Critical Theory: The Podcast

The philosopher Étienne Balibar reads and discusses with Bernard E. Harcourt Marx’s last texts (The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874), and Letters to Vera Zasulich (1881)) at Marx 13/13 @Columbia in Paris. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/13-13/ The full-length introduction to Marx 13/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1313 The recording of the seminar is here: https://youtube.com/live/5nwOCRrql4w Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** This is the seminar with Étienne Balibar at Marx 13/13 at which we read and discuss Marx's last writings, including his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), his conspectus and critique of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874), and his letter and drafts to the Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich (1881). What makes these final texts so utterly fascinating and important is that they encapsulate Marx’s post-economic political thought: his political thinking after he had fully developed and articulated his mature political-economic theories. These political texts of the Late Marx—by contrast to the Communist Manifesto (1848), the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), or the earlier articles on the thefts of wood (1842)—formulate political views within the framework of Marx’s mature economic thinking. What we have, in effect, here, is the unwritten final political volume of Capital. In this political moment, it is especially important to end here, on these political writings, in this last seminar of Marx 13/13, in order to discuss their contemporary relevance. We will study them at the seminar Marx 13/13 with the philosopher Étienne Balibar, with whom we began this seminar series eight months ago and who has been a constant companion on this journey—perhaps since at least the early 1960s. In this final, closing session of Marx 13/13, the philosopher Étienne Balibar joins us to discuss the final texts of Marx and to reflect on our discussions during the year-long seminar. Welcome to Marx 13/13!

Bernard E. Harcourt introduces the final session of the Marx 13/13 seminars on the Late Marx (Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874), and Letters to Vera Zasulich (1881)) with the philosopher Étienne Balibar @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/13-13/ The full text of this introduction to Marx 11/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1313 The video recording of the seminar Marx 13/13 with Étienne Balibar is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/5nwOCRrql4w?si=vskXmMsLgZeVrZs6 Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** This is the full-length introduction to the final session of Marx 13/13 at which we read and discuss Marx's last writings, including his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), his conspectus and critique of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874), and his letter and drafts to the Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich (1881). What makes these final texts so utterly fascinating and important is that they encapsulate Marx’s post-economic political thought: his political thinking after he had fully developed and articulated his mature political-economic theories. These political texts of the Late Marx—by contrast to the Communist Manifesto (1848), the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), or the earlier articles on the thefts of wood (1842)—formulate political views within the framework of Marx’s mature economic thinking. What we have, in effect, here, is the unwritten final political volume of Capital. In this political moment, it is especially important to end here, on these political writings, in this last seminar of Marx 13/13, in order to discuss their contemporary relevance. We will study them at the seminar Marx 13/13 with the philosopher Étienne Balibar, with whom we began this seminar series eight months ago and who has been a constant companion on this journey—perhaps since at least the early 1960s. Let me here introduce these final texts in this video before turning to our seminar with Étienne Balibar. Welcome to Marx 13/13!

Bernard E. Harcourt introduces the Marx 12/13 seminar on Marx’s The Civil War in France, in conversation with Voltairine de Cleyre’s “The Commune is Risen” and Plotino Rhodakanaty’s “The American Commune,” with Bruno Bosteels @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/12-13/ The full text of this introduction to Marx 11/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1213 The video recording of the seminar Marx 12/13 with Bruno Bosteels is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/crkWG1wzGAU?si=H3Bq-SOxc75pZkMP Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** This is the full length introduction to the seminar, Marx 12/13, where we read and discuss Marx’s The Civil War in France, in conversation with Voltairine de Cleyre’s “The Commune is Risen” and Plotino Rhodakanaty’s “The American Commune,” with Bruno Bosteels. Few historical events or great defeats have inspired as much hope and inspiration, against all odds, as the Paris Commune of 1871. Voltairine de Cleyre's “The Commune is Risen” (1912) and Plotino Rhodakanaty's “The American Commune" (1877) are two brilliant illustrations of the lasting spirit of the Commune in the Americas. Marx's address "The Civil War in France" is of course another standard-bearer. With Bruno Bosteels, we will be exploring these texts and their interrelations. In this seminar we turn to the penultimate historical period of Marx’s life: the creation of the International Workingmen’s Association (1864–1876), the rise and fall of the Paris Commune (March-May 1871), Marx’s addresses to the IWA on the situation in Paris, and his famous essay The Civil War in France read to the General Council of the IWA just a few days after the collapse of the Paris Commune. We are delighted to welcome to the seminar Columbia University Professor Bruno Bosteels, one of the world’s leading experts on Marx, to discuss The Civil War in France. Bruno Bosteels will put Marx’s writings on the Commune in conversation with Voltairine de Cleyre’s “The Commune is Risen” and Plotino Rhodakanaty’s “The American Commune,” as well as in relation to the second part of his book La comuna mexicana (The Mexican Commune). Welcome to Marx 12/13!

