Sunday, December 7, 6:30 p.m.
Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. (at Alcatraz), Oakland
come up the back stairs

A point of intersection between thoughtful anarchism and anti-state Marxism is John P. Clark’s new book The Impossible Community, which comes out of the Social Ecology of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin’s ideas have been cited lately as one of the influences among Kurds of Turkey and northern Syria where they are trying to establish an egalitarian, gender-equal community.

Clark turns to Hegel’s dialectic to address the problem of free and full development after a revolution when new forms like popular assemblies appear and he challenges Bookchin’s idea that popular assemblies are pure “unmediated social relations.” Freedom, for Clark, means confronting anew the necessarily mediated character of social relations.

An Anarchist/Marxist-Humanist dialog will engage this issue from the perspective of Hegel’s concept of dialectical mediation. Hegel saw the need for his dialectic to be projected directly into the fray as the prevailing discourse late in his life had retrogressed into two opposite forms of “immediate truth:” either a fundamentalist attitude toward scripture or an “enlightened” pure intuitionism. The new November/December issue of News & Letters is now available on-line at newsandletters.org. It includes an essay on “The Syrian Revolution and its philosophy” and an editorial, “Rojava & Syria’s revolution.” Also the critique of the current local reading of Ken Knabb’s new translation of the Society of the Spectacle has been rounded out on the blog, Party of the Concept.