By IIRE Fellow Claudio Katz, June 2008.
The prolonged conflict between ruralismo and the government has resulted in an exhausting political battle. The first bloc aims to hoard the agrarian rent at the cost of the popular majority, and the government needs to exhibit authority in order to implant a social pact that favours the capitalist class as a whole.
This question is ever so urgent to discuss, in order to advance concrete proposals and the work of solidarity as bombs fall over Gaza and the number of innocent victims increases from day to day. Mid-February, IIRE will hold it Palestine Seminar, bringing together progressive activists from several Arab countries and Israel, as well as experts and activists dealing with the Middle East from Europe, North America and the Philippines.
Interview with IIRE Fellow Gilbert Achcar (Znet June 2008)
2008 is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel and of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. What do you see as the Israeli goal and has it changed over the years? What is the current Israeli strategy regarding both Gaza and the West Bank?
Dialectics as a method of social research
Seminar given at the IIRE, Amsterdam, on 15 January 2008
Guglielmo Carchedi
Part I. A general introduction.
As well known, Marx did not explicitly write a work on dialectics. Nevertheless, he thought it would be possible to make intelligible to people with ordinary intelligence in a few pages what is rational in the method “which Hegel discovered and at the same time mystified”. In spite of Marx’s warning that Hegel mystified dialectics, traditionally, commentators have tried to force Marx into conformity with Hegel. I will depart from this tradition and will submit a notion of dialectics as a method of social research, a method focused exclusively on social reality. This method is extracted from Marx’s own work rather than from Hegel’s work. I argue that it is internally consistent with Marx’s theory and therefore capable of further developing that theory in order to account for capitalism’s new features.
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Saturday’s Gramsci conference in Amsterdam turned out to be a big success, both in terms of participation and discussions.
With 120 registration, much more than expected, the organisers were forced to turn down people who wanted to participate.
On Saturday the IIRE hosted, in corporation with the Italian Cultural Institute in Amsterdam, a one-day seminar on the legacy and relevance of Gramsci’s thought today.
