Despite the general academic consensus that liberal democracy has triumphed over communism, Marxist-inspired movements continue to thrive across the global south. This is a curious phenomenon in the post-Cold War era. This paper explores the recent growth of both The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Naxalite-Maoist Insurgency in India, and compares the two groups. It analyzes the factors that have led to their resurgence, in particular, the political and economic dimensions. Specifically, it addresses the impact of two dominant factors in fomenting their resurgence: neo-liberalism and political exclusion. First, recent growth of both groups seems to correlate with the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies and progressively draconian structural adjustments, which aggravated existing poverty and inequality, in their respective countries. Second, recent growth of both groups seems to correlate with political exclusion of marginalized groups, an exclusion increasingly enforced by state violence. The survival and growth of Marxist-inspired armed movements across the globe also raises important questions about the future of liberal democracy. This paper asks whether the persistence of Marxist-inspired movements across the global south has given the lie to the "end of history" theory, and what their resurgence says, if anything, about the "clash of civilizations theory. It concludes that the success of these movements challenges the apparent triumph of liberal democracy in both Colombia and India, and perhaps in the post-Cold War era globally.

To wield direct influence on the everyday lives of citizens, new political elites have often professed a profound interest in shaping the politics of dwelling. In the 1920s, Vienna’s Social Democrats built 400 communal housing blocks equipped with public gardens, theaters, libraries, kindergartens, and sports facilities, hoping that these facilities would serve as loci for “growing into socialism”. In the 1950s, housing construction in Berlin became a site of the Cold War. East Berlin’s social realist “workers palaces” on Stalinallee were meant to serve as an ideal flourishing ground for the “new socialist men and women”. In contrast, West Berlin's modernist Hansa-Viertel was designed to showcase an ideal dwelling culture and an urban environment that would cultivate individuality. This dissertation examines three historically situated and ideologically distinct responses to the housing question: social democracy in Red Vienna, state socialism in East Berlin, and liberal capitalism in West Berlin. It illuminates how political promises of a radical new beginning were translated into spatial arrangements—the private scale of the apartment and the urban scale of the city—as well as how citizens appropriated the social, political, and economic norms inherent to the new spaces they inhabited. More specifically, the following analyses demonstrate the fact that inherited social, technological, and economic practices have often subverted political visions of a radically different future. This was the case with pedagogy in Red Vienna’s municipal housing, instrumental reason in the form of Taylorism and Fordism in East and West Berlin’s mass housing, and gender relations in Red Vienna’s and East Berlin’s politics of dwelling. At the same time, this dissertation examines counter-spaces that emerged from the dialectics between political promises and actual socio-spatial realities, counter-spaces that both reflect critically on past hegemonic “politics of dwelling” and that foreshadow alternative political imaginations that are still relevant today. Of particular interest are counter-hegemonic practices of dwelling that embody possibilities of emancipation—of experiencing oneself as subject instead of object of social transformation, justice—of emphasizing considerations of equality and recognition, and radical democracy—of questioning power relations and of forming alliances among disadvantaged groups to transform everyday life.

Dans la philosophie existentialiste de Sartre, l’existence précède l’essence. C’est-à-dire que c’est la réalité humaine vécue qui définit l’homme, et non une essence abstraite qui précèderait l’existence. L’essence de la vie humaine ne serait donc pas à la portée de la philosophie, qui voudrait établir une essence qui transcenderait la réalité humaine. Pour Sartre, cette tentative d’établir une essence est vaine. L’homme n’est pas simplement, mais a à être. Sartre entrevoit dans cette exigence la seule vraie possibilité de la liberté : la liberté c’est précisément le néant qui est au cœur de l’homme et qui contraint la réalité humaine à se faire au lieu d’être. Cette notion de la liberté absolue de l’homme est très forte et a évidemment suscité la critique. Sartre s’est attiré notamment la désapprobation des penseurs de l’École de Francfort. Ils lui reprochent de ne pas rendre justice aux déterminations spécifiques qu’impose le contexte historique, social et matériel. Sa notion de liberté viendrait dissocier l’horizon des possibilités des processus qui les fixent et, du coup le mène à cautionner tacitement le statut quo, en empêchant la liberté de servir de critère pour critiquer la domination existante. Une philosophie existentialiste reste-t-elle possible par-delà cette critique? La croyance en le caractère absurde de la vie humaine et l’exigence à se faire pour donner un sens à l’existence peuvent-elles tenir sans postuler la liberté absolue? Ou bien cette liberté doit-elle nécessairement être circonscrite par une théorie sociale critique, sans quoi l’existentialisme colportera clandestinement le maintien du statu quo? / n Sartre’s existentialist philosophy existence precedes essence. This means that it is the life being lived that defines man, and not an abstract essence that precedes him. The essence of human life is thus not reachable with a philosophy that would want to posit an essence that transcends human reality. Sartre considers this attempt to establish an essence vain. Man is not simply, but rather has to be. Sartre sees in this the only true possibility for liberty: liberty is precisely the nothingness that is at the heart of man and compels the human reality to make itself instead of just being. This notion of absolute liberty for man is a strong one and has indeed been criticized. Among critics, Sartre met with the disapproval of the thinkers of Frankfurt School. They accused him of not seeing the specific determinations that the historical, social and material world imposes on man. His notion of liberty dissociates the horizon of possibilities from the processes that establish them, which make him tacitly encourage the status quo, because he prevents liberty from being used as a criterion to criticize the existing domination. Is an existentialist philosophy still possible beyond this critic? Can the belief in the absurd nature of human life and in the necessity of making oneself to give sense to existence still hold without postulating absolute liberty? Or must liberty necessarily be circumscribed by a critical social theory, without which existentialism will clandestinely encourage the status quo?

