The original group was formed in Brighton, UK in 2005 primarily from former members of the journal Aufheben , after a critical exchange between Aufheben and the French journal Théorie Communiste. A founding commitment of the group was to prioritise over publishing and other organisational commitments an open-ended but rigorous and regular debate. This has permitted the group’s discussion to range over a very wide terrain, from political Islam to the psychoanalytic theory of groups, though core themes throughout have been the theory of ‘communisation’ that emerged in the post-68 French ultra-left, and advances in ‘systematic dialectic’ and value-form theory which have occurred in the same period.
The first issue of the Endnotes journal, published in 2008, presented a debate between Troploin and Theorie Communiste on the character and meaning of the 20th Century revolutions, with the intention of initiating a wider discussion in the anglophone world around the theory of communisation. The second issue, published in 2010, presented some distillations of the group’s core debates, including: the compatibility of value-form theory and systematic dialectic with the theory of communisation; ways of theorising and periodising the history of the reproduction of the capitalist class relation; the relation of systematic dialectic to class struggle; the historical tendency of capital to create a surplus population.
Partly taken from www.endnotes.org.uk
