Tu Weiming is an ethicist and a . He is currently Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He was Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute . He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Tu was born in Kunming, Yunnan Province, Mainland China in 1940. He obtained his in Chinese Studies at Tunghai University in Taiwan and earned his in Regional Studies and in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. Tu taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981.
Tu was a visiting professor at Peking University, Taiwan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Paris. He holds honorary professorships from Zhejing University, Renmin University, Zhongshan University, and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Lehigh University, Michigan State University at Grand Valley, and Shandong University.
Tu was appointed by Kofi Annan as a member of the United Nation's "Group of Eminent Persons" to facilitate the "Dialogue among Civilizations" in 2001. He gave a presentation on inter-civilizational dialgoue to the Executive Board of UNESCO in 2004. He was also one of the eight Confucian intellectuals who were invited by the Singapore Government to develop the "Confucian Ethics" school curriculum.
Tu has two sons and two daughters: Eugene, Yalun, Marianna, and Rosa. He was featured in ''A Confucian Life in America'' . His homepage: .
Tu has written about two dozen books in and , including:
* ''Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness''
* ''China in Transformation''
* ''Confucianism and Human Rights''
* ''Confucianism in Historical Perspective''
* ''Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge''
* ''Confucian Spirituality''
* ''Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation''
* ''Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity''
* ''Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought''
* ''Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming's Youth''
* ''The Confucian World Observed''
* ''The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today''
* ''Traditional China''
* ''Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual''
Monday, September 22, 2008
Ou Shizi
Ou Shizhi was Song Dynasty scholar. A native of Chencun, Shunde in Guangdong province, he was known as "Mr. Dengzhou" and was famous for his learnedness. His native village was renamed Dengzhou Village in commemoration of him. He is the attributed author of the Three Character Classic, a that embodied yet suitable for teaching young children.
Laurent-Desire Kabila
Laurent-Désiré Kabila was of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from May 1997, when he overthrew longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko after 32 years of ruling Zaire, until his assassination in January 2001. He was succeeded by his son .
Kabila was born to a member of the tribe in Jadotville in the Belgian Congo, province. His father was Luba, while his mother was . He studied political philosophy in France and attended the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
When the Congo gained independence in 1960 and the Congo Crisis began, Kabila was a "deputy commander" in the Jeunesses Balubakat, the youth wing of the Patrice Lumumba-aligned General Association of the Baluba People of Katanga , actively fighting the secessionist forces of Moise Tshombe. Lumumba was overthrown by within months, and by 1962, Kabila was appointed to the provincial assembly for North Katanga and was chief of cabinet for Minister of Information Ferdinand Tumba. He established himself as a supporter of hard-line Lumumbist Prosper Mwamba Ilunga. When the Lumumbists formed the Conseil National de Libération, he was sent to eastern Congo to help organize a revolution, in particular in the Kivu and North Katanga provinces. In 1965, Kabila has set up a cross-border rebel operation from Kigoma, Tanzania, across Lake Tanganyika.
Che Guevara assisted Kabila for a short time in 1965. Guevara had appeared in the Congo with approximately 100 men who planned to bring about a Cuban style revolution. In Guevara's opinion, Kabila was "not the man of the hour" he had alluded to, with Kabila being one who was more interested in consuming alcohol and bedding women. This, in Guevara's opinion, was the reason that Kabila would show up days late at times to provide supplies, aid, or backup to Guevara's men. The lack of cooperation between Kabila and Guevara led to the revolt being suppressed that same year.
In 1967, Kabila and his remnant of supporters moved their operation into the mountainous Fizi-Baraka area of South Kivu and founded the People's Revolutionary Party . With the support of the People's Republic of China the PRP created a secessionist state in South Kivu province, west of Lake Tanganyika. The mini-state included collective agriculture, extortion and mineral smuggling. The local military commanders were aware of the PRP enclave and reportedly traded military supplies in exchange for a cut of the extortion and robbery profits. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kabila had amassed considerable wealth and established houses in Dar es Salaam and Kampala. While in Kampala, he reportedly met Yoweri Museveni, the future leader of Uganda. Museveni and former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere later introduced Kabila to Paul Kagame, who would become president of Rwanda. These personal contacts became vital in mid-1990s, when Uganda and Rwanda were looking for a Congolese face for their intervention in Zaire. The PRP state came to an end in 1988 and Kabila disappeared and was widely believed to be dead.
Kabila returned in October 1996, leading ethnic Tutsis from South Kivu against Hutu forces, marking the beginning of the First Congo War. With support from Burundi, Uganda and the Rwandan Tutsi government, Kabila pushed his forces into a full-scale rebellion against Mobutu as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire . By mid-1997, the ADFL had made significant gains and following failed peace talks in May 1997, Mobutu fled the country, and Kabila declared victory from Lubumbashi on May 17, suspending the Constitution and changing the name of the country from Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo. He later made his grand entry into Kinshasa on May 20 to effectively commence his tenure as President.
Kabila had been a committed Marxist, but his policies at this point were a mix of capitalism and . While some in the West hailed Kabila as representing a "new breed" of African leadership, critics charged that Kabila's policies differed little from his predecessor's, being characterised by authoritarianism, corruption, and human rights abuses. Kabila was also accused of self-aggrandizing tendencies, including trying to set up a personality cult, with the help of Mobutu's former Minister of Information, Dominique Sakombi Inongo.
By 1998, Kabila's former allies in Uganda and Rwanda of the Rally for Congolese Democracy . Kabila found new allies in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola and managed to hold on in the south and west of the country and in July 1999 peace talks led to the withdrawal of most foreign forces.
However, the rebellion continued and Kabila was shot during the afternoon of January 16, 2001 by one of his own staff, Rashidi Kasereka, who was also killed. The assassination was part of a failed coup attempt which was crushed and Kabila, who may have been still alive, was flown to Zimbabwe for medical treatment. The Congolese government confirmed that he had died there on January 18. One week later, his body was returned to Congo for a state funeral and his son, , became president ten days later.
The investigation into the assassination led to 135 people being tried before a special military tribunal. The alleged ringleader, Colonel Eddy Kapend , and 25 others were sentenced to death in January 2003. Of the other defendants 64 were jailed, with sentences from six months to life, and 45 were exonerated.
Early life
Kabila was born to a member of the tribe in Jadotville in the Belgian Congo, province. His father was Luba, while his mother was . He studied political philosophy in France and attended the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Congo Crisis
When the Congo gained independence in 1960 and the Congo Crisis began, Kabila was a "deputy commander" in the Jeunesses Balubakat, the youth wing of the Patrice Lumumba-aligned General Association of the Baluba People of Katanga , actively fighting the secessionist forces of Moise Tshombe. Lumumba was overthrown by within months, and by 1962, Kabila was appointed to the provincial assembly for North Katanga and was chief of cabinet for Minister of Information Ferdinand Tumba. He established himself as a supporter of hard-line Lumumbist Prosper Mwamba Ilunga. When the Lumumbists formed the Conseil National de Libération, he was sent to eastern Congo to help organize a revolution, in particular in the Kivu and North Katanga provinces. In 1965, Kabila has set up a cross-border rebel operation from Kigoma, Tanzania, across Lake Tanganyika.
During the Mobutu dictatorship
Che Guevara assisted Kabila for a short time in 1965. Guevara had appeared in the Congo with approximately 100 men who planned to bring about a Cuban style revolution. In Guevara's opinion, Kabila was "not the man of the hour" he had alluded to, with Kabila being one who was more interested in consuming alcohol and bedding women. This, in Guevara's opinion, was the reason that Kabila would show up days late at times to provide supplies, aid, or backup to Guevara's men. The lack of cooperation between Kabila and Guevara led to the revolt being suppressed that same year.
In 1967, Kabila and his remnant of supporters moved their operation into the mountainous Fizi-Baraka area of South Kivu and founded the People's Revolutionary Party . With the support of the People's Republic of China the PRP created a secessionist state in South Kivu province, west of Lake Tanganyika. The mini-state included collective agriculture, extortion and mineral smuggling. The local military commanders were aware of the PRP enclave and reportedly traded military supplies in exchange for a cut of the extortion and robbery profits. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kabila had amassed considerable wealth and established houses in Dar es Salaam and Kampala. While in Kampala, he reportedly met Yoweri Museveni, the future leader of Uganda. Museveni and former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere later introduced Kabila to Paul Kagame, who would become president of Rwanda. These personal contacts became vital in mid-1990s, when Uganda and Rwanda were looking for a Congolese face for their intervention in Zaire. The PRP state came to an end in 1988 and Kabila disappeared and was widely believed to be dead.
War and presidency
Kabila returned in October 1996, leading ethnic Tutsis from South Kivu against Hutu forces, marking the beginning of the First Congo War. With support from Burundi, Uganda and the Rwandan Tutsi government, Kabila pushed his forces into a full-scale rebellion against Mobutu as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire . By mid-1997, the ADFL had made significant gains and following failed peace talks in May 1997, Mobutu fled the country, and Kabila declared victory from Lubumbashi on May 17, suspending the Constitution and changing the name of the country from Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo. He later made his grand entry into Kinshasa on May 20 to effectively commence his tenure as President.
Kabila had been a committed Marxist, but his policies at this point were a mix of capitalism and . While some in the West hailed Kabila as representing a "new breed" of African leadership, critics charged that Kabila's policies differed little from his predecessor's, being characterised by authoritarianism, corruption, and human rights abuses. Kabila was also accused of self-aggrandizing tendencies, including trying to set up a personality cult, with the help of Mobutu's former Minister of Information, Dominique Sakombi Inongo.
By 1998, Kabila's former allies in Uganda and Rwanda of the Rally for Congolese Democracy . Kabila found new allies in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola and managed to hold on in the south and west of the country and in July 1999 peace talks led to the withdrawal of most foreign forces.
Assassination
However, the rebellion continued and Kabila was shot during the afternoon of January 16, 2001 by one of his own staff, Rashidi Kasereka, who was also killed. The assassination was part of a failed coup attempt which was crushed and Kabila, who may have been still alive, was flown to Zimbabwe for medical treatment. The Congolese government confirmed that he had died there on January 18. One week later, his body was returned to Congo for a state funeral and his son, , became president ten days later.
The investigation into the assassination led to 135 people being tried before a special military tribunal. The alleged ringleader, Colonel Eddy Kapend , and 25 others were sentenced to death in January 2003. Of the other defendants 64 were jailed, with sentences from six months to life, and 45 were exonerated.
Jose Manuel Barroso
José Manuel Dur?o Barroso is the 12th of the European Commission. He served as of Portugal from 6 April 2002 to 17 July 2004. He assumed the position in the Commission 23 November 2004.
He holds two nationalities, Portuguese and Brazilian . He graduated in Law from the University of Lisbon and has an MSc in and Social Sciences from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. His academic career continued as an Assistant Professor in the Law School of the University of Lisbon. He did research for a at Georgetown University and Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C.. He is a 1998 graduate of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar. Back in Lisbon, Barroso became Director of the Department for International Relations at Lusíada University . He also received an honorary degree from Liverpool University on the 3rd of July 2008.
Barroso's political activity began in his college days, before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. He was one of the leaders of the underground MRPP . In an interview with the newspaper ''Expresso'', he said that he had joined MRPP to fight the only other student body movement, also underground, which was controlled by the Communist Party. In December 1980, Barroso joined the right-of-centre PPD , where he remains to the present day.
In 1985, under the PSD government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva , Barroso was named Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs. In 1987 he became a member of the same government as he was elevated to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation , a post he was to hold for the next five years. In this capacity he was the driving force behind the Bicesse Accords of 1990, which led to a temporary armistice in 's civil war between the ruling MPLA and the opposition UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi. He also supported independence for East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, then a province of Indonesia by force. In 1992, Barroso was promoted to the post of , and served in this capacity until the defeat of the PSD in the 1995 general election.
In opposition, Barroso was elected to the Assembly of the Republic in 1995 as a representative for Lisbon. There, he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1999 he was elected president of his political party, PSD, succeeding Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa , and thus became Leader of the Opposition. elections in 2002 gave the PSD enough seats to form a coalition government with the right-wing Portuguese , and Barroso subsequently became Prime Minister of Portugal on 6 April 2002. As Prime Minister, facing a growing budget deficit, he made a number of difficult decisions and adopted strict reforms. He reduced public expenditure, which made him unpopular among leftists and public servants. On July 5 2004, having become -designate of the European Commission, Barroso arranged with Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio the terms of the cessation of his job as Prime Minister of Portugal.
In 2003, Barroso hosted U.S President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in the Portuguese Island of Terceira, in the Azores, in which the four leaders met and finalised the controversial U.S-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Under Barroso's leadership, Portugal became part of the coalition of the willing for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In June 2004, following his being proposed as a consensus candidate by the European People's Party, the European Council appointed José Manuel Barroso -designate of the European Commission. 22 July, the European Parliament endorsed him in the position by 413 votes to 251, with 44 blank ballots and three spoiled ones. He was due to take over officially from Romano Prodi on 1 November. This process was however delayed until 23 November due to problems regarding parliamentary approval of the Barroso Commission.
During his presidency, the following important issues have been on the Commission's agenda:
* The reform of the institutions
* The Bolkestein directive, aimed at creating a single market for services within the EU.
* Lisbon Strategy
* Galileo positioning system
* Doha Development Agenda negotiations
* European Institute of Innovation and Technology
Son of Luís António Saraiva Barroso and wife Maria Elisabete de Freitas Dur?o , José Manuel Barroso married at the Lisbon Cathedral, Lisbon, on September 28, 1980 to Maria Margarida Pinto Ribeiro de Sousa Uva, born in Lisbon, Santa Maria de Belém, on November 25, 1955, with whom he has three sons: Luís , Guilherme and Francisco de Sousa Uva Dur?o Barroso.
Apart from his , Barroso is professionally fluent in , he speaks and and has taken a course to acquire a basic knowledge of .
Academic career
He holds two nationalities, Portuguese and Brazilian . He graduated in Law from the University of Lisbon and has an MSc in and Social Sciences from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. His academic career continued as an Assistant Professor in the Law School of the University of Lisbon. He did research for a at Georgetown University and Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C.. He is a 1998 graduate of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar. Back in Lisbon, Barroso became Director of the Department for International Relations at Lusíada University . He also received an honorary degree from Liverpool University on the 3rd of July 2008.
Early political career
Barroso's political activity began in his college days, before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. He was one of the leaders of the underground MRPP . In an interview with the newspaper ''Expresso'', he said that he had joined MRPP to fight the only other student body movement, also underground, which was controlled by the Communist Party. In December 1980, Barroso joined the right-of-centre PPD , where he remains to the present day.
In 1985, under the PSD government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva , Barroso was named Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs. In 1987 he became a member of the same government as he was elevated to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation , a post he was to hold for the next five years. In this capacity he was the driving force behind the Bicesse Accords of 1990, which led to a temporary armistice in 's civil war between the ruling MPLA and the opposition UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi. He also supported independence for East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, then a province of Indonesia by force. In 1992, Barroso was promoted to the post of , and served in this capacity until the defeat of the PSD in the 1995 general election.
Prime Minister of Portugal
In opposition, Barroso was elected to the Assembly of the Republic in 1995 as a representative for Lisbon. There, he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1999 he was elected president of his political party, PSD, succeeding Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa , and thus became Leader of the Opposition. elections in 2002 gave the PSD enough seats to form a coalition government with the right-wing Portuguese , and Barroso subsequently became Prime Minister of Portugal on 6 April 2002. As Prime Minister, facing a growing budget deficit, he made a number of difficult decisions and adopted strict reforms. He reduced public expenditure, which made him unpopular among leftists and public servants. On July 5 2004, having become -designate of the European Commission, Barroso arranged with Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio the terms of the cessation of his job as Prime Minister of Portugal.
In 2003, Barroso hosted U.S President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in the Portuguese Island of Terceira, in the Azores, in which the four leaders met and finalised the controversial U.S-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Under Barroso's leadership, Portugal became part of the coalition of the willing for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
President of the European Commission
In June 2004, following his being proposed as a consensus candidate by the European People's Party, the European Council appointed José Manuel Barroso -designate of the European Commission. 22 July, the European Parliament endorsed him in the position by 413 votes to 251, with 44 blank ballots and three spoiled ones. He was due to take over officially from Romano Prodi on 1 November. This process was however delayed until 23 November due to problems regarding parliamentary approval of the Barroso Commission.