Bernard E. Harcourt introduces the Marx 11/13 seminar on the Late Marx in conversation with Kohei Saito and his manifesto for degrowth communism, *Slow Down* (2020) @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/11-13/ The full text of this introduction to Marx 11/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1113 The video recording of the seminar Marx 11/13 with Kohei Saito is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/zn6HwiRh23E?si=Kjt3PRHyH61WrdPf Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** This is the full length introduction to the seminar, Marx 11/13, where we read and discuss the late work of Karl Marx in conversation with Kohei Saito from the University of Tokyo and his manifesto for degrowth communism, titled *Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (2020)*. The late Marx is of particular importance to scholars like Kohei Saito because it is during his final years that Marx expands his repertoire to engage a wide range of areas outside the classic corpus of political economy that he had focused on from the 1840s to the 1860s. In his final years, Marx explores scholarship in chemistry and the natural sciences on the effects of advanced agricultural technologies and practices on the ecosystem. He reads works on the history of political development in India, Russia, and Algeria. He consults the work of anthropologists on pre-capitalist societies and on land use and communal practices in ancient Rome, among early Germanic peoples, in South America, and among the indigenous peoples in America. During the period, Marx publishes far less than he had in earlier decades but takes copious notes that fill volumes of the new MEGA2 edition of his and Engels’ collected works. His most important writings from these final years include the drafts and final letter he wrote to the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich in February-March 1881; the preface to the second Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto that he and Engels published in 1882; the Critique of the Gotha Program that he published a few years earlier in 1875; and the Ethnological Notebooks that he kept during his late studies. These texts form the backbone of the late Marx that Kohei Saito analyzes in his work Slow Down. What is unique about Saito’s work is that he marries the late Marx with an argument for degrowth communism. While others have wedded the late Marx to ecological movements and ecosocialism, Saito goes further and argues for degrowth. His theory of degrowth includes, at its heart, an argument for worker cooperatives, consumer coops, and mutual aid. It embraces the idea of an economic regime of mutually reinforcing cooperative initiatives and thus forms a direct link to the idea of coöperism. It is deeply provocative and represents a formative interpretation of Marx and Marxism. This full-length introduction provides background on the late Marx and Kohei Saito's work. Welcome to Marx 11/13!

The philosopher Cornel West reads and discusses Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (1867), in conversation with Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/10-13/ The full-length introduction to Marx 10/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1013 The video recording of the seminar Marx 10/13 with Cornel West is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/Jt1hvsZcHSQ?si=Yn-uQSYm0flWElOJ Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** We now reach, on our year-long journey, the most famous political economic writings of Marx—first, his publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859 and, second, the release of his magnum opus, Capital, Volume I, in 1867. In this session, Marx 10/13, we read Marx through the lens of Cedric Robinson’s landmark work, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Although famous today, Robinson’s book almost fell through the cracks when it was published, and likely would have had it not been for a provocative book review published in the Monthly Review in 1988 by Cornel West, who at the time was professor of religion and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at Princeton University. Cornel West shattered what critics would later call the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded Robinson’s book. In West’s characteristic way, he propelled Black Marxism into contemporary debate. For this and many other reasons, it is an absolute privilege and honor to welcome our dear colleague and friend—and a faithful friend to these 13/13 seminars—Dr. Cornel West, back to Columbia University and to Marx 13/13. This is the seminar recording with Cornel West. Welcome to Marx 10/13!

