UC Santa Cruz

Unlike other terms in the discourse of social movements – power, democracy, citizenship – “organization” is rarely granted the status of a philosophical concept. My dissertation seeks to trace an underground current of political theory that focuses on the issue of organization, by examining certain aspects of the European Marxist debates over the party form and revolutionary strategy in the 1960s and 1970s. I focus on the development of Marxist philosophy in France and Italy by situating it not only in the debates over Communist Party strategy, but also in relation to the formation of new organizations that challenged the parties’ hegemony.