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This essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research—participant observation—to argue that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action. Four core aspects of participation observation are discussed as long duration (long-term engagement), revealing social relations of a group of people (understanding a group of people and their social processes), holism (studying all aspects of social life, marking its fundamental democracy), and the dialectical relationship between intimacy and estrangement (befriending strangers). Though the risks and limits of participant observation are outlined, as are the tensions between activism and anthropology, it is argued that engaging in participant observation is a profoundly political act, one that can enable us to challenge hegemonic conceptions of the world, challenge authority, and better act in the world.

It is possible to verify the role performed by the first activist dissidents from Stalinism aiming at noticing the impact from Marxist-Leninist theory and Russian Revolution on the organization of thinking and left-wing militancy in the capital of São Paulo. The Brazilian Trotskyists ideas and action, during the 1920s and 1930s, are re-evaluated from the analysis of primary sources, in order to understand the interpretations that the dissidents have given to historical events in which they were active and fervent protagonists. In that manner, we expect to get to a more rigorous interpretation of the formation and development of PCB (Brazilian Communist Party). Originality: The studies on PCB usually assume a Stalinist bias, despising Trotskyists as cowards or traitors of Proletarian Revolution. This analysis reveals the Trotskyists interpretation of the events in which they participated, with the support of vast documentation, mostly unpublished, preserved in workers and police archives. Methodology: This approach uses concepts consecrated by the Marxist-Leninist dialectical method, raised to the category of “subject knowledge”, understood as blocks of historical knowledge that were present and disguised in the interior of functional and systematic sets, and that were disqualified as non-conceptual knowledge, hierarchically inferior. This is an approach that questions the formal systematizations from consecrated authors and raises the narratives of individuals who were silenced by power. By focusing on human actions and meanings that go unnoticed in broad analytical frameworks, the goal is to extract from facts that are apparently common a relevant sociocultural dimension, with the use of the narrative as a resource. Conclusions: Strongly influenced by immigrants and by anarchism, the Brazilian labor movements created their own labor unions and parties, and the most important was the Brazilian Communist Party, founded in 1922. In no time, as a consequence of the mortal fight between Stalin and Trotsky, the Brazilian comrades strongly disagreed about the course of the revolution, originating a severe dispute for the dominance of the party’s direction, considering that it was moving away from historical materialism and condemned, for this procedure, the proletarian progress to deviance and defeat. The opponent most operating group, gathered in the International Communist League, started a constant fight against the party’s direction and political policy, becoming the repression preferential victims during the difficult times under the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas.

Merleau-Ponty, in Humanism and Terror (1947), addresses the spectrum of problems related to revolutionary action. His essay, Eye and Mind (1960), is best known as a contribution to aesthetics. A common structure exists in these apparently disparate works. We must reject the illusion of subjective clairvoyance as a standard of revolutionary praxis; but also we must reject any idealised light of reason that illuminates all—that promises a history without shadows. The revolutionary nature of an act must be established as such through praxis . The creative praxes of the political revolutionary or the revolutionary artist are recognised ex post facto ; yet each involves the creation of its own new aesthetic wherein the value of that praxis is to be understood spontaneously and all at once.

This article provides a normative analysis of the rationale behind the creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state. Far from being irrelevant in the face of the well-known aversion of scientific socialism for normative thinking, such analysis illuminates the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing commitment to the unitary multinational state as the best response to the national question. It shows that the Party’s leadership, in a conscious effort to adapt Stalin’s theory of nationality to Chinese revolutionary praxis, substantially revised the standard conception of national self-determination. Relying on its own materialist logic, it made participation in the struggle against alienation the normative basis to justify granting ethnic minorities special rights of regional autonomy under a common state. The creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state appears in this light as a normatively coherent attempt to guarantee that all ethnic groups that contributed to national liberation benefit equally from their imprescriptible right to collective self-determination.

In its focus on social practices, the feature article presents an interesting theoretical framework for rethinking not only where and how knowing and learning in science education exhibit themselves but also we might change our own research practice. The framework is not new to me, as I have advocated it explicitly for more than 15 years. But over time it became apparent to me that some particularities of participation in practice may be grounded more strongly in an orientation towards the societal nature of any human praxis. In this forum contribution, I present a theoretical approach built on societal-historical activity theory that also takes activism as a major category for theorizing participation. This approach not only covers the extent of the social practice framework but also allows us to make thematic the production of inequity and restrictions to access science and engineering that are characteristic of many societies.

