VI. Partners

Espaces Marx, Paris, France

In France and throughout the world, our era is one of profound upheavals. Producing, managing, directing, working, learning, knowing, thinking, creating, living, cooperating : all these human activities are being transformed in an accelerated movement in which contradictions are sharpening and new issues are springing up.

It is also an era of social, ideological and political ruptures, inseparable from the gigantic upheavals of this end of century : the historic failure of the first concrete attempt of the century to break, on a world scale, with capitalism and the devastating developments of the crisis of a system that subjects all aspects of human life to the rule of money.

Understanding these processes, past or still taking place, finding answers to complex questions to which all this gives rise, becomes an vital requirement. The outcome is an immense need for new theoretical knowledge and thought so as to build, draw up, foresee - linked to the necessary critical re-examination of the concepts and the actual practices of the forces that, in this century, called for the progressive transformation of society.

Espaces Marx intends fully to take part in this effort of working out of theory and knowledge from the following three points of view :

• it proposes to set its sights to contributing, by its work, to the social movement of transformation, aiming at a society of human liberation
• it proposes to link the activity of thought to social practices and thus to bring together, in areas of common reflection, "researchers" and "practitioners". Consequently, without any exclusivity or bias, it addressesitself to all those who wish to advance their understanding of the world in which they live, as well as the conditions, the nature and the implications of their own activity : researchers - professional or not - in social, life or natural sciences ; actors in the economic social or cultural fields; activists in political, Trade Union or voluntary organisations ; creators of new and representational forms.
• it bases its approach on freedom of thought, of hypotheses, of works and on the methodological requirement of confrontation - indispensible to a rigorous intellectual approach.

On this basis, it considers that it is absolutely necessary :

• to articulate the proposed efforts of knowledge and reflection round the resources of discovery, theorisation and insight steming from Marx. This ambition presupposes fructifying and transmitting it in a creative manner at the same time as engaging in work that would allow an exacting reappropriation of it.
• to be resolutely open to all innovative thought, as well as to all the critical and thoughtful contributions of social experience and forms of activism that offer an alternative to the existing social order; to organise all possible forms of confrontation and exchange with a exploding movement of knowledge.

In this spirit the association will, in particular, apply itself to :

• progressing in the understanding of the changes of our times, evaluating their anthropological import and contributing to the drawing up of concepts capable of taking them into account.
• elucidating the experience of this century, questioning its contradictions, its advances and its tragedies in an indispensible work on the contemporary history of the revolutionary movement, of which Communism, as a global phenomenon, constitutes a cardinal aspect.
• to proceed to a critique of the dominant logics of society: a critique of capitalism and, still further, of scieties of exploitation, domination and alienation.

The association's activity results from the sovereign choices its members' General Meeting, held in the conditions defined by its charter. It will apply itself to establishing a relationship between activity for knowledge and socioplitical practice, in a perspective of human emancipation and of overcoming capitalism. It will make efforts to establish, on both national and international levels, cooperation and partnerships with all those - public figures, public or private organisations, progressive forces of the social movement, publications etc. - who pursue objectives similar to, or converging on, its own or likely to contribute to them in a signifcant manner. On this basis, it will maintain relations with them based on partnership whose ends and means will be defined and specified in a convention, in particular with the French Communist Party. Official homepage: http://www.espaces-marx.eu.org
e-Mail: Escapes_Marx@internatif.org