During his presidency, the following important issues have been on the Commission's agenda:
* The reform of the institutions
* The Bolkestein directive, aimed at creating a single market for services within the EU.
* Lisbon Strategy
* Galileo positioning system
* Doha Development Agenda negotiations
* European Institute of Innovation and Technology
Personal life
Son of Luís António Saraiva Barroso and wife Maria Elisabete de Freitas Dur?o , José Manuel Barroso married at the Lisbon Cathedral, Lisbon, on September 28, 1980 to Maria Margarida Pinto Ribeiro de Sousa Uva, born in Lisbon, Santa Maria de Belém, on November 25, 1955, with whom he has three sons: Luís , Guilherme and Francisco de Sousa Uva Dur?o Barroso.
Apart from his , Barroso is professionally fluent in , he speaks and and has taken a course to acquire a basic knowledge of .
Internal conflict in Peru
It has been estimated that nearly 70,000 people died in the internal conflict in Peru that started in 1980 and, although still ongoing, had greatly wound down by 2000. The principal actors in the war were the government of Peru, the Shining Path, the , and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
A great many of the victims of the conflict were ordinary civilians. All of the armed actors in the war deliberately targeted and killed civilians, making the conflict more bloody than any other war in .
Peruvian history has long been plagued by coup d'états and military dictatorships. General Juan Velasco Alvarado staged a coup in 1968 and led a -leaning military government until he was thrown out of power by in 1975. Francisco Morales Bermúdez was installed as the new in 1975, and allowed elections to be held in 1980.
During the dictatorships of and , Shining Path had organized as a political group based at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho Region, Peru. The group was led by Abimael Guzmán, a professor of philosophy at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University. Guzmán had been inspired by the Cultural Revolution, which he had witnessed firsthand during a trip to China. Shining Path members engaged in street fights with members of other political groups and painted graffiti exhorting "armed struggle" against the Peruvian state.
When Peru's military government allowed for the first time in a dozen years in 1980, Shining Path was one of the few leftist political groups that declined to take part, instead opting to launch a guerrilla war in the highlands of the province of . On May 17, 1980, the eve of the presidential elections, it burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi, Ayacucho. It was the first "act of war" by Shining Path. Nonetheless, the perpetrators were quickly caught, additional ballots were brought in to replace the burned ballots, the elections proceeded without further incident, and the act received very little attention in the Peruvian press.
Shining Path opted to fight their war in the style taught by Mao Zedong. They would open up "guerrilla zones" in which their guerrillas could operate, drive government forces out of these zones to create "liberated zones", then use these zones to support new guerrilla zones until the entire country was essentially one big "liberated zone." Shining Path also adhered to Mao's teaching that guerrilla war should be fought primarily in the countryside and gradually choke off the cities.
On December 3, 1982, the Shining Path officially formed the "People's Guerrilla Army", its armed wing.
In 1982, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement launched its own guerrilla war against the Peruvian state. The group had been formed by remnants of the in Peru and identified with guerrilla movements in Latin America. The MRTA used techniques that were more traditional to Latin American leftist organizations than those used by Shining Path. For example, the MRTA wore uniforms, claimed to be fighting for true democracy, and complained of human rights abuses by the state, while Shining Path did not wear uniforms, abhorred democracy, and rejected the idea of human rights.
During the internal conflict, the MRTA and Shining Path engaged in combat with each other. The MRTA played a small part in the overall internal conflict, being declared by the to have been responsible for 1.5% of deaths accumulated throughout the war. At its height the MRTA was believed to consist of only a few hundred members.
Gradually the Shining Path made more and more violent attacks on the National Police of Peru, and the Lima-based government could no longer ignore the growing crisis in the Andes. In 1981, Fernando Belaúnde Terry declared a State of Emergency and ordered that the Peruvian Armed Forces fight the Shining Path. Constitutional rights were suspended for 60 days in Huamanga Province, Huanta Province, Cangallo Province, La Mar Province and Víctor Fajardo Province. Later, the Armed Forces created the Ayacucho Emergency Zone, in which military power was superior to civilian power, and many constitutional rights were suspended. The military committed many human rights violations in the area where it had political control, including the famous Accomarca massacre. Scores of peasants were massacred by the armed forces. A special -trained counterterrorist police battalion known as the "Sinchis" were particularly notorious for their human rights violations.
The reaction of the Shining Path to the Peruvian government's use of the military in the war was not to back down, but instead to ramp up the level of violence in the countryside. Shining Path attacked police, military, and civilians that it considered to be "class enemies", often using particularly gruesome methods of killing their victims. These killings, along with Shining Path's disrespect for the culture of indigenous peasants it claimed to represent, turned many people in the sierra away from the Shining Path.
Faced with a hostile population, the Shining Path's guerrilla war began to falter. In some areas, peasants formed anti-Shining Path patrols, called ''rondas''. They were generally poorly equipped despite donations of guns from the armed forces. Nevertheless, Shining Path guerrillas were militarily attacked by the ''rondas''. The first such reported attack was in January 1983 near Huata, when some ''rondas'' killed 13 ''senderistas''; in February in Sacsamarca, ''rondas'' stabbed and killed the Shining Path commanders of that area. In March 1983, ''rondas'' brutally killed Olegario Curitomay, one of the commanders of the town of Lucanamarca. They took him to the town square, stoned him, stabbed him, set him on fire, and finally shot him. As a response, in April, Shining Path entered the province of Huancasancos and the towns of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua, Muylacruz and Lucanamarca, and , many of whom were children, including one who was only six months old.
Additional massacres by Shining Path occurred, such as one in Marcas on 29 August 1985.
The Shining Path, like the government, filled its ranks by conscription. The Shining Path also kidnapped children and forced them to fight as child soldiers in their war.
Under the administration of Alberto Fujimori the pace at which the armed forces committed widespread atrocities such as massacres was slowed. Additionally, the state began the widespread use of intelligence agencies in its fight against Shining Path. However, atrocities were committed by the , notably the La Cantuta massacre, the Barrios Altos massacre, and the Santa massacre, all of which were committed by Grupo Colina.
On April 5, 1992, Alberto Fujimori ordered the military to occupy the Congress of Peru, declaring the Congress dissolved and the Constitution abolished, initiating the Peruvian Constitutional Crisis of 1992. The pretext for these actions was that the Congress was slow to pass anti-terrorism legislation. Fujimori set up military courts to try suspected members of the Shining Path and MRTA, and ordered that an "iron fist" approach be used. Fujimori also announced that Peru would no longer accept the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
As Shining Path began to lose ground in the Andes to the Peruvian state and the rondas, it decided to speed up its overall strategic plan. Shining Path declared that, in Maoist jargon, it had reached "strategic equilibrium" and was ready to begin its final assault on the cities of Peru. In 1992, Shining Path set off a powerful bomb in the Miraflores District of Lima in what became known as the Tarata bombing. This was part of a larger bombing campaign in Lima.
On September 12, 1992, Peruvian police captured Guzmán and several Shining Path leaders in an apartment above a dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima. The police had been monitoring the apartment, as a number of suspected Shining Path militants had visited it. An inspection of the garbage of the apartment produced empty tubes of a skin cream used to treat psoriasis, a condition that Guzmán was known to have. Shortly after the raid that captured Guzmán, most of the remaining Shining Path leadership fell as well. At the same time, Shining Path suffered embarrassing military defeats to campesino self-defense organizations — supposedly its social base — and the organization fractured into splinter groups. Guzmán's role as the leader of Shining Path was taken over by ?scar Ramírez, who himself was captured by Peruvian authorities in 1999. After Ramírez's capture, the group splintered, guerrilla activity diminished sharply, and previous conditions returned to the areas where the Shining Path had been active.
The ranks of the MRTA were decimated by both an amnesty program for its members and the jailing of several of its key leaders. In late 1996, the MRTA seized the residence of the ambassador of Japan to Peru, starting a 126 day-long during which the MRTA demanded the release of their prisoners. Ultimately, none of the MRTA's demands were met, and the crisis ended when the Peruvian armed forces and freed the hostages. All of the MRTA members involved in the crisis were reportedly killed during the raid; however, it is alleged that several of the aforesaid members had survived the initial raid and were hours after the raid began.
Alberto Fujimori resigned the Presidency in 2000, but Congress declared him "morally unfit", installing Valentín Paniagua into office. He rescinded Fujimori's announcement that Peru would leave the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and established a to investigate the war. The Commission found in its 2003 ''Final Report'' that 69,280 people died or between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the armed conflict. A statistical analysis of the available data led the the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to estimate that the Shining Path was responsible for the death or disappearance of 31,331 people, 46% of the total deaths and disappearances. According to its final report, 75% of the people who were either killed or spoke Quechua as their native language, despite the fact that the 1993 census found that only 20% of Peruvians speak Quechua or another indigenous language as their native language.
Nevertheless, the final report of the was surrounded by controversy. It was criticized by almost all political parties , the military and the Catholic Church, which claimed that many of the Commission members where former members of extreme leftists movements and that the final report wrongfully portrayed Shining Path and the MRTA as "political parties" rather than as terrorist organizations.
Since the capture of Guzman, Shining Path has greatly declined in strength. It no longer conducts any operations in Lima, and has only been able to mount sporadic small-scale attacks. Nevertheless, Shining Path continues to occasionally kill Peruvian security forces. For example, on June 9, 2003 a Shining Path group attacked a camp in Ayacucho, and took 68 employees of the Argentinean company Techint and three police guards as hostages. They had been working in the that would take natural gas from to Lima. According to sources from Peru's Interior Ministry, the hostage-takers asked for a sizable ransom to free the hostages. Two days later, after a rapid military response, the hostage-takers abandoned the hostages. According to rumor, the company paid the ransom.
The group now appears to be led by a man known as Comrade Artemio. Rather than attempt to destroy the Peruvian state and replace it with a communist state, Artemio has pledged to carry out attacks until the Peruvian government releases Shining Path prisoners and negotiates an end to the war. These demands have been made in various video statements made by Artemio. The vast majority of Peruvians continue to hold the Shining Path in low regard. On October 13 2006, Guzmán was sentenced to life in prison for terrorism.
On the 27th anniversary of the Shining Path's first attack against the Peruvian state a homemade bomb in a backpack was set off in a market in the southern Peruvian city of Juliaca killing 6 and wounding 48. Because of the timing of the attack the Shining Path is suspected by the Peruvian authorities of holding responsibility for the attack.
A great many of the victims of the conflict were ordinary civilians. All of the armed actors in the war deliberately targeted and killed civilians, making the conflict more bloody than any other war in .
National situation before the war
Peruvian history has long been plagued by coup d'états and military dictatorships. General Juan Velasco Alvarado staged a coup in 1968 and led a -leaning military government until he was thrown out of power by in 1975. Francisco Morales Bermúdez was installed as the new in 1975, and allowed elections to be held in 1980.
Rise of Shining Path
During the dictatorships of and , Shining Path had organized as a political group based at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho Region, Peru. The group was led by Abimael Guzmán, a professor of philosophy at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University. Guzmán had been inspired by the Cultural Revolution, which he had witnessed firsthand during a trip to China. Shining Path members engaged in street fights with members of other political groups and painted graffiti exhorting "armed struggle" against the Peruvian state.
Outbreak of hostilities
When Peru's military government allowed for the first time in a dozen years in 1980, Shining Path was one of the few leftist political groups that declined to take part, instead opting to launch a guerrilla war in the highlands of the province of . On May 17, 1980, the eve of the presidential elections, it burned ballot boxes in the town of Chuschi, Ayacucho. It was the first "act of war" by Shining Path. Nonetheless, the perpetrators were quickly caught, additional ballots were brought in to replace the burned ballots, the elections proceeded without further incident, and the act received very little attention in the Peruvian press.
Shining Path opted to fight their war in the style taught by Mao Zedong. They would open up "guerrilla zones" in which their guerrillas could operate, drive government forces out of these zones to create "liberated zones", then use these zones to support new guerrilla zones until the entire country was essentially one big "liberated zone." Shining Path also adhered to Mao's teaching that guerrilla war should be fought primarily in the countryside and gradually choke off the cities.
On December 3, 1982, the Shining Path officially formed the "People's Guerrilla Army", its armed wing.
Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement
In 1982, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement launched its own guerrilla war against the Peruvian state. The group had been formed by remnants of the in Peru and identified with guerrilla movements in Latin America. The MRTA used techniques that were more traditional to Latin American leftist organizations than those used by Shining Path. For example, the MRTA wore uniforms, claimed to be fighting for true democracy, and complained of human rights abuses by the state, while Shining Path did not wear uniforms, abhorred democracy, and rejected the idea of human rights.
During the internal conflict, the MRTA and Shining Path engaged in combat with each other. The MRTA played a small part in the overall internal conflict, being declared by the to have been responsible for 1.5% of deaths accumulated throughout the war. At its height the MRTA was believed to consist of only a few hundred members.
Government response
Gradually the Shining Path made more and more violent attacks on the National Police of Peru, and the Lima-based government could no longer ignore the growing crisis in the Andes. In 1981, Fernando Belaúnde Terry declared a State of Emergency and ordered that the Peruvian Armed Forces fight the Shining Path. Constitutional rights were suspended for 60 days in Huamanga Province, Huanta Province, Cangallo Province, La Mar Province and Víctor Fajardo Province. Later, the Armed Forces created the Ayacucho Emergency Zone, in which military power was superior to civilian power, and many constitutional rights were suspended. The military committed many human rights violations in the area where it had political control, including the famous Accomarca massacre. Scores of peasants were massacred by the armed forces. A special -trained counterterrorist police battalion known as the "Sinchis" were particularly notorious for their human rights violations.
Escalation of the war
The reaction of the Shining Path to the Peruvian government's use of the military in the war was not to back down, but instead to ramp up the level of violence in the countryside. Shining Path attacked police, military, and civilians that it considered to be "class enemies", often using particularly gruesome methods of killing their victims. These killings, along with Shining Path's disrespect for the culture of indigenous peasants it claimed to represent, turned many people in the sierra away from the Shining Path.
Faced with a hostile population, the Shining Path's guerrilla war began to falter. In some areas, peasants formed anti-Shining Path patrols, called ''rondas''. They were generally poorly equipped despite donations of guns from the armed forces. Nevertheless, Shining Path guerrillas were militarily attacked by the ''rondas''. The first such reported attack was in January 1983 near Huata, when some ''rondas'' killed 13 ''senderistas''; in February in Sacsamarca, ''rondas'' stabbed and killed the Shining Path commanders of that area. In March 1983, ''rondas'' brutally killed Olegario Curitomay, one of the commanders of the town of Lucanamarca. They took him to the town square, stoned him, stabbed him, set him on fire, and finally shot him. As a response, in April, Shining Path entered the province of Huancasancos and the towns of Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua, Muylacruz and Lucanamarca, and , many of whom were children, including one who was only six months old.
Additional massacres by Shining Path occurred, such as one in Marcas on 29 August 1985.
The Shining Path, like the government, filled its ranks by conscription. The Shining Path also kidnapped children and forced them to fight as child soldiers in their war.
The administration of Alberto Fujimori
Under the administration of Alberto Fujimori the pace at which the armed forces committed widespread atrocities such as massacres was slowed. Additionally, the state began the widespread use of intelligence agencies in its fight against Shining Path. However, atrocities were committed by the , notably the La Cantuta massacre, the Barrios Altos massacre, and the Santa massacre, all of which were committed by Grupo Colina.
On April 5, 1992, Alberto Fujimori ordered the military to occupy the Congress of Peru, declaring the Congress dissolved and the Constitution abolished, initiating the Peruvian Constitutional Crisis of 1992. The pretext for these actions was that the Congress was slow to pass anti-terrorism legislation. Fujimori set up military courts to try suspected members of the Shining Path and MRTA, and ordered that an "iron fist" approach be used. Fujimori also announced that Peru would no longer accept the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
As Shining Path began to lose ground in the Andes to the Peruvian state and the rondas, it decided to speed up its overall strategic plan. Shining Path declared that, in Maoist jargon, it had reached "strategic equilibrium" and was ready to begin its final assault on the cities of Peru. In 1992, Shining Path set off a powerful bomb in the Miraflores District of Lima in what became known as the Tarata bombing. This was part of a larger bombing campaign in Lima.