Bernard E. Harcourt introduces Marx 10/13 on Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital (1867), in conversation with Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism, with the philosopher Cornel West @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/10-13/ The full text of this introduction to Marx 9/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx1013 The video recording of the seminar Marx 10/13 with Cornel West is here: TBD Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** We now reach, on our year-long journey, the most famous political economic writings of Marx—first, his publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859 and, second, the release of his magnum opus, Capital, Volume I, in 1867. In this session, Marx 10/13, we read Marx through the lens of Cedric Robinson’s landmark work, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Although famous today, Robinson’s book almost fell through the cracks when it was published, and likely would have had it not been for a provocative book review published in the Monthly Review in 1988 by Cornel West, who at the time was professor of religion and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at Princeton University. Cornel West shattered what critics would later call the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded Robinson’s book. In West’s characteristic way, he propelled Black Marxism into contemporary debate. For this and many other reasons, it is an absolute privilege and honor to welcome our dear colleague and friend—and a faithful friend to these 13/13 seminars—Dr. Cornel West, back to Columbia University and to Marx 13/13. This is the full-length introduction to the seminar. Welcome to Marx 10/13!

The philosophers Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra read and discuss with Bernard E. Harcourt Marx’s Grundrisse and Toni Negri's Marx Beyond Marx at Marx 9/13 @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/9-13/ Wednesday March 5, 2025 at Columbia University. The full text of the introduction to Marx 9/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx913 Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 *** The Grundrisse, a hefty volume running about a thousand pages long, has become the urtext for those readers of Marx who have sought to infuse the more scientific and economistic later Marx of the Capital with the earlier philosophical, political, and social theoretic Marx of the 1840s. For these readers, it serves as the final bridge to Capital. It still contains traces of the early philosophical theory of alienation from the Paris manuscripts and in fact hints at how those ideas are transformed into questions of fetishism. It still retains a conversation with Hegel, this time with his Science of Logic. Marx emphasizes the centrality of social relations, in other words of social theory, in all the economic categories that he develops—money, value, capital. Marx speaks to the subjectivities of the workers, he discusses their consciousness of self, of “being for another” and “being for self.” Marx emphasizes the conflict and struggle between capital and the workers. “The biggest exchange process,” Marx writes, “is not that between commodities, but that between commodities and labor.” To which Toni Negri exclaims, “boom! The first big leap, the first of the political excursuses of the Grundrisse.” At Marx 9/13, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra will highlight the political reading of the Grundrisse, drawing on the work of Toni Negri, from his lectures on the Grundrisse from 1978 published under the title Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. In that work, Negri meticulously demonstrates how the Grundrisse operates as a praxis-oriented manual to guide revolutionary action. Negri shows how, in his words, “the revolutionary subject emerges from the relation with capital” through a process that makes possible the “auto-determination of the subject” that can then modify the processes of capitalism. For this session, we are privileged to welcome Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, who themselves collaborated closely with Negri for decades. Notably, in Toni Negri’s book Marx in Movement, Negri traces the different phases of the workerist movement and its development, from its origins in the 1960s, through the work on social reproduction and the wages for housework movement of the 1970s, beyond the European focus in the 1980s, to the third phase in the 1990s with the birth of neoliberalism and financial mediations in post-Fordism. Negri concludes with the seminal work of our two guests: “And then there were the studies of Michael Hardt, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson on global migration and the international dimension of the class struggle.” Welcome to Marx 9/13!

