Robin Blackburn - The first circle

‘For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,’ remarks one of the characters in The First Circle. This observation has always been especially true of Russia and a reading of Solzhenitsyn’s work confirms that it has as much relevance today as at any time in the past. The First Circle is a political tour de force as well as a major literary achievement: in fact by far the most vivid and eloquent account of Stalinism to have emerged from the contemporary Soviet Union.

https://newleftreview.org/I/63/robin-blackburn-the-first-circle?token=AEmQ49TuMtVf&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=from_the_archive&utm_medium=social_media

Ian Birchall - Socialism in One Factory?

Ian Birchall reviews Opening the Gates, on the historic 1970s struggles at the Lip watch factory in Besançon.

The struggle by French workers at the Lip watch factory in Besançon in the 1970s now seems very remote, and is probably little known, even though there are several books and a couple of films devoted to it. So Donald Reid’s book, carefully documented with a mass of detail, is to be welcomed for reminding us of an enthralling page from working-class history.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3871-socialism-in-one-factory

Anton Jager - On the Front Lines of the Populism Wars

Left populism might be working in practice — but does it work in theory? A review of Chantal Mouffe’s latest salvo in the “populism wars.”

“I’m a populist — no doubt about that.” So said French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in September 2010, towards the end of a long interview with the French weekly L’Express.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/for-a-left-populism-mouffe-review

Slavoj Zizek - Troubles with identity

Everyone who is troubled by new anti-immigrant populism should make the effort to watch Europa – the Last Battle (Tobias Bratt, Sweden 2017), a 10-episode documentary. It presents in extenso the neo-Nazi version of the last hundred years of European history. According to the series, this history was dominated by Jewish bankers who controlled our entire financial system; from the beginning, Judaism stood behind Communism, and the wealthy Jews directly financed the October Revolution to deal a mortal blow to Russia, a staunch defender of Christianity; Hitler was a peaceful German patriot who, after being democratically elected, changed Germany from a devastated land to a welfare country with the highest living standard in the world by withdrawing from international banking controlled by the Jews; international Jewry declared war on him, though Hitler desperately strived for peace; after the failure of the European Communist revolutions in the 1920s, the Communist center realized that one had first to destroy the moral foundations of the West (religion, ethnic identity, family values), so it founded the Frankfurt School whose aim was to pronounce family and authority as pathological tools of domination and to undermine every ethnic identity as oppressive.

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/troubles-with-identity/

Agon Hamza - Marx’s Dyslexia

How should Marx be read today? Or, rather, which Marx do we need to read? The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser famously periodized Marx’s work (a Spinozist operation if ever there was). His periodization divided Marx into two distinct and opposing periods: the early humanist and ideological Marx, and the later scientific Marx. The two periods are divided by a break, which, drawing on the rich epistemological tradition of French philosophy, Althusser designated as an epistemological break. According to Althusser, this break with Marx’s “erstwhile philosophical conscience” enabled him to open up a new scientific horizon that remains comparable to, and of the same scientific status as, mathematics and physics: that of the science of history, or historical materialism.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/marxs-dyslexia/

Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza - Reading Marx (2018)

Marx’s critique of political economy is vital for understanding the crisis of contemporary capitalism. Yet the nature of its relevance and some of its key tenets remain poorly understood. This bold intervention brings together the work of leading Marx scholars Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza, to offer a fresh, radical reinterpretation of Marxism that explains the failures of neoliberalism and lays the foundations for a new emancipatory politics. Avoiding trite comparisons between Marx’s worldview and our current political scene, the authors show that the current relevance and value of Marx’s thought can better be explained by placing his key ideas in dialogue with those that have attempted to replace them. Reading Marx through Hegel and Lacan, particle physics, and modern political trends, the authors provide new ways to explain the crisis in contemporary capitalism and resist fundamentalism in all its forms. Reading Marx will find a wide audience amongst activists and scholars.