On September 12, 1992, Peruvian police captured Guzmán and several Shining Path leaders in an apartment above a dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima. The police had been monitoring the apartment, as a number of suspected Shining Path militants had visited it. An inspection of the garbage of the apartment produced empty tubes of a skin cream used to treat psoriasis, a condition that Guzmán was known to have. Shortly after the raid that captured Guzmán, most of the remaining Shining Path leadership fell as well. At the same time, Shining Path suffered embarrassing military defeats to campesino self-defense organizations — supposedly its social base — and the organization fractured into splinter groups. Guzmán's role as the leader of Shining Path was taken over by ?scar Ramírez, who himself was captured by Peruvian authorities in 1999. After Ramírez's capture, the group splintered, guerrilla activity diminished sharply, and previous conditions returned to the areas where the Shining Path had been active.
The ranks of the MRTA were decimated by both an amnesty program for its members and the jailing of several of its key leaders. In late 1996, the MRTA seized the residence of the ambassador of Japan to Peru, starting a 126 day-long during which the MRTA demanded the release of their prisoners. Ultimately, none of the MRTA's demands were met, and the crisis ended when the Peruvian armed forces and freed the hostages. All of the MRTA members involved in the crisis were reportedly killed during the raid; however, it is alleged that several of the aforesaid members had survived the initial raid and were hours after the raid began.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Alberto Fujimori resigned the Presidency in 2000, but Congress declared him "morally unfit", installing Valentín Paniagua into office. He rescinded Fujimori's announcement that Peru would leave the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and established a to investigate the war. The Commission found in its 2003 ''Final Report'' that 69,280 people died or between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the armed conflict. A statistical analysis of the available data led the the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to estimate that the Shining Path was responsible for the death or disappearance of 31,331 people, 46% of the total deaths and disappearances. According to its final report, 75% of the people who were either killed or spoke Quechua as their native language, despite the fact that the 1993 census found that only 20% of Peruvians speak Quechua or another indigenous language as their native language.
Nevertheless, the final report of the was surrounded by controversy. It was criticized by almost all political parties , the military and the Catholic Church, which claimed that many of the Commission members where former members of extreme leftists movements and that the final report wrongfully portrayed Shining Path and the MRTA as "political parties" rather than as terrorist organizations.
The war today
Since the capture of Guzman, Shining Path has greatly declined in strength. It no longer conducts any operations in Lima, and has only been able to mount sporadic small-scale attacks. Nevertheless, Shining Path continues to occasionally kill Peruvian security forces. For example, on June 9, 2003 a Shining Path group attacked a camp in Ayacucho, and took 68 employees of the Argentinean company Techint and three police guards as hostages. They had been working in the that would take natural gas from to Lima. According to sources from Peru's Interior Ministry, the hostage-takers asked for a sizable ransom to free the hostages. Two days later, after a rapid military response, the hostage-takers abandoned the hostages. According to rumor, the company paid the ransom.
The group now appears to be led by a man known as Comrade Artemio. Rather than attempt to destroy the Peruvian state and replace it with a communist state, Artemio has pledged to carry out attacks until the Peruvian government releases Shining Path prisoners and negotiates an end to the war. These demands have been made in various video statements made by Artemio. The vast majority of Peruvians continue to hold the Shining Path in low regard. On October 13 2006, Guzmán was sentenced to life in prison for terrorism.
On the 27th anniversary of the Shining Path's first attack against the Peruvian state a homemade bomb in a backpack was set off in a market in the southern Peruvian city of Juliaca killing 6 and wounding 48. Because of the timing of the attack the Shining Path is suspected by the Peruvian authorities of holding responsibility for the attack.
Harry Haywood
Harry Haywood was born in South Omaha, Nebraska to former , Harriet and Haywood Hall. He was the youngest of three children. Named after his father at birth, Haywood Hall, "Harry Haywood" is a pseudonym adopted in 1925. Radicalized by the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, he was a leading African American member of both the Communist Party of the United States and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . He is best known for his significant theoretical contributions to the Marxist national question and as a founder of the Maoist New Communist Movement. In 's autobiographical novel ''Black Boy '', the character of Buddy Nealson represents Haywood.
Harry Haywood began his revolutionary career by joining the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922 followed by the in 1923. Shortly thereafter, in 1925 he joined the Communist Party, USA. After joining the CPUSA Haywood went to Moscow to study, first to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in 1925, then to the International Lenin School in 1927. He stayed until 1930 as a delegate to the Communist International . There he worked on commissions dealing with the question of African Americans in the United States as well as the development of the "Native Republic Thesis" for the South African Communist Party. Haywood worked to draft the "Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question" of 1928 and 1930, which put forward the line that African Americans in the of the United States made up an oppressed nation, with the right to self-determination up to and including secession. He would continue to fight for this line throughout his life.
In the CPUSA, Haywood served on the Central Committee from 1927 to 1938 and on the Politburo from 1931 until 1938. He also participated in the major factional struggles internal to the CPUSA against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder, regularly siding with William Z. Foster.
He was General Secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In the early 1930s while head of the CPUSA Negro Department, he was a leader in the movement to support the Scottsboro Boys, organized miners in with the National Miners Union, and was a leader in the struggles of the militant Sharecroppers Union in the Deep South. He also led the "Hands off Ethiopia" campaign in Chicago's to oppose the Fascist in 1935. When eleven Communist leaders went on trial under the Smith Act in 1949, Haywood was assigned the task of research for the defense.
Haywood's military career stretched through three wars, beginning with World War I where he served with a Black regiment. He fought for the in the Spanish Civil War with the of the International Brigades. With the Merchant Marines, he served in World War I where he was active with National Maritime Union.
During his four and half year stay in the Soviet Union Harry Haywood held dual membership in both the CPUSA and the CPSU. As a member of the CPSU, he travelled extensively through the Soviet Union's , and participated in the struggles against both the Left Opposition headed by Leon Trotsky and the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin. In these struggles and in others Haywood was on the side of Joseph Stalin.
With the Comintern, Haywood was assigned to work with the newly created Negro Commission. His major work regarding this, ''Negro Liberation'', argues that the root of the oppression of Blacks was the unsolved agrarian question in the . There he analyzed that the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution of had been betrayed through the - Compromise of 1877 and had thus left African Americans abandoned and thrust back on to the plantations from which they had been freed, now as tenant farmers and sharecroppers faced with the governments, the system of , and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. According to Haywood, the rise of imperialism left Blacks frozen as "landless, semi-slaves in the South."
Through all of this developed a distinct African American nation which fulfilled the criteria laid out by Stalin in his ''Marxism and the National Question'': a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.
Haywood saw as the correct response to this nothing short of the demand for self-determination of the African American people in their historically constituted national territory, the Black Belt South, and full equality everywhere else. Only with genuine political power, which from a Marxist point of view includes control of the productive forces, including the land, could African American's obtain genuine equality. This was seen as a prerequisite for broader working class unity.
Most of those in the CPUSA who disagreed with the analysis put forth by Harry Haywood and the Comintern considered the question of African American oppression in the United States simply a matter of racial prejudice with moral roots rather than an economic and political question of national oppression. They saw it as a problem to be solved under Socialism and in no need of special attention until after the institution of the revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat. To this charge Haywood countered that the category of "" is a mystification and that such policy can only alienate African Americans and inhibit working class unity.
Following urbanization and major from the South critics attempted to use statistics to counter the Black Belt theory. Haywood, in his 1957 article, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question," responded that the question of an oppressed nation in the South was not one of "nose counting."
Following the death of Stalin in 1953 and Nikita Krushchev's rise to power, the CPUSA accompanied Moscow in Krushchev's policy of destalinization and "peaceful coexistence". Long an admirer of Mao Zedong, Harry Haywood was one of the pioneers of the anti-revisionist movement born out of the growing Sino-Soviet split. He was driven out of the CPUSA in the late 1950s along with many others who took firm anti-revisionist or pro-Stalin positions.
The CPUSA's decision to change its line on the African American national question was a central factor in Haywood's expulsion. Though it had not been a strong point for the CPUSA since the dissolution of the Sharcroppers Union, the demand for self-determination for African Americans in the South was officially dropped by the CPUSA in 1959 in favor of a "Melting Pot" position that as American capitalism developed, so too would Black-white unity. Haywood, no longer a functioning party member, attempted to intervene, writing "On the Negro Question" which was distributed at the Seventeenth National Convention in 1959 by and in the name of African Blood Brotherhood founder, Cyril Briggs. This was not effective, however, as most of Haywood's potential allies had already been removed in the name of combatting and dogmatism.
In Haywood's view, this change of line was based on longstanding "white chauvanism" in the party. He also argued that the change prevented the CPUSA from giving correct leadership during the and left the party to tail behind the NAACP and Martin Luther King. This further alienated the party from the militant Black Power Movement that was to follow.
After being isolated and driven from the ranks of the CPUSA, Harry Haywood became one of the initiators of the New Communist Movement, the goal of which was to found a new Communist Party on an anti-revisionist basis, believing the CPUSA to have deviated irrevocably from Marxism-Leninism. He was one of the founders of the Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party , formed in New York in August, 1958 by eighty-three mostly Black and delegates from the CPUSA. According to Haywood, the POC rapidly degenerated into an isolated, dogmatic, ultraleft sect, completely removed from any political practice.
He went from there to work in one of the newly formed Maoist groups of the New Communist Movement, the . In the CP Haywood served on the Central Committee and published, along with his other major works, his 700 page, critical autobiography, ''Black Bolshevik''. This book became, because of its breadth and scope, an important document and through it and his other writings Haywood was able to provide leadership to the New Communist Movement. Haywood's theoretical contributions had a substantial impact on the major groups of the movement well beyond his own CP, including, for example, the , the early , the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters and the . Nonetheless, lack of experience, sectarianism, and voluntarism played a major role in keeping the young Maoist groups from taking a strong leading role.
Despite all of its changes, the Black Belt South is still considered relevant by many Marxists. The reason given by many revolutionary groups is because of the negative impact of conditions for African Americans in the South upon the US working class as a whole. Haywood's theoretical contributions to questions of African American national oppression and national liberation thus remain highly valued by the Ray O. Light Group, which developed out of an anti-revisionist split from the Communist Party USA in 1961, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which was originally formed from the mergers of several New Communist Movement groups in the 1980s, and the Maoist Internationalist Movement.
*Foster, William Z. ''History of the Communist Party of the United States''. International Publishers, New York: 1952. 600 pages.
*Foster, William Z. ''The Negro People in American History''. International Publishers, New York: 1954. 608 pages.
*Kelly, Robin D. G. ''Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression''. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill: 1990. 369 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist''. Liberator Press, Chicago: 1978. 700 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''Negro Liberation''. International Publishers, New York: 1948. 245 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question''. Liberator Press, Chicago: 1975. 38 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''On the Negro Question''. 1959 . Available in: ''Towards Victorious Afro-American National Liberation: A Collection of Pamphlets, Leaflets and Essays Which Dealt In a Timely Way With the Concrete Ongoing Struggle for Black Liberation Over the Past Decade and More.'' A Ray O. Light Publication, Bronx: 1982. pp. 383-403
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Career with the Communist Party USA
Harry Haywood began his revolutionary career by joining the African Blood Brotherhood in 1922 followed by the in 1923. Shortly thereafter, in 1925 he joined the Communist Party, USA. After joining the CPUSA Haywood went to Moscow to study, first to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in 1925, then to the International Lenin School in 1927. He stayed until 1930 as a delegate to the Communist International . There he worked on commissions dealing with the question of African Americans in the United States as well as the development of the "Native Republic Thesis" for the South African Communist Party. Haywood worked to draft the "Comintern Resolutions on the Negro Question" of 1928 and 1930, which put forward the line that African Americans in the of the United States made up an oppressed nation, with the right to self-determination up to and including secession. He would continue to fight for this line throughout his life.
In the CPUSA, Haywood served on the Central Committee from 1927 to 1938 and on the Politburo from 1931 until 1938. He also participated in the major factional struggles internal to the CPUSA against Jay Lovestone and Earl Browder, regularly siding with William Z. Foster.
He was General Secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. In the early 1930s while head of the CPUSA Negro Department, he was a leader in the movement to support the Scottsboro Boys, organized miners in with the National Miners Union, and was a leader in the struggles of the militant Sharecroppers Union in the Deep South. He also led the "Hands off Ethiopia" campaign in Chicago's to oppose the Fascist in 1935. When eleven Communist leaders went on trial under the Smith Act in 1949, Haywood was assigned the task of research for the defense.
Haywood's military career stretched through three wars, beginning with World War I where he served with a Black regiment. He fought for the in the Spanish Civil War with the of the International Brigades. With the Merchant Marines, he served in World War I where he was active with National Maritime Union.
The Comintern and the Black Belt Nation
During his four and half year stay in the Soviet Union Harry Haywood held dual membership in both the CPUSA and the CPSU. As a member of the CPSU, he travelled extensively through the Soviet Union's , and participated in the struggles against both the Left Opposition headed by Leon Trotsky and the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin. In these struggles and in others Haywood was on the side of Joseph Stalin.
With the Comintern, Haywood was assigned to work with the newly created Negro Commission. His major work regarding this, ''Negro Liberation'', argues that the root of the oppression of Blacks was the unsolved agrarian question in the . There he analyzed that the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution of had been betrayed through the - Compromise of 1877 and had thus left African Americans abandoned and thrust back on to the plantations from which they had been freed, now as tenant farmers and sharecroppers faced with the governments, the system of , and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. According to Haywood, the rise of imperialism left Blacks frozen as "landless, semi-slaves in the South."
Through all of this developed a distinct African American nation which fulfilled the criteria laid out by Stalin in his ''Marxism and the National Question'': a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.
Haywood saw as the correct response to this nothing short of the demand for self-determination of the African American people in their historically constituted national territory, the Black Belt South, and full equality everywhere else. Only with genuine political power, which from a Marxist point of view includes control of the productive forces, including the land, could African American's obtain genuine equality. This was seen as a prerequisite for broader working class unity.
Most of those in the CPUSA who disagreed with the analysis put forth by Harry Haywood and the Comintern considered the question of African American oppression in the United States simply a matter of racial prejudice with moral roots rather than an economic and political question of national oppression. They saw it as a problem to be solved under Socialism and in no need of special attention until after the institution of the revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat. To this charge Haywood countered that the category of "" is a mystification and that such policy can only alienate African Americans and inhibit working class unity.
Following urbanization and major from the South critics attempted to use statistics to counter the Black Belt theory. Haywood, in his 1957 article, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question," responded that the question of an oppressed nation in the South was not one of "nose counting."
Expulsion from the CPUSA
Following the death of Stalin in 1953 and Nikita Krushchev's rise to power, the CPUSA accompanied Moscow in Krushchev's policy of destalinization and "peaceful coexistence". Long an admirer of Mao Zedong, Harry Haywood was one of the pioneers of the anti-revisionist movement born out of the growing Sino-Soviet split. He was driven out of the CPUSA in the late 1950s along with many others who took firm anti-revisionist or pro-Stalin positions.
The CPUSA's decision to change its line on the African American national question was a central factor in Haywood's expulsion. Though it had not been a strong point for the CPUSA since the dissolution of the Sharcroppers Union, the demand for self-determination for African Americans in the South was officially dropped by the CPUSA in 1959 in favor of a "Melting Pot" position that as American capitalism developed, so too would Black-white unity. Haywood, no longer a functioning party member, attempted to intervene, writing "On the Negro Question" which was distributed at the Seventeenth National Convention in 1959 by and in the name of African Blood Brotherhood founder, Cyril Briggs. This was not effective, however, as most of Haywood's potential allies had already been removed in the name of combatting and dogmatism.
In Haywood's view, this change of line was based on longstanding "white chauvanism" in the party. He also argued that the change prevented the CPUSA from giving correct leadership during the and left the party to tail behind the NAACP and Martin Luther King. This further alienated the party from the militant Black Power Movement that was to follow.
