After highlighting the philological and theoretical fortes of Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment, the intervention questions his assumption of Gramsci’s allegedly ‘neutral’ concept of ideology. This interpretation is one-sided in that it leaves out the ideology-critique adopted via Labriola and practised throughout Gramsci’s work. Gramsci’s perspective of rendering people’s common sense more coherent opens up a more democratic perspective than Kautsky’s and Lenin’s notion that socialist class-consciousness is to be brought ‘from without’. The intervention argues that the reconstruction of a (...) ‘Luxemburg-Gramsci line’ is of importance for today’s debates and struggles. (shrink)

For different feminist theorists, housework and child rearing are viewed in very different ways. I argue that Marx gives us the categories that allow us to see why housework and child care can be both a paradigm of unalienated labor and also involve the greatest oppression. In developing this argument, a distinction is made between alienation and oppression and the conditions are discussed under which unalienated housework can become oppressive or can become alienated.

This article analyses Foucault’s 1972–3 lecture course,La société punitive. While the course can certainly be seen as an initial draft of themes for the 1975 bookSurveiller et punir, there are some important differences. The reading here focuses on different modes of punishment; the civil war and the social enemy; the comparison of England and France; and political economy. It closes with some analysis of the emerging clarity in Foucault’s work around power and genealogy. This is a course where Foucault makes (...) use of Marxist language and categories, engages with historical materialism, and offers a complementary and at times corrective focus. (shrink)