Figures

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (1934–2016), the Syrian Marxist who was professor of Modern European Philosophy at the University of Damascus from 1977 to 1999, and who died in December 2016. Arrested and then jailed for his book Naqd al-fikr al-dini (Critique of Religious Thought) when it was published in 1969, much of his work remains banned in the Arab countries.

‘Everything is given in the least punch…’

When the last concentrated burst of class struggle in Europe’s industry receded in the early to mid seventies, two broad visions of industrial politics had come to coexist on the Left. In many ways, these two positions were diametrically opposed political readings of the massive changes that had swept through industry in post-war capitalism in the fifties & sixties. The first was an attempt to restate the case for workers’ control not in terms of abstract theory but by looking at changes in the working class and, behind the class, in the nature of industry as a whole. This was a French innovation and its defining text was Mallet’s 1963 book La nouvelle classe ouvrière (The New Working Class). The other stream was peculiarly Italian and went back to the splits that resulted when Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri broke with Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and formed their own review Classe Operaia in 1964. The overall perspective of this current, more nebulous than ‘workers control’, is best conveyed by the slogan ‘the strategy of the refusal’.