With the New Communist Movement
After being isolated and driven from the ranks of the CPUSA, Harry Haywood became one of the initiators of the New Communist Movement, the goal of which was to found a new Communist Party on an anti-revisionist basis, believing the CPUSA to have deviated irrevocably from Marxism-Leninism. He was one of the founders of the Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party , formed in New York in August, 1958 by eighty-three mostly Black and delegates from the CPUSA. According to Haywood, the POC rapidly degenerated into an isolated, dogmatic, ultraleft sect, completely removed from any political practice.
He went from there to work in one of the newly formed Maoist groups of the New Communist Movement, the . In the CP Haywood served on the Central Committee and published, along with his other major works, his 700 page, critical autobiography, ''Black Bolshevik''. This book became, because of its breadth and scope, an important document and through it and his other writings Haywood was able to provide leadership to the New Communist Movement. Haywood's theoretical contributions had a substantial impact on the major groups of the movement well beyond his own CP, including, for example, the , the early , the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters and the . Nonetheless, lack of experience, sectarianism, and voluntarism played a major role in keeping the young Maoist groups from taking a strong leading role.
Despite all of its changes, the Black Belt South is still considered relevant by many Marxists. The reason given by many revolutionary groups is because of the negative impact of conditions for African Americans in the South upon the US working class as a whole. Haywood's theoretical contributions to questions of African American national oppression and national liberation thus remain highly valued by the Ray O. Light Group, which developed out of an anti-revisionist split from the Communist Party USA in 1961, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which was originally formed from the mergers of several New Communist Movement groups in the 1980s, and the Maoist Internationalist Movement.
Further reading
General
*Foster, William Z. ''History of the Communist Party of the United States''. International Publishers, New York: 1952. 600 pages.
*Foster, William Z. ''The Negro People in American History''. International Publishers, New York: 1954. 608 pages.
*Kelly, Robin D. G. ''Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression''. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill: 1990. 369 pages.
Selected writings by Harry Haywood
* Harry Haywood, ''Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist''. Liberator Press, Chicago: 1978. 700 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''Negro Liberation''. International Publishers, New York: 1948. 245 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question''. Liberator Press, Chicago: 1975. 38 pages.
* Harry Haywood, ''On the Negro Question''. 1959 . Available in: ''Towards Victorious Afro-American National Liberation: A Collection of Pamphlets, Leaflets and Essays Which Dealt In a Timely Way With the Concrete Ongoing Struggle for Black Liberation Over the Past Decade and More.'' A Ray O. Light Publication, Bronx: 1982. pp. 383-403
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Francisco Sarrion
Francisco Sarrión was a -born , mostly known as the leader of a small, short lived Maoist sect in Sweden in 1968.
Sarrión lived in the People's Republic of China for a while in the 1960s where he came in contact with group of Maoists visiting China. He decided to move to Sweden, where he in 1968 became the indisputable leader of a small extremist Maoist sect, called ''Rebellerna'' . The Rebels rebelled against the broader Leftist and Maoists movement, which they considered corrupted. They even went to the Chinese embassy in Stockholm were they demanded to become members of the Communist Party of China. When they were denied membership, because they weren't Chinese citizens, Francisco Sarrión declared that the embassy was under the control of reactionary bureaucrats who had betrayed Mao Zedong.
In Sweden, Sarrión sometimes used the pseudonym Fredrik Svensson.
Francisco Sarrión was a charismatic leader who could gather and control a group of young, dedicated followers around him. Witnesses have described Sarrión acting more like a fanatic religious preacher than a politician.
The Rebel Movement only lasted for a couple of months, but during this time, its members rapidly broke off all contact with the rest of society, including their families. The group of approximately 100 members was divided into smaller cells, living isolated in 7 apartments in Stockholm and one apartment in Uppsala, where they were to study the works of Mao and prepare for the coming ''World Revolution''. Only the leadership, the ''Central Committee'', with Sarrión as chairman, knew were the different cells were located.
Eventually the sect imploded and Francisco Sarrión, after having failed to obtain a Swedish citizenship, moved back to Spain and lived the last years of his life in the Canary Islands, working in the tourist industry until his death.
Sarrión lived in the People's Republic of China for a while in the 1960s where he came in contact with group of Maoists visiting China. He decided to move to Sweden, where he in 1968 became the indisputable leader of a small extremist Maoist sect, called ''Rebellerna'' . The Rebels rebelled against the broader Leftist and Maoists movement, which they considered corrupted. They even went to the Chinese embassy in Stockholm were they demanded to become members of the Communist Party of China. When they were denied membership, because they weren't Chinese citizens, Francisco Sarrión declared that the embassy was under the control of reactionary bureaucrats who had betrayed Mao Zedong.
In Sweden, Sarrión sometimes used the pseudonym Fredrik Svensson.
Francisco Sarrión was a charismatic leader who could gather and control a group of young, dedicated followers around him. Witnesses have described Sarrión acting more like a fanatic religious preacher than a politician.
The Rebel Movement only lasted for a couple of months, but during this time, its members rapidly broke off all contact with the rest of society, including their families. The group of approximately 100 members was divided into smaller cells, living isolated in 7 apartments in Stockholm and one apartment in Uppsala, where they were to study the works of Mao and prepare for the coming ''World Revolution''. Only the leadership, the ''Central Committee'', with Sarrión as chairman, knew were the different cells were located.
Eventually the sect imploded and Francisco Sarrión, after having failed to obtain a Swedish citizenship, moved back to Spain and lived the last years of his life in the Canary Islands, working in the tourist industry until his death.
Dai Chung
Dai Chung , a Taiwanese resident, self-proclaimed a "Taiwan Province branch" of the Communist Party of China without applying for official status as a political party and without any support or interest from the Communist Party of China. He staged a minor political protest following the . The party has operated since 2000 despite opposition from the Republic of China government.
He was born in Taiwan but is a waisheng ren of Hunanese descent. The ROC government has made numerous attempts to disband his organization. the Taiwanese Communist Party was active from 1928-1945 in resisting Japan, and 1945-1949 in resisting the KMT but was crushed after the KMT fled the mainland. Numerous attempts to restore the party were foiled in the 1990s due to clauses in the constitution. After the lifting of martial law in 1987, attempts have been made to re-establish a legal party of the same name. However, these applications to the ROC Ministry of the Interior have been rejected on the grounds that Article 2 of the Civic Organization Law forbids civic organizations and activities from promoting communism.
"Its wrong to say that if I love the mainland so much, I should move there. If I do that, Taiwan will only be left with independence supporters" -Dai Chung
He was born in Taiwan but is a waisheng ren of Hunanese descent. The ROC government has made numerous attempts to disband his organization. the Taiwanese Communist Party was active from 1928-1945 in resisting Japan, and 1945-1949 in resisting the KMT but was crushed after the KMT fled the mainland. Numerous attempts to restore the party were foiled in the 1990s due to clauses in the constitution. After the lifting of martial law in 1987, attempts have been made to re-establish a legal party of the same name. However, these applications to the ROC Ministry of the Interior have been rejected on the grounds that Article 2 of the Civic Organization Law forbids civic organizations and activities from promoting communism.
"Its wrong to say that if I love the mainland so much, I should move there. If I do that, Taiwan will only be left with independence supporters" -Dai Chung
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew was an avant-garde composer, and founder of the ''Scratch Orchestra'', an performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".
Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. He was the second of three sons whose parents were both artists — his father was potter Michael Cardew. The family moved to Wenford Bridge Pottery Cornwall a few years after his birth where he was later accepted as a pupil by the Canterbury Cathedral School which had evacuated to the area during the war due to bombing. His musical career thus began as a chorister. From 1953-57, Cardew studied piano, cello, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1957, he performed in the British premiere of Pierre Boulez's ''Le Marteau sans ma?tre'' . Having won a scholarship to study at the newly established Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. He was given the task of independently working out the composition plans for the German composer's score ''Carré'', and Stockhausen noted:
As a musician he was outstanding because he was not only a good pianist but also a good improviser and I hired him to become my assistant in the late 50s and he worked with me for over three years. I gave him work to do which I have never given to any other musician, which means to work with me on the score I was composing. He was one of the best examples that you can find among musicians because he was well informed about the latest theories of composition as well as being a performer.
Most of Cardew's compositions from this period make use of the integral and total serialist languages pioneered by Boulez and Stockhausen.
In 1958, Cardew witnessed a series of concerts in Cologne by John Cage and David Tudor which had a considerable influence on him, leading him to abandon post-Sch?nbergian serial composition and develop the indeterminate and experimental scores for which he is best known. He was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American Avant-Garde composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards.
Cardew's most important scores are '''' , a 193-page which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and '''', a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. ''The Great Learning'' instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books, in Fitzroy Square, London.
In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group which had formed the previous year and included English Jazz musicians Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, and one of his first students at the Royal Academy Christopher Hobbs. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores.
While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's ''The Great Learning''. The Scratch Orchestra gave performances throughout Britain and elsewhere until its demise in 1972. It was during this period that the question of ''art from whom'' was hotly debated within the context of the Orchestra, which Cardew came to see as elitist despite its numerous attempts to make socially accessible music.
Following the demise of the Orchestra, Cardew became more directly involved in left-wing politics and abandoned avant-garde music altogether, adopting a populist though post-romantic tonal style. He spent 1973 in West Berlin on an artist's grant from the City, where he was active in a campaign for a children's clinic. During the 1970s, he produced many songs, often drawing from traditional English folk music put at the service of lengthy - exhortations; representative examples are ''Smash the Social Contract'' and ''There Is Only One Lie, There Is Only One Truth''. In 1974, he published a book entitled ''Stockhausen Serves Imperialism'', which denounced, in Maoist style, his own involvement with Stockhausen and the Western avant-garde tradition.
Cardew was active in various causes in British politics, such as the struggle against the revival of neo-Nazi groups in Britain, and subsequently was involved in the People's Liberation Music group with Laurie Scott Baker, John Marcangelo, Vicky Silva, Hugh Shrapnel, Keith Rowe and others. The group developed and performed music in support of various popular causes including benefits for striking miners and Northern Ireland.
Cardew became a member of the Communist Party of England in the 1970s, and in 1979 was a co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain . His creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment. Cardew stated his attitude towards the avant-garde in ''Stockhausen Serves Imperialism'':
I'm convinced that when a group of people get together and sing The Internationale this is a more complex, more subtle, stronger and more musical experience than the whole of the avant-garde put together.
Cardew's efforts to politicise culture in Britain were influenced by his relationship with Hardial Bains, the Canadian communist leader and a leading anti-revisionist politician. Bains contributed the lyrics to Cardew's signature song from his later period, ''We Sing for the Future''.
Cardew died on 13th December 1981, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident near his London home in Leytonstone. The driver was never found.
The German musician and composer Ekkehard Ehlers published a Cardew-inspired work in 2001, titled ''Ekkehard Ehlers plays Cornelius Cardew'', which was released on Staubgold Records.
A 70th Birthday Anniversary Festival, including live music from all phases of Cardew's career and a symposium on his music, took place on Sunday, 7 May 2006, at the Cecil Sharpe House in London.
In 1999 Cardew's '''' was performed by the experimental rock group Sonic Youth on their album ''''.
"Cornelius Cardew" is the name of the unemployed pipe-fitter in Alan Moore's ''Skizz''.
*''The Great Learning'' Paragraphs 2 and 7 .
*''Th?lmann Variations''
*''Cornelius Cardew Piano Music'' musicnow 1991
*''We Sing for the Future!'' Interpretations of two compositions for solo piano by Frederic Rzewski
*''Four Principles On Ireland And Other Pieces''
*''Treatise''
*''Chamber Music 1955-1964'' Apartment House
*''Material''
*''Cornelius Cardew — piano music 1959-70'' John Tilbury
*''AMMMUSIC'' — Cardew as an improviser. With Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Lawrence Sheaff and Keith Rowe, London 1966. CD release
*''AMM The Crypt - 12th June 1968'' Cardew as an improviser. With Lou Gare. Christopher Hobbs, Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe. Double CD.
*''AMM LAMINAL'' Cardew as an improviser. Three CD retrospective AMM box set published in 1996. Cardew performs on one CD, titled ''The Aarhus Sequences ''.
* Aharonián, Coriún. "Cardew as a Basis for a Discussion on Ethical Options". ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 11 : 13–15.
* Anderson, Virginia. "" .
* Anderson, Virginia. "". ''OpenDemocracy'' .
* Bains, Hardial. "The Question Is Really One of Word and Deed"
* Cardew, Cornelius. ''Cornelius Cardew: A Reader'', edited by Edwin Prévost, introduction by Michael Parsons. Harlow, Essex: Copula, 2006. ISBN 0-9525492-2-0.
* Eno, Brian. "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts". In ''Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music'', edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner,. New York and London: Continuum Books, 2005.
* Fox, Edward. "Death of a Dissident". ''The Independent Magazine'' : 24–30.
* Marko, Vladimir. "" . ''Scena: ?asopis za pozori?nu umetnost'' no. 4, 2006.
* Nyman, Michael. ''Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
* Parsons, Michael. "The Scratch Orchestra and the Visual Arts". ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 11 : 5–11.
* Schonfield, Victor. "Cornelius Cardew, AMM, and the Path to Perfect Hearing". ''Jazz Monthly'' 159 : 10–11..
* Taylor, Timothy D. "Moving in Decency: The Music and Radical Politics of Cornelius Cardew" ''Music & Letters'' 79, no.4 : 555–76.
* Tilbury, John. "" ''Contact'' no. 26 : 4-12
* Tilbury, John. "The Experimental Years: A View from the Left]" ''Contact'' 22 : 16-21. Reprinted online in ''[http://www.users.waitrose.com/~chobbs/tilburyleft.html Journal of Experimental Music Studies'' .
* Varela, Daniel. "" Journal of Experimental Music Studies.
Biography
Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. He was the second of three sons whose parents were both artists — his father was potter Michael Cardew. The family moved to Wenford Bridge Pottery Cornwall a few years after his birth where he was later accepted as a pupil by the Canterbury Cathedral School which had evacuated to the area during the war due to bombing. His musical career thus began as a chorister. From 1953-57, Cardew studied piano, cello, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1957, he performed in the British premiere of Pierre Boulez's ''Le Marteau sans ma?tre'' . Having won a scholarship to study at the newly established Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. He was given the task of independently working out the composition plans for the German composer's score ''Carré'', and Stockhausen noted:
As a musician he was outstanding because he was not only a good pianist but also a good improviser and I hired him to become my assistant in the late 50s and he worked with me for over three years. I gave him work to do which I have never given to any other musician, which means to work with me on the score I was composing. He was one of the best examples that you can find among musicians because he was well informed about the latest theories of composition as well as being a performer.
Most of Cardew's compositions from this period make use of the integral and total serialist languages pioneered by Boulez and Stockhausen.
Chance and the American avant-garde
In 1958, Cardew witnessed a series of concerts in Cologne by John Cage and David Tudor which had a considerable influence on him, leading him to abandon post-Sch?nbergian serial composition and develop the indeterminate and experimental scores for which he is best known. He was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American Avant-Garde composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards.
Cardew's most important scores are '''' , a 193-page which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and '''', a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. ''The Great Learning'' instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books, in Fitzroy Square, London.
In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group which had formed the previous year and included English Jazz musicians Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, and one of his first students at the Royal Academy Christopher Hobbs. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores.
While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's ''The Great Learning''. The Scratch Orchestra gave performances throughout Britain and elsewhere until its demise in 1972. It was during this period that the question of ''art from whom'' was hotly debated within the context of the Orchestra, which Cardew came to see as elitist despite its numerous attempts to make socially accessible music.
Political involvements
Following the demise of the Orchestra, Cardew became more directly involved in left-wing politics and abandoned avant-garde music altogether, adopting a populist though post-romantic tonal style. He spent 1973 in West Berlin on an artist's grant from the City, where he was active in a campaign for a children's clinic. During the 1970s, he produced many songs, often drawing from traditional English folk music put at the service of lengthy - exhortations; representative examples are ''Smash the Social Contract'' and ''There Is Only One Lie, There Is Only One Truth''. In 1974, he published a book entitled ''Stockhausen Serves Imperialism'', which denounced, in Maoist style, his own involvement with Stockhausen and the Western avant-garde tradition.
