Viewpoint Magazine
Connexions Directory of Groups & Websites 2023

Website: https://www.viewpointmag.com/

Purpose: Viewpoint Magazine aims to understand the struggles that define our conjuncture, critically reconstruct radical history, and reinvent Marxism for our time. Viewpoint is therefore neither a socialist news source nor an academic journal. It is a militant research collective.

Through rigorous investigation, we seek to grasp the class composition of contemporary social movements, extract the rudiments of a revolutionary political project already inherent in these struggles, and then articulate this project in a way that emphasizes strategy, raises questions about potential programs, and explores historically appropriate organizational forms. Our object is therefore not news cycles but cycles of struggle. We see a significant difference between militant inquiry and reporting, just as there is a significant difference between scientific research and academic writing. Our goal is to fuse the two sides: to force theory to learn from movements themselves, and then to bring that theory to bear on those movements, working towards a dynamic circuit between scientific theoretical production and real struggles while also reflexively examining the relationship between them. This is an unstable and fluid kind of practice, which requires us to oscillate between the technical language of materialist analysis and the practical language of the concrete situation.

It is therefore necessary for us to constantly and critically investigate our own theoretical apparatus. We do not believe there is a single Marxist position on every question # even what seem to be first principles of Marxism emerge from specific situations in which other positions were possible. For this reason, our goal is not to provide commentary on current events from a fixed and invariant Marxist perspective. Instead, we must first ask what it even means to be Marxist in the twenty-first century. This means engaging in a theoretical deconstruction that problematizes many of our inherited assumptions and concepts.

Relatedly, any rigorous investigation of the concepts we deploy demands a firm engagement with revolutionary history. Historical inquiry allows us to historicize and problematize our own methods and theory, previous cycles of struggle can serve as potential laboratories from which there may still be much to learn, and it is only through studying the movements of the past - their ambitions, composition, limits, and defeats - that we can understand the bases of our own conjuncture, intellectual horizon, and present class composition. To that end, we reestablish connections to the historical memory of past movements and struggle, return to neglected strands of our radical traditions, and propose alternative genealogies of past struggles and movements.

Structure: Non-Profit





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