by the struggle for social transformation. Tus his confession transcends the seeming chasm between Christian and communist faith.
What is the notion of citizenship that reveals itself in such varied and successive appearances as “civic” participation, “civil” society, and “civil” rights? Th e law provides us with positive defi nitions, defi ning individuals’ relationship to given states, which grant rights to participate in civil society. But such defi nitions conceal as much as they reveal. Th e full meaning of citizenship comes out only in relation to other categories which citizenship excludes. Th is is true not only because all categories of meaning are defi ned against their opposites, but also because citizenship as a specifi c category is characterized fundamentally by the principle of exclusion. Citizenship, typically conceived as a bundle of rights, functions de facto as a bundle of privileges, that is to say, of rights that must be granted, rights which (in spite of universalist justifi cations) are always granted to some and not to others, and which are granted on the condition that right-holders renounce their claims on other rights. Th e non-citizen tends to become not only uncivil but also uncivilized, deprived not only of specifi c civil rights but also of human dignity. Th e citizen is civilized while the non-citizen is made barbaric. It becomes necessary therefore to develop the following thesis: that the essence of the citizen is the proletarian tramp. So argues Joseph Grim Feinberg in this Czech translation of an article published in English as “Th e Civic and the Proletarian,” in Socialism & Democracy 27 (2013), no. 3.
Since the beginnings of Marxism there has been a persistent demand to understand this theory, as well its practical and organizational development, according to the principles of Marxism itself. By “Marxism” I mean here historical materialism: not mechanical determinism but the interaction of transformational praxis with continually changing reality. Th is interaction may be confrontational and, as the poet-philosopher Bertolt Brecht said, “like everything that pertains to confl ict, collision, and struggle, it cannot be treated without the materialist dialectic.” (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 23 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993], p. 376.) In the following article I want to show that Brecht’s thesis is also valid for the history of Marxism and its forms of motion.
In this article, fi rst published in English in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20 (2013), pp. 461–99, James Mark Shields analyzes the possibilities and problems of a “Buddhist materialism” constructed along Marxian lines, by focusing in particular on Buddhist and Marxist conceptions of “liberation.” Although it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to reconsider and problematize Buddhist conceptions of “freedom” and “agency,” the thought traditions of Asian Buddhism have for many centuries struggled with questions related to the issue of “liberation”—along with its fundamental ontological, epistemological and ethical implications. With the development of Marxist thought in the mid- to late nineteenth century, a new paradigm for thinking about freedom in relation to history, identity, and social change found its way to Asia and confronted traditional religious interpretations of freedom as well as competing Western ones. In the past century, several attempts have been made—in India, southeast Asia, China, and Japan—to bring together Marxist and Buddhist worldviews, with only moderate success (both at the level of theory and of practice). By utilizing the theoretical work of “radical Buddhist” Seno’o Girō, Shields argues that the root of the tension lies with conceptions of selfhood and agency—but that, contrary to expectations, a strong case can be made for convergence between Buddhist and Marxian perspectives on these issues, as both traditions ultimately seek a resolution of existential determination in response to alienation. Along the way, Shields discusses the work of Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Lukács, Sartre, and Rorty in relation to aspects of traditional (particularly East Asian Mahāyāna) Buddhist thought. The article has been translated into Czech by Max Ščur.
Kapitola z knihy The Psychic Life of Power (1997) nabízí originální četbu pojetí ideologie a ideologické interpelace, jak je předkládá Louis Athusser, jeden z nejvýznamnějších marxistických myslitelů 20. století. Judith Butlerová analyzuje zejména fenomén subjektivace, který v souvislosti s ideologickou interpelací vstupuje do hry, a afektivní pouto, které je konstitutivní podmínkou fungování interpelace. Druhá část textu je věnována polemice s Mladenem Dolarem, představitelem lublaňské psychoanalytické školy, který ve své četbě Althussera propojuje problematiku ideologie a lacanovské psychoanalýzy – tato polemika se týká především pojmu reálna, který Dolar transponuje z psychoanalytického do marxistického kontextu., A chapter in the book The Psychic Life of Power (1997) offers an original reading of the conception of ideology and ideological inquiry as it is presented by Louis Althusser, one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. Judith Butler’s analysis focuses on the phenomenon of subjectivisation which, in the context of ideological inquiry, enters our consideration, and on the affective bond which is a constitutive condition of the fuctioning of inquiry. The second half of the text is devoted to a polemical discussion with Mladen Dolar, representative of the Lubliana psychoanalytical school which, in its reading of Althusser, brings with it the problematic of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalysis – these polemics concern above all the concept of the real which Dolar transposes from the psychoanalytical context to the Marxist one., Judith Butler, Josef Fulka., and přeloženo z anglického jazyka
Th e emergence of the New Materialisms from a critique of the cultural or linguistic turn in social theory and its inability to adequately deal with questions of matter seems to be quite similar to the starting point of historical Materialism. But, in its reformulation of such crucial concepts and relations as subject-object- or nature-culture divisions (or, in that case, non-divisions), as well as its emphasis on the concept of contingent assemblages as an ontology of the emergence of matter and things, it is no longer human praxis which is being highlighted but the event (Ereignis) of materialization of non-human/human assemblages. Th us, it is only the contingency of matter which is leading to changes. Hence, the ontology of New Materialisms is deeply problematic. Th erefore, the paper aims to provide a critique of the main concepts of the New Materialisms by means of Marxian approaches. Th e theses are, fi rst, that the New Materialisms de-socialize things through de-socializing categories and concepts; second, that they can be assumed to represent more of an “ontological turn” than a “material turn,” which has serious epistemological consequences; and, third, they are mirroring in their negation of the subject the methodological individualism of neoliberal theory because both approaches defi ne a non-society of super-individual processes, a kind of spontaneous order which cannot be controlled by humans. In order to substantiate these assumptions the paper fi rst traces back the main categories of New Materialisms, then takes a deeper look at the subject-object- and the nature-culture relation before relating it to neoliberal society. Finally, the ontology of open-endedness and contingency will be criticized as an ontological apologia of what is.
Recently, the term “Ecological Leninism” has emerged as a popular invocation in the works of Marxist thinkers attempting to grasp dialectically the numerous intersecting ecological crises. Yet, beyond a few introductory remarks, little has been said about the content of this concept and, even less, its relation to Lenin. Generally, the concept attempts to combine Leninist political theory with the ecological analyses of the growing number of ecosocialists and eco-Marxists working both within the academy and without. This paper intends an initial, philosophical contribution toward developing Ecological Leninism: (1) by providing an interpretation of Lenin’s philosophical method, that is, dialectical and historical materialism; and (2) explicating the way in which this philosophy gives rise to a political ecological theory and practice, Ecological Leninism, that addresses the crisis of the metabolic rift between nature and society. We intend to contribute to the development of Ecological Leninism by clarifying the philosophy through which the political method is articulated. Thus, we hope to show that, under the conditions of a global metabolic rift produced by capitalist society, Ecological Leninism as a political ecological theory signals the possibility of securing a just and sustainable world for future generations.