1st Edition
Can Common People Govern? Political Parties, Movements, and Uprisings
Introduction 1. The One-Party Model: A Revealing Development of the Party-Form 2. The Mixed Legacy of the Bygone Class Party 3. The Fatal Contradictions of the Movement-Form 4. The Rainbow of Common People 5. Organize, Associate, Rise Up Appendix: On the Popular Left in France Today
Biography
Jacques Bidet is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre, France, and the founder of the journal Actuel Marx. Since the 1980s, he has been developing a theory of modern society and history known as “metastructural theory of modernity.” His work is mainly inspired by Marx and influenced by thinkers such as Althusser, Habermas, Bourdieu, Foucault, Wallerstein, and others.
Jacques Bidet has in recent decades carved out a distinctive theory of modernity that starts from, but strives to transcend Marx. In this lucid and wide-ranging book he develops this theory further by rethinking the project of democracy in the context of the accelerating ecological crisis that increasingly threatens humankind. This involves Bidet in both critically interrogating theorists and idéologues – including Lenin and Xi Jinping. Gramsci and Althusser, Laclau and Mouffe – and empirically exploring how political institutions, movements, and parties function in the contemporary world-system. The result is a book that both demands hard thinking and offers radical hope.
Alex Callinicos, Emeritus Professor of European Studies, King's College LondonJacques Bidet incorporates essential elements of Marx's work and, at the same time, makes corrections, indicates blind points and opens up original paths. A call for an uprising of the Nation-World that unites class, race and gender and is guided by the compass of ecology. For us, in the continent of the Amazon Rainforest, inhabited by dozens of indigenous peoples and also of large urban concentrations, this original and exciting book adds a lot to the search for popular struggle.
Armando Boito Júnior, Professor de Ciência Política, Editor of Critica Marxista