This thesis interprets the unification process that the Turkish left undertook during the 1990s as a redefinition and re-identification of leftist values according to the recent changes in the economic and political areas in the world. This redefinition process will be investigated by looking at the &Ouml / DP (Freedom and Solidarity Party) case, the main task of which was defined by the founders as the unification of various leftist movements as well as the representation of the new social movements. For this purpose, different theoretical perspectives concerning the new social movements will be read by means of observation of their position in the &Ouml / DP. It will be investigated, to what degree the &Ouml / DP was successful in unifying and including the new social movements. In that sense, this work will emphasize the role of the &Ouml / DP in the history of the Turkish leftist movement.

Within this thesis, the dominant conceptualisations of the state/market and the national/global within international political economy are put into a critical scrutiny. It is emphasized that within most of the analyses of globalisation and the state, these conceptualisations are built in a dualist manner and that the internal relation between them is ignored. Within this context, it will be focused on three prominent approaches in contemporary international political economy literature, namely regulation approach, neo-Gramscian approach and open Marxism which scrutinise the relation between globalisation and the state. Through an analysis of the methodological and conceptual frameworks of regulation and neo-Gramscian approaches with a particular focus on the relationship they posit between globalisation and the state, the political/ economic and the national/ global conceptualisations of these approaches will be criticised for being dualist. Such a criticism will be developed by deriving insights from open Marxist perspective which provides a relational conception of the political/economic and the global/national and, through emphasizing that globalism is inherent in capitalism and capital is a global social relation which cannot be taken as separate from labour, perceives the state and market as internally related forms of capitalist social relations of production.

This thesis argues that the end of Soviet Marxism and a bipolar global political imaginary at the dissolution of the short Twentieth Century poses an obstacle for anti-systemic political action. Such a blockage of alternate political imaginaries can be discerned by reading the work of Francis Fukuyama and "Endism" as performative invocations of the closure of political alternatives, and thus as an ideological proclamation which enables and constrains forms of social action. It is contended that the search through dialectical thought for a competing universal to posit against "liberal democracy" is a fruitless one, because it reinscribes the terms of teleological theories of history which work to effect closure. Rather, constructing a phenomenological analytic of the political conjuncture, the thesis suggests that the figure of messianism without a Messiah is central to a deconstructive reframing of the possibilities of political action - a reframing attentive to the rhetorical tone of texts. The project of recovering the political is viewed through a phenomenological lens. An agonistic political distinction must be made so as to memorialise the remainders and ghosts of progress, and thus to gesture towards an indeconstructible justice which would serve as a horizon for the articulation of an empty universal. This project is furthered by a return to a certain phenomenology inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ernesto Laclau. The thesis provides a reading of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin as thinkers of a minor universalism, a non-prescriptive utopia, and places their work in the context of new understandings of religion and the political as quasi-transcendentals which can be utilised to think through the aporias of political time in order to grasp shards of meaning. Derrida and Chantal Mouffe's deconstructive critique and supplement to Carl Schmitt's concept of the political is read as suggestive of a reframing of political thought which would leave the political question open and thus enable the articulation of social imaginary significations able to inscribe meaning in the field of political action. Thus, the thesis gestures towards a form of thought which enables rather than constrains action under the sign of justice.

