“Tres pasiones, simples, pero abrumadoramente intensas, han gobernado mi vida: el ansia de amor, la búsqueda del conocimiento y una insoportable piedad por los sufrimientos de la humanidad. Estas tres pasiones, como grandes vendavales, me han llevado de acá para allá, por una ruta cambiante, sobre un profundo océano de angustia, hasta el borde mismo de la desesperación” — Bertrand Russell

Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta Warren Montag. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta Warren Montag. Mostrar todas las entradas

20/2/17

Althusser, Spinoza and Revolution in Philosophy: An Interview with Warren Montag

Baruch Spinoza
✆ Alexandre Camanho
Warren Montag interviewed by George Souvlis
George Souvlis: Would you like to present yourself by focusing on the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?
Warren Montag: My political and intellectual formation was governed, fittingly I suppose, by a logic of the encounter: that is, I was extraordinarily lucky. If I had not been in the right place at the right time and in proximity to the right people, I would not have thought or written as I have. In the mid to late seventies in Los Angeles (to which I returned after receiving my B.A. from UC Berkeley), I met both Geoff Goshgarian and Mike Davis and we soon formed a kind of collective with a few others (in particular I remember Samira Haj, now a historian at CUNY, I believe). We also organized a study group in which we read the three volumes of Capital, as well as Mandel’s Late Capitalism and other works.

Through Mike (who had recently returned from Britain where he had been close to the International Marxist Group [IMG]), I was introduced to the Trotskyism of the Fourth International (or more accurately its dominant tendency), that is, of Mandel, Krivine, Bensaid, Tariq Ali and others. This variant of Trotskyism, which had virtually no presence in the US at that time was very much a codification of the political experiences of 1968 internationally, combining a notion of the direct democracy of workers’ councils, consistent opposition to the bureaucratic regimes of the USSR and its satellites, and intransigent support for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements around the world.