Bernard E. Harcourt introduces Marx 9/13 on Marx's Grundrisse and Toni Negri's Marx Beyond Marx, with the philosophers Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/9-13/ The full text of this introduction to Marx 9/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx913 The video recording of the seminar Marx 9/13 with Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/A-ox1NlJElg?si=52nL_qWUqQ2Er2tm Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ***** The Grundrisse, a hefty volume running about a thousand pages long, has become the urtext for those readers of Marx who have sought to infuse the more scientific and economistic later Marx of the Capital with the earlier philosophical, political, and social theoretic Marx of the 1840s. For these readers, it serves as the final bridge to Capital. It still contains traces of the early philosophical theory of alienation from the Paris manuscripts and in fact hints at how those ideas are transformed into questions of fetishism. It still retains a conversation with Hegel, this time with his Science of Logic. Marx emphasizes the centrality of social relations, in other words of social theory, in all the economic categories that he develops—money, value, capital. Marx speaks to the subjectivities of the workers, he discusses their consciousness of self, of “being for another” and “being for self.” Marx emphasizes the conflict and struggle between capital and the workers. “The biggest exchange process,” Marx writes, “is not that between commodities, but that between commodities and labor.” To which Toni Negri exclaims, “boom! The first big leap, the first of the political excursuses of the Grundrisse.” At Marx 9/13, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra will highlight the political reading of the Grundrisse, drawing on the work of Toni Negri, from his lectures on the Grundrisse from 1978 published under the title Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. In that work, Negri meticulously demonstrates how the Grundrisse operates as a praxis-oriented manual to guide revolutionary action. Negri shows how, in his words, “the revolutionary subject emerges from the relation with capital” through a process that makes possible the “auto-determination of the subject” that can then modify the processes of capitalism. For this session, we are privileged to welcome Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, who themselves collaborated closely with Negri for decades. Notably, in Toni Negri’s book Marx in Movement, Negri traces the different phases of the workerist movement and its development, from its origins in the 1960s, through the work on social reproduction and the wages for housework movement of the 1970s, beyond the European focus in the 1980s, to the third phase in the 1990s with the birth of neoliberalism and financial mediations in post-Fordism. Negri concludes with the seminal work of our two guests: “And then there were the studies of Michael Hardt, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson on global migration and the international dimension of the class struggle.” This is the full-length introduction to the seminar. Welcome to Marx 9/13!

Seyla Benhabib presents a keynote lecture for Marx 13/13 @columbia on Hannah Arendt's reading and critique of Marx. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/seyla-benhabib-on-hannah-arendts-reading-of-marx/ Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at Columbia University in the City of New York. Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/conten... ***** In her chapter on “Labor” in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt developed a critique of Marx for not differentiating properly between the concepts of “labor” and “work.” This distinction and Arendt’s reading of Marx played a significant role in late twentieth-century debates in political theory. As Seyla Benhabib notes in her book The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (2003), “the aspect of Arendt’s theory of human activity that has been most criticized and discussed … is the distinction between labor and work.” (130) In this keynote lecture by Professor Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy emeritus at Yale University, senior research scholar at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT), professor at Columbia Law School, and a foremost authority on Arendt, we will explore the controversy over Arendt’s reading of Marx. Welcome to this keynote for Marx 13/13!

Bernard E. Harcourt and guests, W.J.T. Mitchell, Kendall Thomas, Michaela Soyer, and others, read and discuss Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Engels' Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 1848, in conversation with Herbert Marcuse's Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/8-13/ Wednesday, February 12, 2025 at Columbia University in the City of New York. The full length introduction to Marx 7/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx813 Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ******* We are witnessing today a new and radical offensive in the American Counterrevolution. We are, right now, in the demolition phase of this new offensive. In the first few weeks of his mandate, President Trump is taking a bulldozer to the existing federal government and wrecking its foundations, in an effort to eradicate the federal regulatory state and replace it with an oligarchic-theological, fealty-based cult with an authoritarian grip. The times could not be more urgent to critically analyze and understand this moment. Few texts are more important to do that than Engel’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 1848 and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. So we turn to those texts at our seminar, Marx 8/13, in the context of our own Counterrevolution. And to enrich our understanding, we will place these texts in conversation with Herbert Marcuse’s book, Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972, at the time of a previous triumphal offensive of counterrevolution in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and during the Vietnam War protests. This is the full seminar Marx 8/13. Welcome to Marx 8/13!