Overview

In Can Common People Govern?, the renowned French social theorist, philosopher, and historian Jacques Bidet offers a theoretical and political exploration of political parties, movements, and uprisings as forms of popular political organization. He highlights the contradictions of the party-form and the movement-form through a critical analysis of Lenin, Xi Jinping, Gramsci, Althusser, and the theorists of left-wing populism, Laclau and Mouffe. Popular political organization, he argues, must be related to the structure of modern society, in which the popular class is opposed in a “triangular duel” against a dominant class that includes two poles in conflictual connivance, “capitalpower” and “competence-power” (or “elite”). This duality offers the common people an angle of attack for a risky alliance with this elite against capital. This class confrontation is put in the context of the ongoing ecological disaster and popular uprisings. In the age of disaster, environmentalism and social emancipation must be conceived as one and the same thing. Can Common People Govern? is relevant to students of Marxism as well as wider readership interested in political thought and action.

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9781032843575

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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 London Jacques 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

Author Information

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.

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