Huey P. Newton - Intercommunalism (1974)

On September 5, 1970, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), introduced his theory of intercommunalism at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He later expanded on this theory before an audience at Boston College in November of that year, and then again In February 1971 during a joint talk he gave with psychologist Erik Erikson across several days at Yale University and later in Oakland.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-1974/

Delio Vasquez - Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, ‘Chief Theoretician’ of the Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party was the last and perhaps most significant, domestically-based left revolutionary political organization to challenge American imperialism. At its height, the BPP encompassed 68 chapters in the United States, it established an international branch in Algeria and trained with operatives in the Congo, and it formed coalitions with political organizations in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, North and South Vietnam, North Korea, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, India, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, Palestine, Iraq, Israel, Australia, and throughout Europe. Ultimately, the Black Panther Party’s influence and power provoked a frenzied effort by the U.S. federal government and local law enforcement to destroy its structure and either assassinate or immobilize its members an effort that continues to the present day, with dozens of former Panthers still incarcerated.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-the-late-theorizations-of-huey-p-newton-chief-theoretician-of-the-black-panther-party/

Richard McEncroe - Taming the gig economy

On May 21 Australian Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt introduced a small but potentially significant private member's bill into the House of Representatives.
It is a bill to re-establish "old fashions", like fairness, equity and justice. The bill is a key step towards taming the gig economy because it re-asserts rules that have been ignored to accommodate odd, and not so nice, inventions.
The Fair Work Amendment (Making Australia More Equal) Bill 2018 aims to classify so-called "gig economy" workers as employees to give them minimum pay and workers’ rights.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/taming-gig-economy

Lee Wengraf - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: The Legacy of Walter Rodney

In the final blog for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf celebrates Walter Rodney, the scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana who was murdered 37 years ago this week. She writes how he was influenced by Marxist ideas and remains central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left. His book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by activists and scholars today.
A number of African economies have experienced a massive boom in wealth and investment over the past decade. Yet most ordinary Africans live in dire poverty with diminished life expectancy, high unemployment and in societies with low-levels of industry. For the roots of these conditions of “under-development,” one historical account stands alone in importance: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

http://roape.net/2017/06/16/europe-underdeveloped-africa-legacy-walter-rodney/

Alexis Dudden - Revolution by Candlelight: How South Koreans Toppled a Government

South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution was the culmination of a sustained protest movement that brought out over 16 million people almost a third of the country’s population.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/revolution-by-candlelight-how-south-koreans-toppled-a-government

Giovanni Arrighi - Nationalism and Imperialism: The Premises of Hobson's Definition

Giovanni Arrighi's The Geometry of Imperialism was published by New Left Books in 1978, in a translation by Patrick Camiller. "I was disturbed, at the time," Arrighi later told David Harvey, "by the terminological confusions that were swirling around the term ‘imperialism’. My aim was to dissipate some of the confusion by creating a topological space in which the different concepts, which were often all confusingly referred to as ‘imperialism’, could be distinguished from one another."
In Marxist debate, Arrighi argued, such confusions could be traced to Lenin's classical theory of imperialism, which at times fails to clearly distinguish it from "the monopoly stage of capitalism" or "finance capital." Arrighi's study would then be neither "a simple reproduction of the thought of this or that theoretician" nor the development of a new theory of imperialism, but rather an examination of "the presuppositions of the theory of imperialism in order to explicate, specify, and delimit them." Those presuppositions were to be located not in Lenin's own theory, but in that of J.A. Hobson, which preceded it.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3141-nationalism-and-imperialism-the-premises-of-hobson-s-definition

Laura Secor - Testaments Betrayed

Liberated from fascism by partisan struggle, after 1945, socialist Yugoslavia claimed to offer an alternative to the bureaucratic Soviet model. Although Communist leader Josip Broz Tito remained firmly in command until his death in 1980, his party promised equality among the nationalities, workers’ self-management in industry, and a degree of cultural freedom unparalleled elsewhere in the socialist world.
Despite the general intolerance for opposition, some philosophical currents called for a radicalization of Yugoslavia’s socialist democracy and a more humanist vision of social change. Prominent among these was the Praxis group, which from 1964 to 1974 produced among the most innovative Marxist journals internationally, also bound to the experience of a socialist state. Such was Praxis’s prestige, its yearly summer school attracted figures from Herbert Marcuse to Erich Fromm. At the end of the 1980s, the balance among Yugoslavia’s nationalities began to collapse, and many Praxis leaders joined the wave of ethnic chauvinism. There was little trace of the humanism the group had long preached.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/yugoslavia-praxis-journal-tito-marxism-socialism