Objetivo/contexto: Verifica-se o papel desempenhado pelos primeiros ativistas dissidentes do stalinismo, com o objetivo de auferir o impacto da teoria marxista-leninista e da Revolução Russa sobre a organização do pensamento e da militância de esquerda, na capital paulista. As ideias e a atuação dos trotskistas brasileiros, nas décadas de 1920 e 1930, são reavaliadas a partir da análise de documentos de primeira mão, a fim de entender as interpretações que os dissidentes deram a acontecimentos históricos dos quais foram protagonistas ativos e fervorosos. Espera-se, assim, chegar a uma interpretação mais rigorosa sobre a formação e o desenvolvimento do PCB (Partido Comunista do Brasil). Originalidade: Os estudos sobre o PCB assumem usualmente o viés stalinista, menosprezando os trotskistas, como covardes ou traidores da Revolução Proletária. Esta análise traz à tona a interpretação dos trotskistas sobre os acontecimentos dos quais participaram, com o apoio de uma farta documentação, em grande parte inédita, conservada nos arquivos operários e nos policiais. Metodologia: Esta abordagem utiliza-se de conceitos consagrados pelo método dialético marxista-leninista, estendidos à categoria dos “saberes sujeitados”, entendidos como blocos de conhecimentos históricos que estavam presentes e disfarçados no interior dos conjuntos funcionais e sistemáticos, e que se encontravam desqualificados como saberes não conceituais, hierarquicamente inferiores. Trata-se de uma abordagem que põe em questão as sistematizações formais de autores consagrados, e traz à tona as narrativas de indivíduos silenciados pelo poder. Ao focalizar ações humanas e significados que passam despercebidos nos grandes quadros analíticos, tem-se por objetivo extrair de fatos aparentemente corriqueiros uma dimensão sociocultural relevante, com o apelo ao recurso da narrativa. Conclusões: Fortemente influenciados pelos imigrantes e pelo anarquismo, os movimentos operários brasileiros estruturaram-se em sindicatos e partidos próprios, do qual o mais importante foi o Partido Comunista do Brasil, fundado em 1922. Em pouco tempo, como consequência da luta mortal travada entre Stalin e Trotsky, os camaradas brasileiros divergiram fortemente sobre os rumos da revolução, dando origem a uma disputa árdua para o domínio da direção partidária, considerando que ela se afastava do materialismo histórico e condenava, por esse procedimento, a marcha do proletariado a desvios e à derrota. O grupo mais operante dos opositores, reunido na Liga Comunista Internacionalista, travou uma luta constante contra os dirigentes do partido e a polícia política, transformando-se em vítimas preferenciais da repressão, nos tempos difíceis da ditadura varguista.

Today’s political sociologists are once again interested in the study of the crisis of mass-based parties, anti-politics and anti-parliamentarism, crisis in the authority of the political class, prevailing corporate interests within republican institutions, and populism. Political sociology however, takes the party, as a construct of political sociology alone, without consideration upon its militancy and action, as the party, which objectifies the foundation of a State, and as a result the party becomes, simply an historical category. We approach the problem of the modern state from many angles; analysing the nature of a political party as such; the ideological dangers of determinism and spontaneism which a party necessarily must struggle with; the type of non-administrative internal regime which is necessary for a party to be effective and so on. The problem we seek to elaborate is the specific character of the collective action that makes possible the passage from a sectored, corporate and subordinate role of purely negative opposition, to a leading role of conscious action towards not merely a partial adjustment within the system, but posing the issue of the State in its entirety. In developing this theme – as a study of the real relations between the political party, the classes and the State – a two-fold consideration is devoted to the study of Machiavelli and Marx: first from the angle of the real relations between the two, as thinkers of revolutionary politics, of action; and secondly from a perspective which would derive from the Marxist doctrines an articulated system of contemporary politics, as found in The Prince.

Soon after arriving in Harlem, Lorraine Hansberry began writing for Paul Robeson’s anti-imperialist and anticapitalist newspaper Freedom. With offices in the same building as the Council on African Affairs, the most visible anticolonial organization in the first years after World War II, Freedom put Hansberry in the midst of a vibrant Black Left network that included Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Burnham, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Alice Childress.¹ For Freedom, Hansberry covered the outrage of African and Asian attendees at a World Assembly of Youth convention marred by paternalism; the trip to Washington, D.C., the Sojourners for

Am Beispiel der durch die historische Wende vom progressiven zum regressiven Reformismus ermöglichten globalen Finanzkrise von 2008 wird versucht, das komplexe Verhältnis von revolutionärem Handeln und naturwüchsig evoluierender Gewohnheit zu klären. Es bestätigt sich, dass Evolutionstheorien durch die Tatsache, dass »vorwärts gelebt« werden muss (Kierkegaard), begrenzt sind und die Krise den Horizont revolutionären Handelns öffnet, das die Richtung der Evolution zu ändern versucht. Für diese Öffnung sind insbesondere die normativ neutralisierten, funktionalistischen Evolutionstheorien, die es mit der Kontingenz übertreiben, blind. The relationship between revolutionary action and naturally evolving habits (naturwüchsige Gewohnheit) is illustrated by the global fiscal crisis of 2008, which was preceded by an historical reversal from progressive to regressive reformism. The explanatory power of evolutionary theories is limited by the fact that human actors must »live forward« (Kierkegaard), and that therefore the crisis opens the horizon for changing the course of evolution by revolutionary agency. Because it neutralizes the normative dimension of human agency by overestimating contingency, functionalist evolutionary theory in particular fails to understand radical change.

In On a raison de se révolter Sartre identifies in idealistic unrealism, in amoralistic realism, and in materialistic and moralistic realism, the three decisive moments in his intellectual development. In the light of these caesuras, which interweave the gnoseological and the moral problem and find a possible key of interpretation in the progressive semantic mutation of the authenticity-unauthenticity dichotomy, the author intends to redesign the path that leads from absolute freedom, through the discovery of history and the theoretical redefinition of the notion \"freedom-world-others\", to freedom as \"total praxis\". If man's ontological difference runs through Sartre's entire work and guides his critique of dialectical materialism, in the post-war writings that difference begins to be rethought within the historical horizon of the dialectical process of work (subjection- liberation). In presenting the morality-history relationship as inescapable, this horizon resolves the gnoseological (truth) and the moral (freedom) problem in the revolutionary philosophy of work. With his adherence to historical materialism, to which Sartre lays claim in the Critique de la raison dialectique, and the dialectical connection between historical subject and method, the writings that appeared after May '68 place within the dialectic of freedom the problem of the \"total meaning\" of the life of man and indicate in the «reign of freedom», of Marxian memory, the telos of history.