This thesis takes issue with Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that contemporary science fiction is sending back “more reliable information [about current political and economic organisation] than an exhausted realism” and it develops an alternative Marxist defense of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism's techniques adequately represent the complexity of contemporary political organization? The thesis presents readings of key realist texts — by Pat Barker, Maurice Gee, Kerstin Hensel, James Kelman and David Peace — testing their potential to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. (For complete abstract open document).

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In 1959 the popular Revolution of national liberation and independence triumphed in Cuba, extended a few years later into a Marxist-Leninist strategy for building socialism and communism on the island. In this radical social and political context, conditions were ripe for a radical alternative approach to secondary school education. This research confirms and extends existing evidence and analyses, showing that the model of secondary schooling established in revolutionary Cuba shared fundamental aspects of dominant models throughout the world. In particular, Cuba’s revolutionary schools are shown to have adopted a similar approach to mass education, as an investment in human capital and citizen formation. In the analysis of this historical phenomenon, a world-systems geocultural approach is used to describe and explain the non-exceptional form and character of Cuba’s secondary schools. The approach synthesises world-system level economic and cultural aspects, within the concept of a world-systems ‘geoculture’ of development, describing how these interrelated influences historically conditioned secondary school education policy and practice in Cuba. This process is traced through the impact of the world-economy, and related world-systems geocultural assumptions and objectives, over the political economy of Cuba’s socialist project, with direct implications for secondary school education. The world-system level conditioning influence on school policy and practice is shown to have been mediated by the particular national conditions, such that features specific to Cuba’s secondary schools are identified within the broad framework and constraints of the world-system level influence. The world-systems geocultural approach provides a viable, historical account of secondary school policy and practice in revolutionary Cuba. General continuity is identified, in accordance with the broad, world-system level influence. The historical analysis demonstrates the need for a world-system level approach, and supports the need to include world economic and cultural factors, under the geocultural framework.

A half century long civil war was fought in Colombia during 1964 and 2016, during these years there have been numerous peace negotiations between the state and the leftist guerrilla FARC-EP. The two enemies had big ideological differences but despite this, they managed to strike a peace deal in the end. These negotiations can be connected with the theory of rationality, where each partner will act with a goal for maximum profitable purpose. This study will primarily focus on the FARC-EP ideological alteration and its rational behaviour during negotiations during 2012-2016 and that concluded with the peace deal signed in Cartagena, Colombia. This study will also give a perspective in how FARC-EP has acted post- the peace negotiations on its way with peace and reconciliation in mind. With the ideological aspect and rationality in remembrance this study will analyse the change of method that the FARC-EP went through, from a violent guerrilla towards a political party with its primary goal still in mind, of an equal marxist nation, and the participation in its first democratic election in 2018.

Malgré sa condamnation post-positiviste et sa réception négative par la gauche, l’empirisme logique regagne en intérêt. Cette thèse est une contribution à la littérature émergente du «Cercle de Vienne de gauche» (CVG). Autour de Neurath et quelques autres personnalités de l’aile gauche du Cercle (Carnap, Frank, Hahn, Zilsel), nous proposons de repenser la relation de l’empirisme logique avec le marxisme. Ces deux courants se rejoignent dans leur défense d’une «conception scientifique du monde» et leur sécularisme radical. Les critiques communistes et néo-marxistes (l’École de Francfort, l’épistémologie féministe) adressées à l’empirisme logique sont recensées et leur pertinence questionnée à travers les données de l’historiographie du CVG. La politique de l’empirisme logique est examinée à travers les textes économiques de Neurath et son œuvre d’infographiste. Son engagement pour l’économie socialiste planifiée et ses efforts en graphisme pour la popularisation des méthodes quantitatives (la méthode Isotype pour la visualisation des statistiques sociales) sont présentés en vue d’une évaluation politique du CVG, ainsi que les connexions de l’empirisme logique avec le mouvement pour une langue auxiliaire internationale. / Despite logical empiricism’s dismissal by ambient postpositivism in academia as well as by the Far Left, a growing interest in its previously unknown socialist origins has resulted in a new topic in the history of philosophy of science : «Left Vienna Circle» (LVC). This thesis dedicated to LVC studies aims to clarify the politics of European logical empiricism. A presentation of its major critics from the Left (from communist parties to neo-Marxist trends like Frankfurt School and feminist epistemology) is followed by more recent arguments about its socialist politics. The «scientific world conceptions» of logical empiricism and Marxism will be compared through the work of Neurath and some other representatives of LVC (Carnap, Frank, Zilsel, Hahn). Alongside the connections of logical empiricism to the movement for an international auxiliary language, Neurath’s economical writings and his efforts to popularize quantitative methods in social sciences (the Isotype method of visual statistics) will be presented in an attempt to evaluate the politics of logical empiricism.