Selected Translations (from French and Italian) by Patrick King
Jérome Skalski: Fifty years ago Louis Althusser's For Marx, and, under his direction, Reading Cap... more Jérome Skalski: Fifty years ago Louis Althusser's For Marx, and, under his direction, Reading Capital, were published. What was the context of the debate at that period? Étienne Balibar: To put it very briefly, I would say that the question speaks to an intellectual and even academic dimension, and a political and ideological one. I belong to a generation that entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1960. That's not irrelevant from an historical point of view. In our group, which was formed little by little around Althusser, there were students, of course, but also disciples. People who were a bit older, like Pierre Macherey, and later those a bit younger who came just after, the future Maoists, like Dominique Lecourt. That is, over the span of five or six years. On the one hand, then, the year 1960 was two years before the end of the Algerian War, and the year that Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason was published. We had been politicized by the Algerian War. We were all UNEF militants, which was the first French union to meet with the Algerian unions linked to the FLN in order to coordinate actions against the war. This context was one of intense politicization and mobilization, but also very sharp internal conflicts. The basis of our politicization was mostly that of the anti-colonial and, consequently, antiimperialist mobilization. The social dimension existed, but it came as a kind of an add-on.
Articles by Patrick King
The lack of attention given to the group is understandable; with the exception of a two-page writ... more The lack of attention given to the group is understandable; with the exception of a two-page write-up included in the New Left collection The Movement Towards a New America, and a brief statement published at the end of the Black Panthers Speak anthology, very few writings from the YPO are easily available to the public. Moreover, until Amy Sonnie and James Tracy's 2011 work Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, a timely study of radical anti-racist activism during the 1960s and '70s within working-class white communities in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, and Jakobi Williams's recent book From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago, one of the only full accounts of the history of the Chicago Rainbow Coalition, very little in-depth historical care had been paid to the group. Republishing this vital archival text is a small attempt toward filling said void in the scholarship. But just as important, we wager that, given renewed attention to racism, the legacies of the South, and the Confederate flag today, disentangling the visible contradictions of the YPO and analyzing their role as a key constituency of the Rainbow Coalition can help us demarcate certain positions within contemporary debates about radical history, organizing strategy, and political identity. In our current conjuncture, the idea of white and black radicals rallying side-by-side around cries of "Black Power to black people!" and "White Power to white people!," as the Chicago Black Panthers and the Young Patriots did, seems absolutely unthinkable; but to dismiss this as mere anachronism would be to overlook a pivotal episode in American political activism and thus disregard what "strategic traces" and resources this experience could hold. To be able to investigate the YPO further, and understand how such a multiracial assemblage of groups like the Rainbow Coalition was possible in the first place, we should heed the advice of Cha-Cha Jimenez, leader of the Young Lords: "in order to understand [the Young Patriots], you have to understand the influence of nationalism." This also requires us to chart the specific organizational forms and styles of political work that this nationalism assumed. *** Formed in 1968, the YPO quite consciously took after the Panthers by combining revolutionary nationalism and community defense as a political strategy, and in their viewing of the "pig power structure" as a common enemy for both poor whites and African Americans. The YPO was also marked by the specific conditions of radical politics in Chicago where the "organize your own" activist model, famously advocated by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in its later phase (but present even in that group's short-lived organizing efforts between 1963-65 among poor whites in Biloxi, Mississippi and the Ozarks region of Arkansas, dubbed the "White Folks' Projects"), meant not identity-based essentialism but a forging of connections across class, race, and ethnic lines. This is reflected in the YPO's own 11-Point Program, which, while modeled on the original version put forth by the Oakland Panthers, contained a prominent addition. Following demands for full employment, better housing conditions, prisoners' rights, and an end to 2 3 4 5 16/20
Translations by Patrick King
Viewpoint Magazine, 2022
In the present context, what we are seeing does not really resemble the establishment of innovati... more In the present context, what we are seeing does not really resemble the establishment of innovative organizations breaking with the Taylorist logic, but much more a mixture of genres where innovations are introduced but within a logic that remains fundamentally Taylorist. Management is engaged in a constant project to seek out another mode of control, domination, and coercion of employees before preparing the passage toward possible reforms of the organization of labor which could be rendered more compatible with the demands for responsiveness imposed by the market and new forms of competition.
