The essay examines some moments of Benjamin's theoretical and political turn toward Marxism by catching some aspects of his early position within Western Marxism. The focus is from his meeting with Asja Lacis and his trip to Moscow to the time before his dialogue with Brecht, the phase referred to here as pre-Brechtian. Benjamin's reflections on the construction of a proletarian culture and literature are connected with the theme of the heritage of bourgeois culture and literature in the transition from the phase of wartime communism to that of the stabilization of the NEP, and the consequences of this on the German cultural milieu. Thus, the first traits of what can be called Benjaminian Marxism become evident.
This article offers a reinterpretation of Marx's theory of machines by grounding it in a zoo-technological anthropology. It argues that Marx conceives the human being as a technical animal whose praxis mediates the relation between nature and society. Drawing on the Grundrisse and Capital, the study explores how machines embody social relations and scientific knowledge, becoming instruments of alienation under capitalism. Yet, their teleological structure also carries an emancipatory potential. The paper reframes debates on technological determinism and highlights the critical power of Marx's thought in confronting digital capitalism and AI.
The philosophy of the Spirit, developed by Benedetto Croce during his mature years of thought, has one of its distinctive features in the category of the Useful. For this reason, critics have tried to give answers about the origin of this idea within his youthful thought. Considering the main existing hypotheses (the Machiavelli/Marx parallelism and the 1900-1901 public debate with Pareto), a new one is here proposed moving from the science concept developed since 1893 by a young neo-Kantian Croce and from his studies on Marxist theory and pure economics (1895-1897).
In Marx's dead hour, Derrida initiates a confrontation between deconstruction and communism not to depoliticise, but rather to repoliticises its revolutionary injunction. Marx's spirit is inhabited by numerous specters, which haunt both his works and us. From Marx, Derrida inherits a critique of nationalism and a messianic affirmation. Marxism links itself for the first time to a form of international organisation. However, Derrida deconstructs Marxist ontology, according to which the Communist International would be the real presence of the red spectrum-thus its end-, and proposes a hauntology, which breaks the logic of being and non-being and the teleological temporality, since the new International must remain to come as a real otherness. Derrida replaces Marx's materialist messianism with a messianic linked to a materialism without substance, that of the kh & ocirc;ra-a receptacle open to welcoming the other.
This article contributes to the renewed inquiry into the relationship between Marxism and feminism by addressing a core omission in traditional Marxist theory: the analysis of the social forms through which individuals are reproduced, alongside goods and services. Building on Marxist feminist critiques and Marx and Engels's early insights, it develops a novel materialist queer theory. First, it rethinks the gender-capital relation via revisiting the 1970s Marxist feminist notion of the "extended mode of production". Second, it conceptualizes gender as a social form, drawing on Gayle Rubin's sex/gender system and queer critiques of heterosexuality by Judith Butler and Teresa De Lauretis. Third, integrating Foucault's analysis of the dispositif of sexuality, it demonstrates the historical necessity of gender as the form of production of individuals in capitalist societies.
