Al Jazeera.
Barcelona, Spain - Reading and writing about Karl
Marx does not necessarily make you a communist, but the fact that a
number of distinguished philosophers are reevaluating Marx's ideas
certainly means something.
After the autumn 2008 global economic crisis, new editions of Marx's
texts returned to our bookstores accompanied by a large number of
introductions, biographies, and new interpretations of the German
master.
While this resurrection was undoubtedly caused by the financial meltdown allowed by our democratic governments, Marx's revival among philosophers is not as simple a consequence as many believe.
After all, in the early nineties the great French philosopher Jacques Derrida anticipated this return as a response to Francis Fukuyama's (self-proclaimed) "neoliberal victory" at the "end of history".
Against Fukuyama's predictions, the Occupy movement and the Arab
Spring demonstrated that history calls once again for a new beginning
beyond the economic, neoliberal, and international paradigms we live in.
A number of renowned philosophers (Judith Balso, Bruno Bosteels, Susan
Buck-Mors, Jodi Dean, Terry Eagleton, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere,
and others), led by Slavoj Zizek, have began to envision how such
beginning would look in communist terms, that is, as a radical
alternative.
This took place not only at successful conferences in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York
(which were attended by thousands of academics, students, and
activists) but also through such best-selling books as Toni Negri and
Michael Hardt's Empire, Alain Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis, and Gianni Vattimo's Ecce Comu.
Although not all these philosophers consider themselves communist - at
least, not in the same way - the fact that communist thought has been at
the centre of their political research permits us to ask why there are
so many communist philosophers today.