Cardew was active in various causes in British politics, such as the struggle against the revival of neo-Nazi groups in Britain, and subsequently was involved in the People's Liberation Music group with Laurie Scott Baker, John Marcangelo, Vicky Silva, Hugh Shrapnel, Keith Rowe and others. The group developed and performed music in support of various popular causes including benefits for striking miners and Northern Ireland.
Cardew became a member of the Communist Party of England in the 1970s, and in 1979 was a co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain . His creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment. Cardew stated his attitude towards the avant-garde in ''Stockhausen Serves Imperialism'':
I'm convinced that when a group of people get together and sing The Internationale this is a more complex, more subtle, stronger and more musical experience than the whole of the avant-garde put together.
Cardew's efforts to politicise culture in Britain were influenced by his relationship with Hardial Bains, the Canadian communist leader and a leading anti-revisionist politician. Bains contributed the lyrics to Cardew's signature song from his later period, ''We Sing for the Future''.
Death
Cardew died on 13th December 1981, the victim of a hit-and-run car accident near his London home in Leytonstone. The driver was never found.
The German musician and composer Ekkehard Ehlers published a Cardew-inspired work in 2001, titled ''Ekkehard Ehlers plays Cornelius Cardew'', which was released on Staubgold Records.
A 70th Birthday Anniversary Festival, including live music from all phases of Cardew's career and a symposium on his music, took place on Sunday, 7 May 2006, at the Cecil Sharpe House in London.
In popular culture
In 1999 Cardew's '''' was performed by the experimental rock group Sonic Youth on their album ''''.
"Cornelius Cardew" is the name of the unemployed pipe-fitter in Alan Moore's ''Skizz''.
Selected discography
*''The Great Learning'' Paragraphs 2 and 7 .
*''Th?lmann Variations''
*''Cornelius Cardew Piano Music'' musicnow 1991
*''We Sing for the Future!'' Interpretations of two compositions for solo piano by Frederic Rzewski
*''Four Principles On Ireland And Other Pieces''
*''Treatise''
*''Chamber Music 1955-1964'' Apartment House
*''Material''
*''Cornelius Cardew — piano music 1959-70'' John Tilbury
*''AMMMUSIC'' — Cardew as an improviser. With Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Lawrence Sheaff and Keith Rowe, London 1966. CD release
*''AMM The Crypt - 12th June 1968'' Cardew as an improviser. With Lou Gare. Christopher Hobbs, Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe. Double CD.
*''AMM LAMINAL'' Cardew as an improviser. Three CD retrospective AMM box set published in 1996. Cardew performs on one CD, titled ''The Aarhus Sequences ''.
Bibliography
* Aharonián, Coriún. "Cardew as a Basis for a Discussion on Ethical Options". ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 11 : 13–15.
* Anderson, Virginia. "" .
* Anderson, Virginia. "". ''OpenDemocracy'' .
* Bains, Hardial. "The Question Is Really One of Word and Deed"
* Cardew, Cornelius. ''Cornelius Cardew: A Reader'', edited by Edwin Prévost, introduction by Michael Parsons. Harlow, Essex: Copula, 2006. ISBN 0-9525492-2-0.
* Eno, Brian. "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts". In ''Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music'', edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner,. New York and London: Continuum Books, 2005.
* Fox, Edward. "Death of a Dissident". ''The Independent Magazine'' : 24–30.
* Marko, Vladimir. "" . ''Scena: ?asopis za pozori?nu umetnost'' no. 4, 2006.
* Nyman, Michael. ''Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
* Parsons, Michael. "The Scratch Orchestra and the Visual Arts". ''Leonardo Music Journal'' 11 : 5–11.
* Schonfield, Victor. "Cornelius Cardew, AMM, and the Path to Perfect Hearing". ''Jazz Monthly'' 159 : 10–11..
* Taylor, Timothy D. "Moving in Decency: The Music and Radical Politics of Cornelius Cardew" ''Music & Letters'' 79, no.4 : 555–76.
* Tilbury, John. "" ''Contact'' no. 26 : 4-12
* Tilbury, John. "The Experimental Years: A View from the Left]" ''Contact'' 22 : 16-21. Reprinted online in ''[http://www.users.waitrose.com/~chobbs/tilburyleft.html Journal of Experimental Music Studies'' .
* Varela, Daniel. "" Journal of Experimental Music Studies.
Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organisations of South Asia
The Coordination Committee of Maoist Parties and Organizations of South Asia usually goes by its abbreviation, CCOMPOSA. As the name implies, it is an umbrella organization of various South Asian Maoist parties and movements and its purpose is to coordinate their activities throughout South Asia .
CCOMPOSA was founded in 2001 by the following parties:
* Purba Bangala Sarbahara Party
* Purba Bangla Sarbahara Party
*
* Purba Banglar Communist Party - Marksbadi-Leninbadi
* Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party
* Communist Party of India
* Maoist Communist Centre
* Revolutionary Communist Centre of India
* Revolutionary Communist Centre of India
* Communist Party of India People's War
''''
* Bhutan Communist Party
At CCOMPOSA's second annual conference in 2002, a declaration was issued, outlining the vision CCOMPOSA had for its role in revolutionary politics, how it would operate, and how the political situation in South Asia and the world looked from their point of view. It was declared that the organization would follow the ideas carved by Marx, Lenin and Mao, and, not least, to build on the examples and experience of s in Peru, Nepal, Philippines, India, Turkey and elsewhere.
In August 2006, CCOMPOSA held its fourth conference in Nepal. Representatives of eight parties attended, including those of the Ceylon Communist Party , who did not sign the resolutions. That has been taken as an indication that the CCP was invited as an observer. The parties that participated in the conference were the following: Purba Bangala Sarbahara Party , Purba Banglar Communist Party - ML , Bangladesher Samyabadi Dal , Communist Party of Bhutan , Communist Party of Nepal , Communist Party of India , Communist Party of India Naxalbari and Communist Party of India .
The conference resolved that coordination would be deepened and extended, while asserting that Nepali Maoists would not meddle in the 'Indian People's War'.
Founding Parties
CCOMPOSA was founded in 2001 by the following parties:
From Bangladesh
* Purba Bangala Sarbahara Party
* Purba Bangla Sarbahara Party
*
* Purba Banglar Communist Party - Marksbadi-Leninbadi
* Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party
Ceylon Communist Party
From India
* Communist Party of India
* Maoist Communist Centre
* Revolutionary Communist Centre of India
* Revolutionary Communist Centre of India
* Communist Party of India People's War
''''
Communist Party of Nepal
Observers
* Bhutan Communist Party
Declaration
At CCOMPOSA's second annual conference in 2002, a declaration was issued, outlining the vision CCOMPOSA had for its role in revolutionary politics, how it would operate, and how the political situation in South Asia and the world looked from their point of view. It was declared that the organization would follow the ideas carved by Marx, Lenin and Mao, and, not least, to build on the examples and experience of s in Peru, Nepal, Philippines, India, Turkey and elsewhere.
Fourth Conference
In August 2006, CCOMPOSA held its fourth conference in Nepal. Representatives of eight parties attended, including those of the Ceylon Communist Party , who did not sign the resolutions. That has been taken as an indication that the CCP was invited as an observer. The parties that participated in the conference were the following: Purba Bangala Sarbahara Party , Purba Banglar Communist Party - ML , Bangladesher Samyabadi Dal , Communist Party of Bhutan , Communist Party of Nepal , Communist Party of India , Communist Party of India Naxalbari and Communist Party of India .
The conference resolved that coordination would be deepened and extended, while asserting that Nepali Maoists would not meddle in the 'Indian People's War'.
Chinese Revolution
The Chinese Revolution in 1949 refers to the final stage of fighting in the Chinese Civil War. In some anti-revisionist communist media and historiography, as well as the official media of the Communist Party of China, this period is known as the ''War of Liberation'' .
With the breakdown of peace talks between the Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party , and the Communist Party of China , an all-out war between these two forces resumed. The Soviet Union provided limited aid to the communists, and the United States assisted the Nationalists with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military supplies and equipment , as well as the airlifting of many Nationalist troops from central China to Manchuria, an area Chiang Kai-Shek saw as strategically vital to defend Nationalist-controlled areas against a communist advance.
Belatedly, the Nationalist government also sought to enlist popular support through internal reforms. The effort was in vain, however, because of the rampant corruption in government and the accompanying political and economic chaos including massive hyperinflation. By late 1948 the Nationalist position was bleak. The demoralized and undisciplined Nationalist troops proved no match for the communist People's Liberation Army. The communists were well established in the north and northeast while the Nationalists, who had an advantage in both numbers of men and weapons, controlled a much larger territory and population than their adversaries, and enjoyed considerable international support, nevertheless suffered from a lack of morale and rampant corruption that greatly reduced their ability to fight and their civilian support. Especially during World War II, the best of the Nationalist troops were either wounded or killed while the communists had suffered minimal losses.
After numerous operational set-backs in Manchuria, especially in attempting to take the major cities, the communists were ultimately able to seize the region and capture large Nationalist formations. This provided them with the tanks, heavy artillery, and other combined-arms assets needed to prosecute offensive operations south of the Great Wall. In January 1949 Beiping was taken by the communists without a fight, and its name was changed back to Beijing. Between April and November, major cities passed from Nationalist to Communist control with minimal resistance. In most cases the surrounding countryside and small towns had come under Communist influence long before the cities — part of the strategy of people's war. One of the decisive battles was the Huai Hai Campaign.
Ultimately, the People's Liberation Army was victorious. On October 1, 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek, 600,000 Nationalist troops, and about two million Nationalist-sympathizer refugees, predominantly from the former government and business communities of the mainland, retreated to the island of Taiwan and proclaimed the Republic of China. After that, there remained only isolated pockets of resistance to the communists on the mainland, such as in the far south. A PRC attempt to take the ROC-controlled island of Kinmen was thwarted in the Battle of Kuningtou, halting a PLA advance towards Taiwan. In December 1949 Chiang proclaimed Taipei, Taiwan the temporary capital of the Republic, and continued to assert his government as the sole legitimate authority of all China, while the PRC government did likewise. The last fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces ended with the communist capture of Hainan Island in May 1950.
* Franke, W., ''A Century of Chinese Revolution, 1851-1949'' .
With the breakdown of peace talks between the Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party , and the Communist Party of China , an all-out war between these two forces resumed. The Soviet Union provided limited aid to the communists, and the United States assisted the Nationalists with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military supplies and equipment , as well as the airlifting of many Nationalist troops from central China to Manchuria, an area Chiang Kai-Shek saw as strategically vital to defend Nationalist-controlled areas against a communist advance.
Belatedly, the Nationalist government also sought to enlist popular support through internal reforms. The effort was in vain, however, because of the rampant corruption in government and the accompanying political and economic chaos including massive hyperinflation. By late 1948 the Nationalist position was bleak. The demoralized and undisciplined Nationalist troops proved no match for the communist People's Liberation Army. The communists were well established in the north and northeast while the Nationalists, who had an advantage in both numbers of men and weapons, controlled a much larger territory and population than their adversaries, and enjoyed considerable international support, nevertheless suffered from a lack of morale and rampant corruption that greatly reduced their ability to fight and their civilian support. Especially during World War II, the best of the Nationalist troops were either wounded or killed while the communists had suffered minimal losses.
After numerous operational set-backs in Manchuria, especially in attempting to take the major cities, the communists were ultimately able to seize the region and capture large Nationalist formations. This provided them with the tanks, heavy artillery, and other combined-arms assets needed to prosecute offensive operations south of the Great Wall. In January 1949 Beiping was taken by the communists without a fight, and its name was changed back to Beijing. Between April and November, major cities passed from Nationalist to Communist control with minimal resistance. In most cases the surrounding countryside and small towns had come under Communist influence long before the cities — part of the strategy of people's war. One of the decisive battles was the Huai Hai Campaign.
Ultimately, the People's Liberation Army was victorious. On October 1, 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek, 600,000 Nationalist troops, and about two million Nationalist-sympathizer refugees, predominantly from the former government and business communities of the mainland, retreated to the island of Taiwan and proclaimed the Republic of China. After that, there remained only isolated pockets of resistance to the communists on the mainland, such as in the far south. A PRC attempt to take the ROC-controlled island of Kinmen was thwarted in the Battle of Kuningtou, halting a PLA advance towards Taiwan. In December 1949 Chiang proclaimed Taipei, Taiwan the temporary capital of the Republic, and continued to assert his government as the sole legitimate authority of all China, while the PRC government did likewise. The last fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces ended with the communist capture of Hainan Island in May 1950.
Further reading
* Franke, W., ''A Century of Chinese Revolution, 1851-1949'' .
Chinese New Left
New Leftism in the People's Republic of China is an ideological tendency in opposition to capitalism and the and in favour of the restoration of Maoist-style socialism. The movement first gained steam during the mid-1990s. New Leftism is seen as being more appealing to students in China today than liberalism or neoliberalism — problems faced by China during its modernisation, such as inequality and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, are becoming more serious. It is also known as 'neo-leftism'.
New Leftists can usually be divided into two main groups: believers in either postmodernism or ; and those who support Chinese nationalism. The Chinese New Left's origins lie mainly in scholarly people who were heavily influenced by the idea of postmodernism in universities in the Western world before coming back to China in the mid-1990s. They tend to think that the social problems faced by China are caused by capitalist loopholes and .
The name was first applied in the late 1990s. Their foremost thinker is , and he explains how they did not choose this term:
The first stirring of a more critical view of official marketization go back to 1993... But it wasn't till 1997-98 that the label New Left became widely used, to indicate positions outside the consensus. Liberals adopted the term, relying on the negative identification of the 'Left' with late Maoism, to imply that these must be a throw-back to the Cultural Revolution. Up till then, they had more frequently attacked anyone who criticised the rush to marketization as a 'conservative' - this is how Cui Zhiyuan was initially described, for example. From 1997 onwards, this altered. The standard accusatory term became 'New Left'...
Actually, people like myself have always been reluctant to accept this label, pinned on us by our adversaries. Partly this is because we have no wish to be associated with the Cultural Revolution, or for that matter with what might be called the 'Old Left' of the reform-era CCP. But it is also because the term New Left is a Western one, with a very distinct set of connotations – generational and political – in Europe and America . Our historical context is Chinese, not Western, and it is doubtful whether a category imported so explicitly from the West could be helpful in today's China. Attacking the current leadership as " ," the leaflets called on lower-level cadre to "change current and to revert to the road." The Zhengzhou incident is one of the first manifestations of public nostalgia for the Mao era to make it to the international press, although it is far from clear whether these feelings are widespread. In any case, it is an example of Marxist Chinese New Leftism in action.
Chinese New Leftists are often criticised by liberal intellectuals, who consider China not to be liberal ''enough'', both economically and politically. These liberals tend to think that inequality and the widening gap between rich and the poor are serious problems, but that these problems exist in every and constitute a necessary stage of development. Liberals also criticise postmodernism, which they argue is inappropriate for China because it is still not developed enough, and at the moment does not yet face some of the particular problems that have occurred in some developed countries that in turn gave rise to postmodernist thought. Democracy and personal freedoms are seen by these liberals to be important for China, although perhaps not attainable in the near future. The liberal critics and Chinese New Leftists have fiercely debated throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
Current plans for a "New Socialist Countryside" could be seen as a concession to New Left ideas. It is significant that the idea of privatising the land has not so far been accepted. Currently it is used privately but cannot be sold, unlike urban property. Britain's Financial Times has been expressing concern at an apparent stagnation in China's economic reforms.
Overview
New Leftists can usually be divided into two main groups: believers in either postmodernism or ; and those who support Chinese nationalism. The Chinese New Left's origins lie mainly in scholarly people who were heavily influenced by the idea of postmodernism in universities in the Western world before coming back to China in the mid-1990s. They tend to think that the social problems faced by China are caused by capitalist loopholes and .
The name
The name was first applied in the late 1990s. Their foremost thinker is , and he explains how they did not choose this term:
The first stirring of a more critical view of official marketization go back to 1993... But it wasn't till 1997-98 that the label New Left became widely used, to indicate positions outside the consensus. Liberals adopted the term, relying on the negative identification of the 'Left' with late Maoism, to imply that these must be a throw-back to the Cultural Revolution. Up till then, they had more frequently attacked anyone who criticised the rush to marketization as a 'conservative' - this is how Cui Zhiyuan was initially described, for example. From 1997 onwards, this altered. The standard accusatory term became 'New Left'...
