Reading Marx: The 18th Brumaire; The Civil War in France; Critique of the Gotha Program
In particular, substantive questions to be explored include the relevance of the class position and origins of political elites, the role of violence in revolutionary politics, forms of organization and their selectivity’s, the experimental practice of communism, the state form and its class functions, the revolutionary potential of cities, the ways that the dominant classes form political alliances, the relation of anarchism to communism, the pitfalls of economism and nationalism, and the authoritarian and oligarchic forms of the capitalist state. In addition to these three readings from Marx, key insights from important readers of these texts (Rosa Luxemburg, Nicos Poulantzas, Henri Lefebvre) will be brought into the discussion.