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Karl Marx’s reading of Lewis H. Morgan not only produces a paradigm shift from a progressive and linear view of history towards a multilinear perspective in which the-re is room for uneven development, leaps and returns from the “archaic” past into the future of communism. It also enables Marx, based on the profound history of ancient Mexico, to anticipate the possibility of the revolutionary uprising of the community as a commune, just as it would in fact occur in Morelos. Marx in his final stage was approaching a new understanding of the link between the community as a form of repro-duction of collective life and the commune as an expansive political form that cannot be limited exclusively to its best-known version, associated with the Paris Commune of 1871. In Mexico, this understanding places Marx in the company of famous historians of the Mexican Revolution such as Jesús Sotelo Inclán or Adolfo Gilly, who- already in the twentieth century but without explicitly referring to each other -will contribute new chapters to the history of that other commune, the Mexica or Mexican one on whose tracks the American ethnologist in our opinion had already put Marx., La lectura de Lewis H. Morgan por parte de Karl Marx no sólo produce un cambio paradigmático desde una visión progresista lineal de la historia hacia un perspectivismo multilineal en el que hay lugar para el desarrollo desigual, los saltos y los retornos del pasado “arcaico” en el futuro próximo del comunismo. También le permite a Marx plantear, con base en la historia profunda del antiguo México, la posibilidad del levantamiento revolucionario de la comunidad en tanto comuna, tal y como de hecho ocurriría en Morelos. Marx en su etapa final se estaba acercando a una nueva comprensión del vínculo entre la comunidad como forma de reproducción de la vida colectiva y la comuna como forma política expansiva que no se puede limitar exclusivamente a su versión más conocida, asociada con la Comuna de París de 1871. En México, esta comprensión sitúa a Marx anticipadamente en la compañía de famosos historiadores de la Revolución mexicana como Jesús Sotelo Inclán o Adolfo Gilly, quienes -ya en pleno siglo veinte, pero sin conocerse o referirse explícitamente el uno al otro- aportarán otros tantos capítulos a la historia de esa otra comuna, la mexica o mexicana, sobre cuyas pistas el etnólogo estadounidense en nuestra opinión ya había puesto a Marx.

Confronted with an arguably incomplete critique of the notion and history of sovereignty, contemporary lines of thinking have forcefully returned to the inquiry into political foundations. These theoretical approaches in philosophy and the humanities at large have attempted to find possibilities of dialogue concerning the critique of sovereign structures of power, the undoing of systemic violence, as well as the development of ideas of community and mutual aid. The conference ‘Anarchē’ aims to investigate the contemporary philosophical attempts at questioning traditional concepts of political foundations in order to rethink the central notion of ground or archē., Anarchē: Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of the Ground, conference, ICI Berlin, 7–8 July 2021

Bruno Bosteels, ‘Foundations of the Critique of Political Ontology’, talk presented at the conference Anarchē: Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of the Ground, ICI Berlin, 7–8 July 2021, video recording, mp4, 29:20