Phd in POLITICAL STUDIES

Research: Rereading Marx: from social freedom to mutualism

PhD Research: "Social freedom and the mutualism experiences in the Nineteenth century"
by Salvatore Cannavò

The research project entitled "Social freedom and the mutualism experiences in the XIX century" aims to originally re-read Marx's works through the concept of social freedom. This idea, born in young Hegel's books and reworked by Marx, has been relaunched recently by the German philosopher Axel Honneth, one of the best representative of Critical Theory.

The second part of the project aims to connect social freedom elaboration with the historical experiences of the workers' mutualism as it was BUILT along the nineetenth century.

The first part of the project will take in consideration above all Marx's works from the young writER to The Capital reading in them the elaborations influencing the new cooperativism among the workers at the mid of Nineetenthh century. At the same time we aim to indagate, consulting the original documents in Italy, France and Great Britain, the way in which workers' cooperativism influenced the ideas of Karl Marx and the first socialism utopic thinkers such as Robert Owen.

The second part of the research is focused on the archives of the first mutualistic and cooperative societies especially in Manchester at the Robert Owen Foundation and in Paris where are collected the documents of the French cooperativisme.

Our thesis is that the biunivoc influence is very productive to understand the meaning of the "cooperative freedom", a concept that was at the core in the rising of labor movement in Europe and succesfully has remained at the borders of the history of the workers activity in XX century. This activity was founded above all on the tools of "the party" and "the trade unions" models, devoleped on the wave of the German exemple based on the building process of the Socialdemocratic party in Germany at the end of XIX century.
This research aims to validate the actual vitality of the original idea of the mutualism, its theoretical solidity as an altenative framework to the modern liberalism policies.

This project is related to the international debate on Socialism as was established in the works of the same Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Thomas Piketty, J. Roemer, A. Cohen. An international (often neglected) debate, a gap that our research aims to fill.

Bio:
Journalist, actually deputy editor at the Fatto quotidiano, former parliamentarian at the italian Deputies assembly, chief editor of the publishing house Edizioni Alegre.

He started his journalistic activity at Liberazione, a newspaper directed by Sandro Curzi where he become deputy editor. In such role he followed for several years the International anti-global mouvement partecipating at all the international Social Forum and contributing at his sessions. After this experience he decided to create the publishing house Edizioni Alegre, a name taken by the city Porto Alegre, in Brazil.

In 2006 he was elected by the Party of Communist Refondation into italian Parliament where engaged himself in foreign policy and defense problems.

In 2010 he started again his journalist career at the Fatto quotidiano, involving himself in the economic and tradeunionist issues until the actual role of deputy editor. He is in charge to coordinate the paid digital contents section.

Graduated in Polical Sciences, in 2021 he began his PhD in Political Studies at the Sciences political Department of the La Sapienza in Rome.

He was among the founders of the Jacobin Italia review. He published six monographs.