Book•
Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
01 Jan 2015-
TL;DR: The first selection published from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks to be made available in Britain, and was originally published in the early 1970s as discussed by the authors, was the first publication of the Notebooks in the UK.
Abstract: Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, are the work of one of the most original thinkers in twentieth century Europe. Gramsci has had a profound influence on debates about the relationship between politics and culture. His complex and fruitful approach to questions of ideology, power and change remains crucial for critical theory. This volume was the first selection published from the Notebooks to be made available in Britain, and was originally published in the early 1970s. It contains the most important of Gramsci's notebooks, including the texts of The Modern Prince, and Americanism and Fordism, and extensive notes on the state and civil society, Italian history and the role of intellectuals. 'Far the best informative apparatus available to any foreign language readership of Gramsci.' Perry Anderson, New Left Review 'A model of scholarship' New Statesman
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used Gramscian perspectives on hegemony and intellectuals to trace the contradictory formation of the contemporary Zimbabwean ruling class and argue that the present ruling group has consolidated and is maintaining its hegemony.
Abstract: This article uses Gramscian perspectives on hegemony and intellectuals to trace the contradictory formation of the contemporary Zimbabwean ruling class. It argues, contrary to views claiming that there is no hegemonic discourse (or, presumably, class) in Zimbabwe, that the present ruling group has consolidated and is maintaining its hegemony. To be sure, such a process is unstable and subject to much contestation, but the historical evidence indicates that the nascent state class has handled such contradictions —many of which were internal to it —with a judicious balance of persuasion and force. The main ideological contradictions experienced by the intellectuals on the road to power —an early form of ‘populism versus elitism’ and a later one of ‘Marxism versus capitalism’ —were resolved in favour of the latter tendencies through a process of physical sidelining and discursive absorption. There is little reason to believe that the contemporary ruling class will not continue to maintain its position in suc...
57 citations
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the concrete rationality of labor's revolutionary nature necessarily hinges on a ratio to emergent final causes for which consciousness of such is itself the rational kernel of the religious.
Abstract: FROM MODES OF PRODUCTION TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY: A LABOR THEORY OF REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECTIVITY & RELIGIOUS IDEAS Ben Suriano Marquette University, 2016 In this dissertation I attempt two needed tasks within historical materialism: first, to reestablish the standpoint of labor as the normative basis for critical theory beyond irrational bourgeois categories, and second, to show that labor’s own self-mediating rationalization, if it is to move beyond these contradictory categories, necessarily requires a certain religious-utopian consciousness. The dominant Weberian and Marxist paradigms for understanding labor and its relation to the religious variously perpetuated irrational bourgeois conceptions of labor as a bare efficient cause, with religion paternalistically positioned as an inherently idealist or mystifying external form. I argue, however, that the concrete rationality of labor’s revolutionary nature necessarily hinges on a ratio to emergent final causes for which consciousness of such is itself the rational kernel of the religious. Thus I retain the historical materialist primacy of the modes of production as an organizing concept but with a more comprehensive account of its selftranscending movement. Herein the religious arises internally as a non-reductive function of labor’s self-understanding as more than a disposable instrument. I claim any materialist critique of alienated labor implies this religious-utopian consciousness, and therefore any critique of religion must presuppose the normative form of the religious as revolutionary rather than reactionary, reflecting ideal trajectories generated from the productive forces in their basic revolutionizing transformation of nature. More specifically, I argue that theoretically the one religious-utopian ideal transcendentally necessary for grasping the normative standpoint of the laboring body as its own emergent final cause, without external mediation, is the resurrection of the body. I then substantiate this historically. The comprehensive rationality of the modes of production demands that the Marxist distinction between historical periods of formal and real subsumptions yield new assessments of pre-capitalist religious ideology as positively integral to labor’s self-mediating history. I then genealogically trace a Hebraic discourse on bodily resurrection whose revolutionarily demythologized form emerged directly from and for social consciousness of its communal mode of production. I further demonstrate historically that prior to capitalism the laboring body became intelligible to itself as constitutively active without idealist inversions under this certain Judeo-Christian articulation of the resurrection of the body.
56 citations
TL;DR: Like military might and financial resources, the conventional forms of political influence, information is an important source of influence in international relations as discussed by the authors, and information is a powerful source of information that can be used to influence international relations.
Abstract: Like military might and financial resources – the conventional forms of political influence – information is an important source of influence in international relations. International organisations...
56 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore two of these practices, information literacy and media literacy, through an examination of their histories and practices, and propose a future direction for digital literacy.
Abstract: Digital literacy often serves as an ‘umbrella’ term for a range of distinct educational practices which seek to equip the user to function in digitally rich societies. This article explores two of these practices, information literacy and media literacy and through an examination of their histories and practices proposes a future direction for digital literacy. The article consists of three main sections. Section one considers the history of information literacy. The gradual development and refinement of information literacy is traced through a number of key texts and proclamations. Section two is concerned with media literacy. It is noted that media literacy education evolved in three broad strands with each pursuing differing political ends and utilising different techniques. The three approaches are still evident and differences in contemporary media education practices can be understood through this framework. The final section argues that while media and information literacy offer much there are deficiencies in both: media literacy lacks a full engagement with the nature of digital technology and how digital technology affords users new communicative practices while information literacy has not fully developed a critical approach in the way media literacy has. It is asserted that integrating and strategically revisiting both approaches offers a digitally aware and critically nuanced direction for digital literacy.
56 citations
TL;DR: The idea of social evolution is one of the master ideas of modem social science as discussed by the authors and it has served as benchmarks for measuring the progress of Western science for two hundred years the various phases of its development have been charted by the twists and turns that have marked the history of social evolutionary theory.
56 citations