The Revolutionary Moment (2015) (original) (raw)
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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = http://www.iep.utm.edu/pol-rev/, 2016
In light of the marked heterogeneity of the ways in which thinkers such as Thomas Paine (1737–1809), J.A.N. de Condorcet (1743–1794), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), or Michel Foucault (1926–1984) reflect on the possibilities and conditions of radically transforming political and social structures, this entry concentrates on a set of key questions confronted by all these theories of revolution. Most notably, these questions pertain to the problems of the new, of violence, and of freedom, the problems of the revolutionary subject, the revolutionary object or target, and of the extension (both in the temporal and spatial sense) of revolution. In covering these problems in turn, it is the goal of this article to outline substantial arguments, analyses, and aporias that shape modern and contemporary debates and, thereby, to indicate important conceptual and normative issues concerning revolution.
The Proletariat Moves to the City
The end of capitalism requires the revolutionary agency of the working-class. Traditionally, this agency was forged at the front-line of production: in the factories, on the assembly lines, down the mines. But what happens when the workplace no longer generates the skills and habits of militant political actors? One prominent argument, articulated by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey amongst others, is that the relevant actors will be forged within the urban environment. Drawing on Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', I argue that high-density, urban living fosters subjectivities, from which members of the working-class are not obviously spared. In particular, the blasé outlook and social reserve that are erected as defence mechanisms against city living, work against the cultivation of the sociability, skills and habits that are a necessary part of any radical political agency. With this in mind, more attention needs to be paid to the quality of specific urban environments, the challenges they pose and the potentials they offer, as a way of following the proletariat out of the factory and onto the streets. * "What men call love is very meager, very restricted and very feeble, compared to this ineffable orgy, to this holy prostitution of the soul that abandons itself entirely, poetry and charity included, to the unexpectant arrival, to the passing stranger." Charles Baudelaire, Crowds Understanding the development of revolutionary agency is a central part of Marxism. Without the midwifery of an epochal revolutionary agent, economic development would have stalled long ago. And, though it is hardly mainstream thought that capitalism will, can or must be transcended, there is at least a growing sense that if we cannot establish something else soon, disaster on a planetary scale looms large (Streeck 2016, 5). For a revolution to be initiated and brought about, the conditions that will bring about