The Party Without Bosses
Lessons on Anti-Capitalism from Félix Guattari and Lúis Inácio
'Lula' da Silva
By Gary Genosko
The former metalworker and trade union leader Lúis Inácio ‘Lula' da
Silva-known to everyone as Lula-was elected president of
Brazil in late 2002 in his fourth attempt since founding the Workers' Party
in 1980.
The Party Without Bosses features a discussion between Lula and the
psychoanalyst Félix Guattari that took place in the heady days
after the birth of the Workers' Party. At the time, the optimism
and radicalism of the 1970s in South America was beginning to fade in
the face of Reaganism's gathering momentum, and the Left had entered
a protracted period of frustration and defeat.The discussion is introduced
by leading Guattari scholar Gary Genosko and in addition contains his
lively diaristic essay on the 2002 campaign.
This is a timely and engagingly idiosyncratic introduction to the early
thinking of Lula, the man who may represent a rebirth of southern radicalism
in the era of globalization.
"Genosko's book presents us with yet another
way of thinking about globalization, even while it displaces a historical
program that presents globalization as a dialectical inevitability.
Any discussion of globalism must take seriously the displacement
of the temporal. It must look at the history of globalist thought
not merely as a linear progression, but as innumerable rhizomatic
formations-each cutting across the other and producing new combinations
of time and material. This is precisely what Genosko produces in
the text."
- Roger Whitson, Politics and Culture: An
International Review of Books (2004)
"[...] The Party without Bosses provides
a straightforward introduction to Guattari's political theory in
the context of anti-globalization, a useful summary of the PT's history
and Lula's path to the Brazilian presidency, and a fascinating exchange
of ideas between two radical thinkers."
- Kayley Jones, Politics and Culture
|