Andrew Ryder - A Turning Point for the Sandinistas: Nicaragua’s 1968

In 1968, Carlos Fonseca and the FSLN adopted a new strategic approach, laying the groundwork for the 1979 revolution.
1968 presented a turning point in world revolutionary politics. This was true in Latin America in particular. An Uruguayan theorist, Raúl Zibechi, argues that young men and women in this region were radicalized outside the traditional area of class consciousness, the factory; instead, Christian base communities, Guevarist militancy, and the modern disruption of traditional culture presented new avenues of political and social awareness.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3881-a-turning-point-for-the-sandinistas-nicaragua-s-1968

Doug Henwood - The Gig Economy Fantasy

Stories about a new age of precarity are overblown. Workers have had to deal with economic insecurity since the dawn of capitalism.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/precarity-american-workplace-gig-economy

Slavoj Zizek - Marx Today: The End Is Near… Only Not The Way We Imagined it

The historical deadlock of Marxism resides not only in the fact that it counted on the prospect of capitalism’s final crisis, and therefore couldn’t grasp how capitalism came out of each crisis strengthened. There is a much more tragic mistake at work in the classic body of Marxism, described in precise terms by Wolfgang Streeck: Marxism was right about the “final crisis” of capitalism; we are clearly entering it today, but this crisis is just that, a prolonged process of decay and disintegration, with no easy Hegelian Aufhebung in sight, no agent to give to this decay a positive twist and transform it into a passage to some higher level of social organization

http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/marx-today-the-end-is-near-only-not-the-way-we-imagined-it/

Giuliano Vivaldi - The Soviet '68

In the Soviet Union, 1968 marked the end of reformist optimism and the beginning of a more cynical era.  
1968 was also in many ways a kind of cut-off point in terms of the hegemony of Leninism. The call for a return to "true Leninism" was still generally accepted by the shestydesyatniki.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3885-the-soviet-68

Фоти Бенлисой. Левые в Турции. От истоков до переворота 1980 года

Англоязычный сайт LeftEast взял интервью у известного турецкого левого журналиста — Фоти Бенлисоя — об истории турецкого левого движения со времен Османской империи до наших дней. Фоти Бенлисой, член организации Başlangıç, историк и со-основатель греко-турецкого издательства Istos. Опубликовал на турецком книгу о протестах в Греции, Тунисе и Египте и книгу о протестах  в парке Гези.

http://rabkor.ru/columns/analysis/2018/06/04/turkey-2/

Фоти Бенлисой. История турецких левых. От военного переворота 1980 года до наших дней

Это вторая часть интервью сайта LeftEast с Фоти Бенлисоем об истории турецкого левого движения. Как объяснил Бенлисой в первой части, эпоха между переворотами 1960 и 1980 годов, ставшая чем-то вроде высшей точки развития рабочего движения и социалистических политических партий в Турции, характеризовалась наличием многочисленных профсоюзных организаций и приверженностью профессионального класса левой идее, антиимпериалистическими идеологиями и националистическими идеологиями развития (developmental-nationalist ideologies). Как и во многих странах 1980-е были десятилетием буржуазной реакции под флагом неолиберального поворота, осуществленного при помощи помощью вооруженных репрессий, в случае Турции – путем военного переворота 12 сентября 1980 года. Мы попросили Фоти Бенлисоя рассказать о многочисленных проблемах, стоявших перед левыми в ту эпоху, кульминацией которой стал второй шоковый момент для институционального социалистического движения — распад СССР.

http://rabkor.ru/columns/analysis/2018/06/05/turkish-left-hist2/