Aufheben *18, 2010

Description

There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word Aufheben. In German it can mean “to pick up”, “to raise”, “to keep”, “to preserve”, but also “to end”, “to abolish”, “to annul”. Hegel exploited this duality of meaning to describe the dialectical process whereby a higher form of thought or being supersedes a lower form, while at the same time “preserving” its “moments of truth”. The proletariat’s revolutionary negation of capitalism, communism, is an instance of this dialectical movement of supersession, as is the theoretical expression of this movement in the method of critique developed by Marx.

The journal Aufheben was first produced in the UK in Autumn 1992. Those involved had participated in a number of struggles together – the anti-poll tax movement, the campaign against the Gulf War – and wanted to develop theory in order to participate more effectively: to understand capital and ourselves as part of the proletariat so we could attack capital more effectively. We began this task with a reading group dedicated to Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse. Our influences included the Italian autonomia movement of 1969-77, the situationists, and others who took Marx’s work as a basic starting point and used it to develop the communist project beyond the anti-proletarian dogmatisms of Leninism (in all its varieties) and to reflect the current state of the class struggle. We also recognized the moment of truth in versions of class struggle anarchism, the German and Italian lefts and other tendencies. In developing proletarian theory we needed to go beyond all these past movements at the same time as we developed them – just as they had done with previous revolutionary movements. Aufheben comes out once a year (see subscription details at the bottom of this page), and to date (February 2004) there have been twelve issues. This site contains all of the articles from these twelve issues and also some pamphlets. Since Aufheben is a developing project, some of our own ideas have already been superseded. We do not produce these ideas in the abstract, but, as we hope comes across in these articles, are involved in many of the struggles we write about, and develop our perspective through this experience.