Actually, people like myself have always been reluctant to accept this label, pinned on us by our adversaries. Partly this is because we have no wish to be associated with the Cultural Revolution, or for that matter with what might be called the 'Old Left' of the reform-era CCP. But it is also because the term New Left is a Western one, with a very distinct set of connotations – generational and political – in Europe and America . Our historical context is Chinese, not Western, and it is doubtful whether a category imported so explicitly from the West could be helpful in today's China. Attacking the current leadership as " ," the leaflets called on lower-level cadre to "change current and to revert to the road." The Zhengzhou incident is one of the first manifestations of public nostalgia for the Mao era to make it to the international press, although it is far from clear whether these feelings are widespread. In any case, it is an example of Marxist Chinese New Leftism in action.
Current disputes
Chinese New Leftists are often criticised by liberal intellectuals, who consider China not to be liberal ''enough'', both economically and politically. These liberals tend to think that inequality and the widening gap between rich and the poor are serious problems, but that these problems exist in every and constitute a necessary stage of development. Liberals also criticise postmodernism, which they argue is inappropriate for China because it is still not developed enough, and at the moment does not yet face some of the particular problems that have occurred in some developed countries that in turn gave rise to postmodernist thought. Democracy and personal freedoms are seen by these liberals to be important for China, although perhaps not attainable in the near future. The liberal critics and Chinese New Leftists have fiercely debated throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
Current plans for a "New Socialist Countryside" could be seen as a concession to New Left ideas. It is significant that the idea of privatising the land has not so far been accepted. Currently it is used privately but cannot be sold, unlike urban property. Britain's Financial Times has been expressing concern at an apparent stagnation in China's economic reforms.
Sources
Capitalist Roader
In Maoist thought, a capitalist roader is a person or group on the political who demonstrates a marked tendency to bow to pressure from forces and subsequently attempts to pull the Revolution in a direction. If allowed to do so, these forces would eventually restore the political and economic rule of capitalism; in other words, these forces would lead a society down a "capitalist road". The term first appeared in Chinese Communist Party literature in 1965, but the idea was initially developed by Mao Zedong in 1956-1957, against what he saw as reactionary tendencies in the party.
Capitalist roaders are described as representatives of the capitalist class within the Communist Party and those who attempt to restore capitalism while pretending to uphold socialism. Mao contended that Deng Xiaoping was a capitalist roader and that the Soviet Union fell to capitalist roaders from within the Communist Party after the death of Joseph Stalin.
Capitalist roaders are described as representatives of the capitalist class within the Communist Party and those who attempt to restore capitalism while pretending to uphold socialism. Mao contended that Deng Xiaoping was a capitalist roader and that the Soviet Union fell to capitalist roaders from within the Communist Party after the death of Joseph Stalin.
Bob Avakian
Bob Avakian is Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which he has led since its formation in 1975. He is a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and the Left of the 1960s and early 1970s, and was closely associated with the Black Panther Party. He has continually published writing on Marxism for 25 years.
Avakian was born on March 7, 1943 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Berkeley, California. The grandchild of immigrants who settled in , California to farm, he was a player for his high school. His father was Spurgeon "Sparky" Avakian , an judge in Oakland, California, and member of the Berkeley School Board. Bob attended the , where he became involved in radical politics. He participated in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California—Berkeley that was led by Mario Savio. His political activities continued and he became spokesman for the , and an active supporter of the Black Panthers.
Bob Avakian was active in and was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Youth Movement II. In the Bay Area he worked to form the Bay Area Revolutionary Union. BARU expanded nationally by absorbing other collectives coming out of the SDS. It became the Revolutionary Union.
Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Union, along with others such as C. Clark Kissinger and Carl Dix, led the formation of the in 1975. When Deng Xiaoping went to the United States to visit Jimmy Carter, the RCP led protests at sites throughout Washington, D.C. Avakian and other participants in the march became engaged in a conflict with the police. Avakian and others arrested for the incident were charged with several counts of assault on a police officer. After a court granted Avakian and the other arrestees' request to be charged and tried together, the total punishment exposure for the seventeen defendants was over 241 years . As a result, Avakian went to France in 1981. All charges against him were dropped in 1982.
Bob Avakian's current whereabouts are kept secret. His last appearances caught on video were two speaking engagements . These were recorded for the DVD ''REVOLUTION: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About''. The recordings were the first publicly available images of Avakian since 1981.
Bob Avakian is an outspoken and proclaims that humanity needs "liberation without gods". He is a proponent of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
As chairman of the RCP, and as a writer, Avakian supports the Leninist concept of the vanguard party as a necessary leading component of a revolutionary movement. The role of the vanguard party, as explained by Avakian, continues once regime change has been effected, as class struggle continues under socialism . In Maoist literature, these are widely agreed upon ideas developed from Mao's fight against the "Modern Revisionism" of the former Soviet Union, and within the Communist Party of China, as expressed in Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
He has argued against the idea that "spontaneous" rebellion will achieve political revolution without leadership bodies based on a methodology and practical unity of action. This and other positions he has held have tended toward Avakian something of a polarizing figure among activists of a more "movementist" politics.
Avakian holds that while the United States contains "oppressed nations," a disputed idea in the communist movement, that the working class's struggle is of a "multi-national proletariat" for political power, not a series of separated, concurrent "issues." He sees the main strategic orientation as uniting the fight of that multi-national proletariat with the revolutionary struggle of oppressed nationalities, African-Americans and Chicanos in particular. Avakian and the RCP oppose identity politics as an incorrect "post-modern" and anti-Marxist idea, that there are separate and discrete "truths" particular to who holds them.
Avakian argues that the Democratic Party is not the party of the people, but serves one sector of the capitalist ruling class. He believes in the necessity of a communist party to lead a total regime change based on the uprising of millions, within the United States and around the world.
Avakian holds that "there is nothing sacred" about the current national borders, particularly since they were formed by a process of conquest and dispossession. The economic and state development of different societies must entail different forms of struggle accordingly.
He writes for the newspaper of his party, '''' , and has written several books including:
*''Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World''
*''Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics'' co-authored with
*''From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist'' ISBN 0-9760236-2-8, A memoir.
*''Observations on Art and Culture, Science and Philosophy''
*''Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones: We Need Morality but not ''Traditional'' Morality''
*''Phony Communism is Dead... Long Live Real Communism!'' - A response to claims of the "Death of Communism".
*''Could We Really Win?'' - A talk about how revolution could be possible in a country like the U.S.
*''Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?''
*''For a Harvest of Dragons: On the "Crisis of Marxism" and the Power of Marxism – Now More than Ever: An Essay Marking the 100th Anniversary of Marx's Death''
*''The Immortal Contributions of ''
*''A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror?''
*''Bullets: From the Writings Speeches and Interviews of Bob Avakian'' - A collection of quotes.
*Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity, and
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*, includes question and answer session
* On War and Revolution, On Being a Revolutionary and Changing the World, interviewed by Carl Dix vol. 1 and 2, CD.
*, Three Q Productions DVD
* Ely, Mike. . December 2007.
* . . Communist Voice Organization, September 2005.
* Punkerslut.
* Oppenheimer, Mark. “”. ''The Boston Globe'', 27 January 2008.
Life
Avakian was born on March 7, 1943 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Berkeley, California. The grandchild of immigrants who settled in , California to farm, he was a player for his high school. His father was Spurgeon "Sparky" Avakian , an judge in Oakland, California, and member of the Berkeley School Board. Bob attended the , where he became involved in radical politics. He participated in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California—Berkeley that was led by Mario Savio. His political activities continued and he became spokesman for the , and an active supporter of the Black Panthers.
Bob Avakian was active in and was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Youth Movement II. In the Bay Area he worked to form the Bay Area Revolutionary Union. BARU expanded nationally by absorbing other collectives coming out of the SDS. It became the Revolutionary Union.
Bob Avakian and the Revolutionary Union, along with others such as C. Clark Kissinger and Carl Dix, led the formation of the in 1975. When Deng Xiaoping went to the United States to visit Jimmy Carter, the RCP led protests at sites throughout Washington, D.C. Avakian and other participants in the march became engaged in a conflict with the police. Avakian and others arrested for the incident were charged with several counts of assault on a police officer. After a court granted Avakian and the other arrestees' request to be charged and tried together, the total punishment exposure for the seventeen defendants was over 241 years . As a result, Avakian went to France in 1981. All charges against him were dropped in 1982.
Bob Avakian's current whereabouts are kept secret. His last appearances caught on video were two speaking engagements . These were recorded for the DVD ''REVOLUTION: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About''. The recordings were the first publicly available images of Avakian since 1981.
Views
Bob Avakian is an outspoken and proclaims that humanity needs "liberation without gods". He is a proponent of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
As chairman of the RCP, and as a writer, Avakian supports the Leninist concept of the vanguard party as a necessary leading component of a revolutionary movement. The role of the vanguard party, as explained by Avakian, continues once regime change has been effected, as class struggle continues under socialism . In Maoist literature, these are widely agreed upon ideas developed from Mao's fight against the "Modern Revisionism" of the former Soviet Union, and within the Communist Party of China, as expressed in Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
He has argued against the idea that "spontaneous" rebellion will achieve political revolution without leadership bodies based on a methodology and practical unity of action. This and other positions he has held have tended toward Avakian something of a polarizing figure among activists of a more "movementist" politics.
Avakian holds that while the United States contains "oppressed nations," a disputed idea in the communist movement, that the working class's struggle is of a "multi-national proletariat" for political power, not a series of separated, concurrent "issues." He sees the main strategic orientation as uniting the fight of that multi-national proletariat with the revolutionary struggle of oppressed nationalities, African-Americans and Chicanos in particular. Avakian and the RCP oppose identity politics as an incorrect "post-modern" and anti-Marxist idea, that there are separate and discrete "truths" particular to who holds them.
Avakian argues that the Democratic Party is not the party of the people, but serves one sector of the capitalist ruling class. He believes in the necessity of a communist party to lead a total regime change based on the uprising of millions, within the United States and around the world.
Avakian holds that "there is nothing sacred" about the current national borders, particularly since they were formed by a process of conquest and dispossession. The economic and state development of different societies must entail different forms of struggle accordingly.
Works
He writes for the newspaper of his party, '''' , and has written several books including:
Books
*''Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World''
*''Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics'' co-authored with
*''From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist'' ISBN 0-9760236-2-8, A memoir.
*''Observations on Art and Culture, Science and Philosophy''
*''Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones: We Need Morality but not ''Traditional'' Morality''
*''Phony Communism is Dead... Long Live Real Communism!'' - A response to claims of the "Death of Communism".
*''Could We Really Win?'' - A talk about how revolution could be possible in a country like the U.S.
*''Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?''
*''For a Harvest of Dragons: On the "Crisis of Marxism" and the Power of Marxism – Now More than Ever: An Essay Marking the 100th Anniversary of Marx's Death''
*''The Immortal Contributions of ''
*''A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror?''
*''Bullets: From the Writings Speeches and Interviews of Bob Avakian'' - A collection of quotes.
Printed Talks
*Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity, and
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Audio
*, includes question and answer session
* On War and Revolution, On Being a Revolutionary and Changing the World, interviewed by Carl Dix vol. 1 and 2, CD.
Video
*, Three Q Productions DVD
Critical opinions
* Ely, Mike. . December 2007.
* . . Communist Voice Organization, September 2005.
* Punkerslut.
* Oppenheimer, Mark. “”. ''The Boston Globe'', 27 January 2008.
Bill Martin (philosophy)
Bill Martin is a professor of Philosophy at DePaul University is best known for his work on Derrida, Sartre, Marxist theory, Aesthetics, and his critiques of Richard Rorty. Martin has written a few books on the subject of Prog Rock and bands like . He also considers himself a ; however rejects certain dogmatic princples of . He has certain affinity to the work of the and its chairman, Bob Avakian.
Beyond the relationship there are some major theoretical and philosophical differences as can be seen in the book co-written by both Avakian and Martin, "A Call to the Future," such as the question of the Ethical, the relation of productive forces to our contingency, and the legacy of Christianity. While Avakian takes a more stricter take on Marxism and the relationship between Morality and the economic base, Martin argues for a new re-envisioning of Ethics within Marxism.
*"Avant Rock: Experimental Music from the Beatles to Bjork"
*"Humanism and Its Aftermath: The Shared Fate of Deconstruction and Politics"
*"Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics" co-written with Bob Avakian.
*"Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory"
*"Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock"
*"Politics in the Impasse: Explorations in Postsecular Social Theory"
*"The radical project: Sartrean investigations"
Not yet Published
*"Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation "
Beyond the relationship there are some major theoretical and philosophical differences as can be seen in the book co-written by both Avakian and Martin, "A Call to the Future," such as the question of the Ethical, the relation of productive forces to our contingency, and the legacy of Christianity. While Avakian takes a more stricter take on Marxism and the relationship between Morality and the economic base, Martin argues for a new re-envisioning of Ethics within Marxism.
Works
*"Avant Rock: Experimental Music from the Beatles to Bjork"
*"Humanism and Its Aftermath: The Shared Fate of Deconstruction and Politics"
*"Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics" co-written with Bob Avakian.
*"Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory"
*"Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock"
*"Politics in the Impasse: Explorations in Postsecular Social Theory"
*"The radical project: Sartrean investigations"
Not yet Published
*"Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation "
Bill Epton
William Leo Epton Jr. , more popularly known simply as Bill Epton, was a Maoist African-American communist activist. He was Vice Chairman of the until approximately 1970, and chairman of its Harlem branch until that position went null upon Epton's incarceration for incitement to violence in 1964.
Epton was "the first person convicted of criminal anarchy since the of 1919" — reportedly for a crime of three words: "Burn, baby, burn."
According to his New York Times , Epton, a Harlem native, was a firebrand even early in his youth. "Even as a high school student," the obituary reads, "he demonstrated for civil rights and helped organize unions. He was drafted into the and served in the Korean War." Later, he became an electrician, and gravitated towards the Progressive Labor Movement and its activities.
On July 16, 1964, NYPD officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed a 15-year-old African-American high school student, James Powell, in cold blood. Over the next few days, the people of Harlem rose up in one of the first major Northern rebellions of the period, marking a new stage in such uprisings
Epton and his comrades plastered the streets of Harlem with a poster: ''Wanted For Murder – Gilligan the Cop''. The city administration declared a state of emergency in Harlem, prohibiting all demonstrations. While most of the reformist leaders went along with this ban, Epton and the Harlem branch of PL called for a peaceful rally on 125th Street for July 25. When Epton and the others began to march, Epton was arrested, charged with "criminal anarchy," tried, found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison.
The Epton trial was postponed to August 2, 1965. New York City Mayor Wagner, speaking to a group of students while traveling in Denmark, meanwhile said the rebellion Epton participated in was "a social revolution – a demand by a minority for equal rights" .
Epton wrote a militant speech he made to the court at his sentencing hearing. Progressive Labor Party published it as a pamphlet on February 2, 1966.
Epton was eventually released on bail while he appealed his conviction. Meanwhile, Progressive Labor began to change its line on the national question, the developments of which Epton apparently found politically unacceptable. They denounced all national liberation movements that did not aim directly for socialism, such as the , and also made some rather searing criticisms of the Black Panther Party .
After Epton left PL, he was involved in new attempts to unite revolutionary Marxists in the U.S. in the early 1970s. The appeal of his conviction was eventually rejected and he was forced to serve the remainder of that year in prison . However, such activity as Epton had engaged in was changed back to constitutional a mere two years after Epton's imprisonment. The New York Times obituary article says that Leon Friedman of Hofstra University School of Law noted: "They changed the rules. Had the new rule been in effect, he [Epton] probably would have won."
Epton played a founding role in the A. Philip Randolph Labor Council. He was also an information officer and printer at the New York City Board of Education after serving a year on Rikers Island. He died at a local hospital in his hometown of Harlem. He is survived by two children and three grandchildren.
Epton was "the first person convicted of criminal anarchy since the of 1919" — reportedly for a crime of three words: "Burn, baby, burn."