It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a whole range of concepts dir... more It is impossible at the present time to write history without using a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx's thought and situating oneself within a horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx. One might even wonder what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist. 1 When Foucault cites the "second volume of Capital," he clearly has in mind the second volume of the French edition of Marx's work, published by Éditions Sociales, which comprises Parts 4, 5, and 6 of Volume I, the only volume to appear in Marx's lifetime, the final editing of Volumes II and III being posthumously completed by Engels. Althusser, in a preface written for the 1969 publication of Volume I of Capital in Flammarion's GF book series, had recommended reading it by starting directly with the second half, that is, by skipping the first part, as its interpretation poses the most problems, problems only resolvable when one gets to the end of the work and can grasp the argumentation as a whole. Foucault seems to go even further, advising that Marx's book be approached through the fourth part, which deals with "The Production of Relative Surplus-Value (Mehrwert)." Indeed, in this passage he sees, appearing for the first time, the elements enabling the definition of the new configuration of power, heralded from the end of the 18th century by theorists such as Bentham: namely, "bourgeois power" and its mechanisms, i.e., the specific procedures pertaining to a technology of power, to whose analysis Marx made the greatest contribution. By focusing his attention on this part of Capital, Foucault thereby finds a way of distancing himself from the polemical presentation provided in The Order Of Things -not of Marx's thought stricto sensu, as found in his own texts, but what arose from it in the form of "orthodox" Marxism, in which Foucault had detected an avatar or epiphenomenon of political economy in its Ricardian form, full stop. From this point of view, it is as if Foucault proposed to add a new chapter to the project Althusser himself initiated with the publication of Reading Capital, which had already begun to challenge traditional, orthodox Marxism.
Papers by Patrick King
Viewpoint Magazine, 2022
Consistent with his rejection of a romanticization of the working class, Linhart insists that wor... more Consistent with his rejection of a romanticization of the working class, Linhart insists that workers’ knowledge is fragmented and partial, if also profound. The task of the inquiry is, thus, to collect via dialogue and participation, this disjointed state of collective memory and oral testimony in support of a systematic understanding of the whole.
Século XXI: Revista de Ciências Sociais, 2020
While Daniel Bensaid’s writings on Marxism, socialist strategy, and historical temporality have g... more While Daniel Bensaid’s writings on Marxism, socialist strategy, and historical temporality have gained increased attention in the years since his passing, there remain relatively few accounts of his thinking on class. This article seeks to correct that gap by situating Bensaid’s various texts on class theory in relation to other key reconceptualizations of class in the Marxist tradition that sought to avoid sociological determinism: E. P. Thompson’s lens of class formation and the Italian Workerists’ methodology of class composition. In tracing these connections, we argue that Bensaid’s conception of class is at once historically grounded and attuned to the open-ended conflictuality and multiple terrains of class struggle.
Seculo XXI, 2020
While Daniel Bensaïd's writings on Marxism, socialist strategy, and historical temporality have g... more While Daniel Bensaïd's writings on Marxism, socialist strategy, and historical temporality have gained increased attention in the years since his passing, there remain relatively few accounts of his thinking on class. This article seeks to correct that gap by situating Bensaïd's various texts on class theory in relation to other key reconceptualizations of class in the Marxist tradition that sought to avoid sociological determinism: E. P. Thompson's lens of class formation and the Italian Workerists' methodology of class composition. In tracing these connections, we argue that Bensaïd's conception of class is at once historically grounded and attuned to the open-ended conflictuality and multiple terrains of class struggle. RESUMO: Ainda que os escritos de Daniel Bensaïd sobre marxismo, a estratégia socialista e a temporalidade histórica te-nham atraído mais atenção nos anos que se seguiram à sua mor-te, houve poucas tentativas de examinar sua análise de classe. Este
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Selected Translations (from French and Italian) by Patrick King
Articles by Patrick King
Translations by Patrick King
Papers by Patrick King