Communism

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches communism mainly through the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution that began in 1789. He reads the Marshall Plan as a strategy against the "red plague": capitalism gives ground materially but wages an ideological war1. He links Hegel's presence in French universities to the prestige of Marxism after the war, and he contrasts Lenin's reading of Hegel with Althusser's anti-Hegelianism2. Bernard Friot defines communism as a "real movement" already present in the institutions of 1946. Pagani sees this work as a philosophical gesture: questioning words, then restoring the historical sequence. Drawing on Marx, he recalls that freedom depends on shortening the working day3. He places the present era in a "third restoration", born of the fall of the USSR, which deprives the Third World of any recourse. Against community, he sets the comradeship that forms at work, and he gives the example of the Cuban doctors who went to Italy4. Finally, he distinguishes proletarian internationalism from bourgeois cosmopolitanism and points to the Nazi amalgam of "Judeo-Bolshevism"5.

1. 1Everything is allowed but nothing is possible: Michel Clouscard (1)29 Jan 2012
2. 2H for Hegel22 Dec 2014
3. 3In conversation with Bernard Friot (1 June 2018)12 Jun 2018
4. 4#15 Return to the logics of the subject23 Jul 2020
5. 5#10 The two Klemperers and Bruno Walter in Wagner18 Jan 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 6 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.