Origins
According to his New York Times , Epton, a Harlem native, was a firebrand even early in his youth. "Even as a high school student," the obituary reads, "he demonstrated for civil rights and helped organize unions. He was drafted into the and served in the Korean War." Later, he became an electrician, and gravitated towards the Progressive Labor Movement and its activities.
Background to the Epton court case
On July 16, 1964, NYPD officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed a 15-year-old African-American high school student, James Powell, in cold blood. Over the next few days, the people of Harlem rose up in one of the first major Northern rebellions of the period, marking a new stage in such uprisings
Epton and his comrades plastered the streets of Harlem with a poster: ''Wanted For Murder – Gilligan the Cop''. The city administration declared a state of emergency in Harlem, prohibiting all demonstrations. While most of the reformist leaders went along with this ban, Epton and the Harlem branch of PL called for a peaceful rally on 125th Street for July 25. When Epton and the others began to march, Epton was arrested, charged with "criminal anarchy," tried, found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison.
The Epton trial was postponed to August 2, 1965. New York City Mayor Wagner, speaking to a group of students while traveling in Denmark, meanwhile said the rebellion Epton participated in was "a social revolution – a demand by a minority for equal rights" .
''We Accuse''
Epton wrote a militant speech he made to the court at his sentencing hearing. Progressive Labor Party published it as a pamphlet on February 2, 1966.
Epton breaks with PL
Epton was eventually released on bail while he appealed his conviction. Meanwhile, Progressive Labor began to change its line on the national question, the developments of which Epton apparently found politically unacceptable. They denounced all national liberation movements that did not aim directly for socialism, such as the , and also made some rather searing criticisms of the Black Panther Party .
After Epton left PL, he was involved in new attempts to unite revolutionary Marxists in the U.S. in the early 1970s. The appeal of his conviction was eventually rejected and he was forced to serve the remainder of that year in prison . However, such activity as Epton had engaged in was changed back to constitutional a mere two years after Epton's imprisonment. The New York Times obituary article says that Leon Friedman of Hofstra University School of Law noted: "They changed the rules. Had the new rule been in effect, he [Epton] probably would have won."
Epton played a founding role in the A. Philip Randolph Labor Council. He was also an information officer and printer at the New York City Board of Education after serving a year on Rikers Island. He died at a local hospital in his hometown of Harlem. He is survived by two children and three grandchildren.
Anti-Revisionism
In the movement, an anti-revisionist is one who favors the line of theory and practice associated with ----, usually stated in this way so as to show direct opposition to the --- path of Trotskyism. Anti-revisionists claim that the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership represented the last and final correct and successful practical implementation of the ideas of the ideas of , and in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . However, the anti-revisionist movement is also split with regard to the status of Mao: those that hold to Maoism basically uphold him and his ideas and policies, whereas Hoxhaist groups do not.
Anti-revisionism is seen by its followers as a healthy, solid, scientific ideological road, devoid of both the alleged and elitism of Trotskyism, and the perceived idealism of Left Communism. Nevertheless, "anti-revisionism" can also be a vague and controversial label, particularly in those cases where groups will argue over which of them is really the "true" anti-revisionist.
Anti-revisionism is based on the view that the Soviet Union successfully implemented Marxism-Leninism during approximately the first thirty years of its existence from the time of the October Revolution until the Secret Speech and peaceful coexistence of 1956. Anti-revisionists point out that Stalin's policies not only achieved impressive rates of economic growth and argue that such growth could have been sustained and a prosperous communism could have been achieved if the Soviet Union had remained on this same course ; they also typically further allege that the worldwide ideological impact and leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s world labor movement represent a superior ideological and social model of real "" that was first ruined by the Secret Speech and was later to reemerge with China's Cultural Revolution, only to be ruined again by the capture and deposition of the Gang of Four by China's "" .
According to anti-revisionists, these later attempts to 'fix' or ''revise'' the socialist system represented a shift onto the and ultimately led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the betrayal of communist principles in all self-proclaimed communist countries. Thus, '''' is seen as the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist republics.
After years of direct experience with China that led him first to write the book '''', author then experienced Chinese economic reform and, with this experience, wrote an angry anti-revisionist book entitled ''''. Both books, as well as Hinton's work generally, still tend to have much resonance among many anti-revisionists in the communist movement today.
Self-proclaimed anti-revisionists firmly oppose the reforms initiated in by leaders like Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping in China. They generally refer to such reforms and states as and . They also reject Trotskyism and its "Permanent Revolution" as hypocritical by arguing that Trotsky himself had at one time thought it acceptable that socialism could work in a single country as long as that country was industrialized, but that Trotsky had considered Russia too backward to achieve such industrialization what it later in fact did achieve, mostly through his archenemy Stalin's s. In their own right, anti-revisionists also acknowledge that the Soviet Union contained a "new class" or "'red' bourgeoisie," but they generally place the blame for the formation of that class on Nikita Khruschev and his successors. Therefore, in anti-revisionist circles, there is very little talk of class conflict in the Soviet Union before 1956, except when talking about specific contexts such as the Russian Civil War and World War II .
During the Sino-Soviet split, the governments of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong and Albania under proclaimed themselves to be taking an anti-revisionist line and denounced Khrushchev's policies in the Soviet Union. In the United States, those who supported China or Albania at the time were expelled from the United States Communist Party under orders from Moscow, and in 1961 they formed the Progressive Labor Movement. Anti-revisionist groups were further divided by the Sino-Albanian split, with those following Albania being loosely described as Hoxhaist.
Several in the United States still see themselves as explicitly anti-revisionist. Not every contemporary communist party around the world adhering to elements of anti-revisionism necessarily adopts the label "anti-revisionist"; many such organizations may call themselves Maoist, Marxist-Leninist or even just simply "revolutionary communist". The Workers Party of Korea still claims an anti-revisionist political line; however, this may not be an accurate label either in self-description or description by others, because of the official 'supersedence' of Marxist-Leninist thought in North Korea by the ideology of Juche.
Those at a level claiming an anti-revisionist orientation actually vary widely in their ideological perspectives from within communism. An amalgamated list of the more famous self-proclaimed anti-revisionist leaders:
*Stalin
*Kim Il-Sung
*Kim Jong-il
*Enver Hoxha
*Mao Zedong
*Ho Chi Minh
*Che Guevara
*Hardial Bains
*Bill Bland
*William Z. Foster
*Harry Haywood
*Nelson Peery
*Bob Avakian
*?brahim Kaypakkaya
*Prachanda
*Hua Guofeng
*Gang of Four
*Ludo Martens
*Tron ?grim
*Harpal Brar
*Jose Maria Sison
*
*Workers Party of Korea
*Communist Party of Great Britain
*Communist Party of Nepal
*Communist Party of the Philippines
*Freedom Road Socialist Organization
*Maoist Internationalist Movement
*Communist Party of India
*Ray O. Light Group
*Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
*Parti marxiste-léniniste du Québec
*Progressive Labor Party
*Party of Labour of Albania
Anti-revisionism is seen by its followers as a healthy, solid, scientific ideological road, devoid of both the alleged and elitism of Trotskyism, and the perceived idealism of Left Communism. Nevertheless, "anti-revisionism" can also be a vague and controversial label, particularly in those cases where groups will argue over which of them is really the "true" anti-revisionist.
Anti-revisionism is based on the view that the Soviet Union successfully implemented Marxism-Leninism during approximately the first thirty years of its existence from the time of the October Revolution until the Secret Speech and peaceful coexistence of 1956. Anti-revisionists point out that Stalin's policies not only achieved impressive rates of economic growth and argue that such growth could have been sustained and a prosperous communism could have been achieved if the Soviet Union had remained on this same course ; they also typically further allege that the worldwide ideological impact and leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s world labor movement represent a superior ideological and social model of real "" that was first ruined by the Secret Speech and was later to reemerge with China's Cultural Revolution, only to be ruined again by the capture and deposition of the Gang of Four by China's "" .
According to anti-revisionists, these later attempts to 'fix' or ''revise'' the socialist system represented a shift onto the and ultimately led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the betrayal of communist principles in all self-proclaimed communist countries. Thus, '''' is seen as the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist republics.
After years of direct experience with China that led him first to write the book '''', author then experienced Chinese economic reform and, with this experience, wrote an angry anti-revisionist book entitled ''''. Both books, as well as Hinton's work generally, still tend to have much resonance among many anti-revisionists in the communist movement today.
Background
Self-proclaimed anti-revisionists firmly oppose the reforms initiated in by leaders like Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping in China. They generally refer to such reforms and states as and . They also reject Trotskyism and its "Permanent Revolution" as hypocritical by arguing that Trotsky himself had at one time thought it acceptable that socialism could work in a single country as long as that country was industrialized, but that Trotsky had considered Russia too backward to achieve such industrialization what it later in fact did achieve, mostly through his archenemy Stalin's s. In their own right, anti-revisionists also acknowledge that the Soviet Union contained a "new class" or "'red' bourgeoisie," but they generally place the blame for the formation of that class on Nikita Khruschev and his successors. Therefore, in anti-revisionist circles, there is very little talk of class conflict in the Soviet Union before 1956, except when talking about specific contexts such as the Russian Civil War and World War II .
During the Sino-Soviet split, the governments of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong and Albania under proclaimed themselves to be taking an anti-revisionist line and denounced Khrushchev's policies in the Soviet Union. In the United States, those who supported China or Albania at the time were expelled from the United States Communist Party under orders from Moscow, and in 1961 they formed the Progressive Labor Movement. Anti-revisionist groups were further divided by the Sino-Albanian split, with those following Albania being loosely described as Hoxhaist.
Several in the United States still see themselves as explicitly anti-revisionist. Not every contemporary communist party around the world adhering to elements of anti-revisionism necessarily adopts the label "anti-revisionist"; many such organizations may call themselves Maoist, Marxist-Leninist or even just simply "revolutionary communist". The Workers Party of Korea still claims an anti-revisionist political line; however, this may not be an accurate label either in self-description or description by others, because of the official 'supersedence' of Marxist-Leninist thought in North Korea by the ideology of Juche.
Anti-Revisionist leaders
Those at a level claiming an anti-revisionist orientation actually vary widely in their ideological perspectives from within communism. An amalgamated list of the more famous self-proclaimed anti-revisionist leaders:
*Stalin
*Kim Il-Sung
*Kim Jong-il
*Enver Hoxha
*Mao Zedong
*Ho Chi Minh
*Che Guevara
*Hardial Bains
*Bill Bland
*William Z. Foster
*Harry Haywood
*Nelson Peery
*Bob Avakian
*?brahim Kaypakkaya
*Prachanda
*Hua Guofeng
*Gang of Four
*Ludo Martens
*Tron ?grim
*Harpal Brar
*Jose Maria Sison
Anti-revisionist groups
*
*Workers Party of Korea
*Communist Party of Great Britain
*Communist Party of Nepal
*Communist Party of the Philippines
*Freedom Road Socialist Organization
*Maoist Internationalist Movement
*Communist Party of India
*Ray O. Light Group
*Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
*Parti marxiste-léniniste du Québec
*Progressive Labor Party
Former anti-revisionist groups
*Party of Labour of Albania
Antagonistic contradiction
Antagonistic contradiction is the impossibility of compromise between different . The term is most often applied in Maoist theory, which holds that differences between the two primary classes, the working class/proletariat and the bourgeoisie are so great that there is no way to bring about a reconciliation of their views. Because the groups involved have diametrically opposed concerns, their objectives are so dissimilar and contradictory that no mutually acceptable resolution can be found. Nonantagonistic contradictions may be resolved through mere debate, but antagonistic contradictions can only be resolved through struggle.
The term is usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin, although he may never have actually used the term in any of his written works.
In Maoism, the antagonistic contradiction was usually that between the and the . Mao Zedong expressed his views on the policy in his famous February 1957 speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People."
The term is usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin, although he may never have actually used the term in any of his written works.
In Maoism, the antagonistic contradiction was usually that between the and the . Mao Zedong expressed his views on the policy in his famous February 1957 speech "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People."
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is a prominent Marxist philosopher, formerly chair of philosophy at the ?cole Normale Supérieure . Along with Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, Badiou is a prominent figure in an anti-postmodern strand of continental philosophy. Particularly through a creative appropriation of set theory from his early interest in mathematics, Badiou seeks to recover the concepts of , truth and the in a way that is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of .
Badiou was trained formally as a philosopher as a student at the ?cole Normale Supérieure from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he took courses at the . He had a lively and constant interest in mathematics. He was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the . The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, ''Almagestes'', in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan.
The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to the far Left, and he participated in increasingly radical communist and Maoist groups, such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of University of Paris VIII , which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.
In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline , Badiou published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as ''Théorie du sujet'' , and his magnum opus, ''Being and Event'' . Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works.
He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège International de Philosophie. He is now a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which he founded with some comrades from the Maoist UCFML in 1985. Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as ''Ahmed le Subtil''.
In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been translated into English, such as ''Ethics'', ''Deleuze'', ''Manifesto for Philosophy'', ''Metapolitics'', and ''Being and Event''. Short pieces by Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as ''Lacanian Ink'', ''New Left Review'', Radical philosophy, Cosmos and History and ''Parrhesia''. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of the poor in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.
Lately Badiou got into a fierce controversy within the confines of Parisian intellectual life. It started in 2005 with the publication of his "Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif'" - The Uses of the Word "Jew" . This book generated a strong response with calls of Badiou being labelled Anti-Semitic. The wrangling became a cause célèbre with articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in the cultural journal "Les temps modernes." Another philosopher Jean-Claude Milner has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.
Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy. One of the aims of his thought is to show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique. Therefore, he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery. Johannes Thumfart argues that Badiou's philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.
According to Badiou, philosophy takes place under four conditions , which he maintains are truth procedures, in the sense that they produce philosophical truths. Badiou consistently maintains throughout his work that philosophy must avoid the temptation to attach its own truth to that of any of the discourses, a process he terms a philosophical "disaster". Badiou often attempts to find 'points of suture', or places of exceptional connection between the truths produced by the various discourses. It should be noted that Badiou's concept of truth procedure does not imply a denial of external reality. Badiou, following Lacan, uses 'the real' to designate the space of existing but unsymbolizable reality that can only be thought retroactively through the truth procedures. Thus, while a truth procedure is required to access the real, the real also serves as an external limit on the possibility of its production of truth.
In "the Handbook of Inaesthetics" Badiou coins the phrase 'inaesthetic' to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation". Reacting against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of 'nature', Badiou claims that art is 'immanent' and 'singular'. Immanent, in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art, and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone. His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them." He develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Fernando Pessoa , among others.
The major propositions of Badiou's philosophy all find their basis in ''Being and Event'', in which he continues his attempt to reconcile a notion of the subject with ontology, and in particular and ontologies. A frequent criticism of post structuralist work is that it prohibits, through its fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject. Badiou's work is, by his own admission, an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language, which he sees almost as a straitjacket. This effort leads him, in ''Being and Event'', to combine rigorous mathematical formulae with his readings of poets such as Mallarmé and and religious thinkers such as . His philosophy draws equally upon 'analytical' and 'continental' traditions. In Badiou's own opinion, this combination places him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries, meaning that his work had been only slowly taken up. ''Being and Event'' offers an example of this slow uptake, in fact: it was translated into English only in 2005, a full seventeen years after its French publication.
As is implied in the title of the book, two elements mark the thesis of ''Being and Event'': the place of ontology, or 'the science of being qua being' , and the place of the event — which is seen as a rupture in ontology — through which the subject finds his or her realization and reconciliation with truth. This situation of being and the rupture which characterizes the event are thought in terms of set theory, and specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory , to which Badiou accords a fundamental role in a manner quite distinct from the majority of either mathematicians or philosophers.
For Badiou the problem which the tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is the problem that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, ''it'' is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not. This is why Badiou accords set theory such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a 'pure doctrine of the multiple'. Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set . What separates sets out therefore is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties validate its presentation; which is to say their ''structural'' relation. The ''structure'' of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one. So if one is to think of a set — for instance, the set of people, or humanity — as counting as one the elements which belong to that set, it can then secure the multiple as one consistent concept , but only in terms of what does ''not'' belong to that set. What is, in following, crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable, implies that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such , but rather the void set , the set to which nothing belongs. It may help to understand the concept 'count-as-one' if it is associated with the concept of 'terming': a multiple is ''not'' one, but it is referred to with 'multiple': one word. To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as 'multiple' does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology, within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term, does not coincide with what is understood by 'terminology', which is precisely difference conditioning meaning. Since the idea of conceiving of a term without meaning does not compute, the count-as-one is a ''structural effect'' or a ''situational operation'' and not an event of truth. Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects; inconsistent multiplicity is the presentation of presentation.
