Left Forum

The Renewal of Radical Thought and the Question of Communism 

Saturday, June 8, 5:30pm | Room: W520

Chaired by McKenzie Wark; with Bruno Bosteels, Jodi Dean, and Razmig Keucheyan

As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely—the struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefield, where the outcome of the crisis will in part be decided, will be that of theory. Over the last quarter century, radical intellectuals across the world have produced important and innovative ideas on how to transform the world without falling into the traps of past catastrophic—so-called socialist—experiments. Razmig Keucheyan, in his forthcoming book Mapping Critical Theory Today, offers the first global cartography of the theory battlefield. In The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. Bruno Bosteels, in The Actuality of Communism, discusses new currents of thought that make it possible to thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. McKenzie Wark's The Spectacle of Disintegration is at once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets

via www.versobooks.com