Badiou's use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. So too does the axiom of foundation — or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity — enact such a prohibition . Badiou's philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the 'one': there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore — against , from whom he draws heavily — staunchly . However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically , it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently 'pragmatically abandoned' an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.
The principle of the event is where Badiou diverges from the majority of late twentieth century philosophy and social thought, and in particular the likes of , , Lacan and Deleuze, among others. In short, it represents that which cannot be discerned in ontology. Badiou's problem here is, unsurprisingly, the question of how to 'make use' of that which cannot be discerned. But it is a problem he views as vital, because if one constructs the world only from that which can be discerned and therefore given a name, it results in either the destitution of subjectivity and the removal of the subject from ontology , or the Panglossian solution of Leibniz: that God is language in its supposed completion.
Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory — Badiou's language of ontology — to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician , using what are called the ''conditions'' of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set. Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one's being-in-the-world and one's being in language . However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination — in the terms of mathematical ontology — as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination. One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a 'set of dominations', which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls . And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject — about which the ontological situation cannot comment — to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event. Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.
Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains by which a subject nominates and maintains fidelity to an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecideability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.
In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the 'evental' rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming ''anew''. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' , but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo :
:''When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced , have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?''
Badiou, whilst keen to stress the non-equivalence between politics and philosophy, thus finds his political approach — one of activism, militancy, and scepticism of parliamentary-democratic process — backed up by his philosophy based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.
*''Le concept de modèle''
*''Théorie du sujet''
*''Peut-on penser la politique?''
*''L'?tre et l'?vénement''
*''Manifeste pour la philosophie''
*''Le nombre et les nombres''
*''Conditions''
*''L'?thique''
*''Deleuze''
*''. La fondation de l'universalisme''
*''Abrégé de métapolitique''
*''Court traité d'ontologie provisoire''
*''Petit manuel d'inesthétique''
*''D'un désastre obscur''
*''Le siècle''
*''Logiques des mondes. L'être et l'événement, 2.''
*''Rhapsodie pour le thé?tre''
*''Beckett, l'increvable désir''
*''Le Siècle''
*''Almagestes''
*''Portulans''
*''L'?charpe rouge''
*''Ahmed le subtil''
*''Ahmed Philosophe'', followed by ''Ahmed se f?che''
*''Les Citrouilles'', a comedy
*''Calme bloc ici-bas''
*''Théorie de la contradiction''
*''De l'idéologie'', with F. Balmès
*''Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégelienne'', with L. Mossot and J. Bellassen
*''Circonstances 1''
*''Circonstances 2''
*''Circonstances 3''
*''Circonstances 4: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom ?''
*''Manifesto for Philosophy'', transl. by Norman Madarasz;
*'''', transl. by Louise Burchill;
*''Ethics; An Essay on the Understanding of Evil'', transl. by Peter Hallward;
*''On Beckett'', transl. by A. Toscano, ed. by Nina Power;
*''Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy'', transl. and ed. by Oliver Feltham & Justin Clemens;
*''Metapolitics'', transl. by Jason Barker;
*''Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism''; transl. by Ray Brassier;
*''Handbook of Inaesthetics'', transl. by A. Toscano;
*''Theoretical Writings'', transl. by Ray Brassier;
*''Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology'', transl. by Norman Madarasz;
*''Being and Event'', transl. by O. Feltham;
*'''', transl. by Steve Corcoran;
*'''', transl. by A. Toscano;
*''The Concept of Model'', transl. by Zachery Luke Fraser & Tzuchien Tho; .
*''Number and Numbers'' : ISBN 0745638791 ; ISBN 0745638783
*''The Meaning of Sarkozy'' ''forthcoming'': ISBN 184467309X
*''Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2'', transl. by A. Toscano; ''forthcoming'': ISBN 0826494706
*''Theory of the Subject'', trans. by Bruno Bosteels; ''forthcoming'': ISBN 0826496733
*'''', transl. by Steve Corcoran; ''forthcoming'': ISBN 0826498272
*Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance: Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation, ''''; Location: Slought Foundation, Conversations in Theory Series | Organized by Aaron Levy | Studio: Microcinema in collaboration with Slought Foundation | DVD Release Date: August 26, 2008
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*''Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance.'' Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation
* Jason Barker, ''Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction'', London, Pluto Press, 2002.
* Peter Hallward, ''Badiou: A Subject to Truth'', Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
* Peter Hallward , ''Think Again: Badiou and the Future of Philosophy", London, Continuum, 2004.
* Paul Ashton , A. J. Bartlett , Justin Clemens : ''The Praxis of Alain Badiou''; .
* Adam Miller, ''Badiou, Marion, and St. Paul: Immanent Grace'', London, Continuum, 2008.
* Bruno Bosteels, ''Badiou and Politics'', Durham, Duke University Press, forthcoming.
* Oliver Feltham, ''Alain Badiou: Live Theory'', London, Continuum, 2008.
* Adrian Johnston, ''Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change'', Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009, forthcoming.
* Charles Ramond , ''Penser le multiple'', Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2002
* Fabien Tarby, ''La Philosophie d'Alain Badiou'', Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2005
* Fabien Tarby, ''Matérialismes d'aujourd'hui : de Deleuze à Badiou'' , Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2005
* Bruno Besana et Oliver Feltham , ''?crits autour de la pensée d'Alain Badiou'', Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2007.
* featuring original translations of Alain Badiou's work by Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weissman
* by Slavoj Zizek
* by Johannes Thumfart, in: The Symptom 9/2008.
* by Elie During
* Martinez, Timothy. . 141 . New York:
Biography
Badiou was trained formally as a philosopher as a student at the ?cole Normale Supérieure from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he took courses at the . He had a lively and constant interest in mathematics. He was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the . The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, ''Almagestes'', in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser and grew increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan.
The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to the far Left, and he participated in increasingly radical communist and Maoist groups, such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of University of Paris VIII , which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.
In the 1980s, as both Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline , Badiou published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as ''Théorie du sujet'' , and his magnum opus, ''Being and Event'' . Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works.
He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège International de Philosophie. He is now a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which he founded with some comrades from the Maoist UCFML in 1985. Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as ''Ahmed le Subtil''.
In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been translated into English, such as ''Ethics'', ''Deleuze'', ''Manifesto for Philosophy'', ''Metapolitics'', and ''Being and Event''. Short pieces by Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as ''Lacanian Ink'', ''New Left Review'', Radical philosophy, Cosmos and History and ''Parrhesia''. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in movements of the poor in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa where he is often read together with Frantz Fanon.
Lately Badiou got into a fierce controversy within the confines of Parisian intellectual life. It started in 2005 with the publication of his "Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif'" - The Uses of the Word "Jew" . This book generated a strong response with calls of Badiou being labelled Anti-Semitic. The wrangling became a cause célèbre with articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in the cultural journal "Les temps modernes." Another philosopher Jean-Claude Milner has accused Badiou of Anti-Semitism.
Key concepts
Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy. One of the aims of his thought is to show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique. Therefore, he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery. Johannes Thumfart argues that Badiou's philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.
Four discourses
According to Badiou, philosophy takes place under four conditions , which he maintains are truth procedures, in the sense that they produce philosophical truths. Badiou consistently maintains throughout his work that philosophy must avoid the temptation to attach its own truth to that of any of the discourses, a process he terms a philosophical "disaster". Badiou often attempts to find 'points of suture', or places of exceptional connection between the truths produced by the various discourses. It should be noted that Badiou's concept of truth procedure does not imply a denial of external reality. Badiou, following Lacan, uses 'the real' to designate the space of existing but unsymbolizable reality that can only be thought retroactively through the truth procedures. Thus, while a truth procedure is required to access the real, the real also serves as an external limit on the possibility of its production of truth.
Inaesthetic
In "the Handbook of Inaesthetics" Badiou coins the phrase 'inaesthetic' to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation". Reacting against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of 'nature', Badiou claims that art is 'immanent' and 'singular'. Immanent, in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art, and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone. His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them." He develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Fernando Pessoa , among others.
Introduction to ''Being and Event''
The major propositions of Badiou's philosophy all find their basis in ''Being and Event'', in which he continues his attempt to reconcile a notion of the subject with ontology, and in particular and ontologies. A frequent criticism of post structuralist work is that it prohibits, through its fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject. Badiou's work is, by his own admission, an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language, which he sees almost as a straitjacket. This effort leads him, in ''Being and Event'', to combine rigorous mathematical formulae with his readings of poets such as Mallarmé and and religious thinkers such as . His philosophy draws equally upon 'analytical' and 'continental' traditions. In Badiou's own opinion, this combination places him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries, meaning that his work had been only slowly taken up. ''Being and Event'' offers an example of this slow uptake, in fact: it was translated into English only in 2005, a full seventeen years after its French publication.
As is implied in the title of the book, two elements mark the thesis of ''Being and Event'': the place of ontology, or 'the science of being qua being' , and the place of the event — which is seen as a rupture in ontology — through which the subject finds his or her realization and reconciliation with truth. This situation of being and the rupture which characterizes the event are thought in terms of set theory, and specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory , to which Badiou accords a fundamental role in a manner quite distinct from the majority of either mathematicians or philosophers.
Mathematics as ontology
For Badiou the problem which the tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is the problem that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, ''it'' is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not. This is why Badiou accords set theory such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a 'pure doctrine of the multiple'. Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set . What separates sets out therefore is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties validate its presentation; which is to say their ''structural'' relation. The ''structure'' of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one. So if one is to think of a set — for instance, the set of people, or humanity — as counting as one the elements which belong to that set, it can then secure the multiple as one consistent concept , but only in terms of what does ''not'' belong to that set. What is, in following, crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable, implies that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such , but rather the void set , the set to which nothing belongs. It may help to understand the concept 'count-as-one' if it is associated with the concept of 'terming': a multiple is ''not'' one, but it is referred to with 'multiple': one word. To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as 'multiple' does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology, within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term, does not coincide with what is understood by 'terminology', which is precisely difference conditioning meaning. Since the idea of conceiving of a term without meaning does not compute, the count-as-one is a ''structural effect'' or a ''situational operation'' and not an event of truth. Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects; inconsistent multiplicity is the presentation of presentation.
Badiou's use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell's paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. So too does the axiom of foundation — or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity — enact such a prohibition . Badiou's philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the 'one': there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore — against , from whom he draws heavily — staunchly . However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically , it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently 'pragmatically abandoned' an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.
The event and the subject
The principle of the event is where Badiou diverges from the majority of late twentieth century philosophy and social thought, and in particular the likes of , , Lacan and Deleuze, among others. In short, it represents that which cannot be discerned in ontology. Badiou's problem here is, unsurprisingly, the question of how to 'make use' of that which cannot be discerned. But it is a problem he views as vital, because if one constructs the world only from that which can be discerned and therefore given a name, it results in either the destitution of subjectivity and the removal of the subject from ontology , or the Panglossian solution of Leibniz: that God is language in its supposed completion.
Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory — Badiou's language of ontology — to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician , using what are called the ''conditions'' of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set. Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one's being-in-the-world and one's being in language . However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination — in the terms of mathematical ontology — as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination. One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a 'set of dominations', which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls . And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject — about which the ontological situation cannot comment — to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event. Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.
Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains by which a subject nominates and maintains fidelity to an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecideability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.
In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the 'evental' rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming ''anew''. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' , but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo :
:''When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced , have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?''
Badiou, whilst keen to stress the non-equivalence between politics and philosophy, thus finds his political approach — one of activism, militancy, and scepticism of parliamentary-democratic process — backed up by his philosophy based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.
Works
Philosophy
*''Le concept de modèle''
*''Théorie du sujet''
*''Peut-on penser la politique?''
*''L'?tre et l'?vénement''
*''Manifeste pour la philosophie''
*''Le nombre et les nombres''
*''Conditions''
*''L'?thique''
*''Deleuze''
*''. La fondation de l'universalisme''
*''Abrégé de métapolitique''
*''Court traité d'ontologie provisoire''
*''Petit manuel d'inesthétique''
*''D'un désastre obscur''
*''Le siècle''
*''Logiques des mondes. L'être et l'événement, 2.''
Critical essays
*''Rhapsodie pour le thé?tre''
*''Beckett, l'increvable désir''
*''Le Siècle''
Literature and drama
*''Almagestes''
*''Portulans''
*''L'?charpe rouge''
*''Ahmed le subtil''
*''Ahmed Philosophe'', followed by ''Ahmed se f?che''
*''Les Citrouilles'', a comedy
*''Calme bloc ici-bas''
Political essays
*''Théorie de la contradiction''
*''De l'idéologie'', with F. Balmès
*''Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégelienne'', with L. Mossot and J. Bellassen
*''Circonstances 1''
*''Circonstances 2''
*''Circonstances 3''
*''Circonstances 4: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom ?''
English translations
Books
*''Manifesto for Philosophy'', transl. by Norman Madarasz;
*'''', transl. by Louise Burchill;
*''Ethics; An Essay on the Understanding of Evil'', transl. by Peter Hallward;
*''On Beckett'', transl. by A. Toscano, ed. by Nina Power;
*''Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy'', transl. and ed. by Oliver Feltham & Justin Clemens;
*''Metapolitics'', transl. by Jason Barker;
*''Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism''; transl. by Ray Brassier;
*''Handbook of Inaesthetics'', transl. by A. Toscano;
*''Theoretical Writings'', transl. by Ray Brassier;
*''Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology'', transl. by Norman Madarasz;
*''Being and Event'', transl. by O. Feltham;
*'''', transl. by Steve Corcoran;
*'''', transl. by A. Toscano;
*''The Concept of Model'', transl. by Zachery Luke Fraser & Tzuchien Tho; .
*''Number and Numbers'' : ISBN 0745638791 ; ISBN 0745638783
*''The Meaning of Sarkozy'' ''forthcoming'': ISBN 184467309X
*''Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2'', transl. by A. Toscano; ''forthcoming'': ISBN 0826494706
*''Theory of the Subject'', trans. by Bruno Bosteels; ''forthcoming'': ISBN 0826496733
*'''', transl. by Steve Corcoran; ''forthcoming'': ISBN 0826498272
DVD
*Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance: Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation, ''''; Location: Slought Foundation, Conversations in Theory Series | Organized by Aaron Levy | Studio: Microcinema in collaboration with Slought Foundation | DVD Release Date: August 26, 2008
Articles by Badiou
In English
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Videos of Badiou
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*''Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance.'' Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation
Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in English
* Jason Barker, ''Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction'', London, Pluto Press, 2002.
* Peter Hallward, ''Badiou: A Subject to Truth'', Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
* Peter Hallward , ''Think Again: Badiou and the Future of Philosophy", London, Continuum, 2004.
* Paul Ashton , A. J. Bartlett , Justin Clemens : ''The Praxis of Alain Badiou''; .
* Adam Miller, ''Badiou, Marion, and St. Paul: Immanent Grace'', London, Continuum, 2008.
* Bruno Bosteels, ''Badiou and Politics'', Durham, Duke University Press, forthcoming.
* Oliver Feltham, ''Alain Badiou: Live Theory'', London, Continuum, 2008.
* Adrian Johnston, ''Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change'', Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009, forthcoming.
Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in French
* Charles Ramond , ''Penser le multiple'', Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2002
* Fabien Tarby, ''La Philosophie d'Alain Badiou'', Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2005
* Fabien Tarby, ''Matérialismes d'aujourd'hui : de Deleuze à Badiou'' , Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2005
* Bruno Besana et Oliver Feltham , ''?crits autour de la pensée d'Alain Badiou'', Paris, ?ditions L'Harmattan, 2007.
Secondary Literature on Badiou's Work in English
* featuring original translations of Alain Badiou's work by Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weissman
* by Slavoj Zizek
* by Johannes Thumfart, in: The Symptom 9/2008.
* by Elie During
* Martinez, Timothy. . 141 . New York:
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