Tessa Morris-Suzuki - Robots and Capitalism

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's prescient essay — written for New Left Review in 1984 and included in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution — on the contradictions of automated labor and the commodification of knowledge by software, which responds to claims about automation and value advanced by Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3372-robots-and-capitalism-1984

Branco Marcetic - The Man Behind KeyWiki

Bizarre cults. Anticommunist paranoia. Facebook stalking. Meet Trevor Loudon, founder of the antisocialist website KeyWiki.

Mainstream US conservatism can be so unhinged at times that it’s easy to forget its core tenets are also shared by others around the globe. Take one such figure, New Zealand’s Trevor Loudon, the red-baiting, right-wing conspiracy theorist behind the websites KeyWiki and New Zeal, and several documentaries about armies of secret communists hiding in cupboard drawers across America and has probably stalked you and your friends on Facebook.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/keywiki-trevor-loudon-anticommunism-red-baiting

Josep Maria Antentas - 1968 and the Spanish State: The Year in its Context

Understanding the Spanish 68 requires an understanding of the rise of anti-Francoism in the previous years and its evolution after the state of exception declared in January 1969.
It can be stated, as Kristin Ross has, that there was no Spanish 68. But this must be interpreted in the sense that there was no exceptional May Event. Not in the sense that nothing happened, but rather that 1968 must be considered within a general dynamic of rising social protest.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3890-1968-and-the-spanish-state-the-year-in-its-context

Riccardo Bellofiore - Between Panzieri and Negri: Mario Tronti and the workerism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Workerism is, also because of generational issues, part of my legacy, the air I breathe since my first years in politics. It is interesting to understand why the best of my generation cannot but be deeply influenced by ‘workerism’, by ‘operaismo’ and I’ll try to make this clear in the following. At the same time I think that this imprinting has to be broken because it is my idea, my impression, that the degeneration of the post-workerist literature has its roots deeply in the workerism of the Sixties.

http://libcom.org/library/between-panzieri-negri-mario-tronti-workerism-1960s-1970s

Майкл Буравой - "Опасный" класс как спаситель человечества

Как нам сегодня известно, сторонники рынка добились выдающейся победы в России. Но это была пиррова победа интеллектуального класса над самим собой. Движимые идеологией рыночного фундаментализма и поддерживаемые своими хорошо известными сторонниками рынка на Западе (а они вели собственные идеологические войны, элементом которых стали и российские рыночные фундаменталисты), вышедшие из коммунистов сторонники рынка встали на путь бессмысленного уничтожения ранее созданных социальных структур советского общества.

http://www.russ.ru/layout/set/print/pole/Opasnyj-klass-kak-spasitel-chelovechestva

Sergio Bologna and Giairo Daghini - May ’68 in France (1968)

First published in Piergiorgio Bellochio’s journal Quaderni Piacentini in July 1968, Sergio Bologna and Giairo Daghini’s analysis of the May–June events in Paris reconstructs the significance of those tumultuous weeks through categories forged in the laboratories of Italian operaismo. Their essay arrived at a moment of rupture between the politics of 1960s and those of the 1970s, when a proliferation of social forces would take the stage and Marxist theory entered a new phase of experimentation. Their capacity to deftly navigate this passage was conditioned by their experiences of factory intervention and political-theoretical formation via Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, publications which were at the forefront of heterodox Marxist thought in Italy at the beginning of the decade, but which had dissolved before the auspicious year whose anniversary we greet today.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/06/21/may-68-in-france-1968/

Scott Beauchamp - War Games

The line between sports and war has always been uncomfortably thin. It’s a cliché of aristocratic military lore that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton but like many clichés, it contains more than a kernel of truth. In our frenetically digitized mass society, meanwhile, we casually understand that combat presented as harmless fun in the guise of sports, video games, and television probably goes a long way in softening the military’s image.

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/war-games-beauchamp

Perry Anderson - The New Old World

The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origins and outcomes of European integration since the Second World War, and how today's EU has been theorized across a range of contemporary disciplines. It then moves to more detailed accounts of political and cultural developments in the three principal states of the original Common Market—France, Germany and Italy. A third section explores the interrelated histories of Cyprus and Turkey that pose a leading geopolitical challenge to the Community. The book ends by tracing ideas of European unity from the Enlightenment to the present, and their bearing on the future of the Union. The New Old World offers a critical portrait of a continent now increasingly hailed as a moral and political example to the world at large.

‘The Menace Is Inequality’: A Conversation With Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias

The general secretary of Spain’s leading leftist party discusses how to confront global capitalism.

Podemos, or “We Can,” emerged in 2014 out of the 15-M movement, the Spanish precursor of Occupy Wall Street. Led by political scientist Pablo Iglesias, Podemos has campaigned against austerity and corruption. This year, the so-called Gürtel case has grown into one of the biggest scandals in recent Spanish history, leading to the ouster of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. In May, Spain’s highest criminal court found dozens of people many from the ruling conservative Popular Party guilty of fraud, money laundering, and illegal kickbacks. I spoke with Iglesias, Podemos’s secretary general, about Spanish politics and global capitalism.

https://www.thenation.com/article/menace-inequality-conversation-podemoss-pablo-iglesias/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Cole Stangler - French Labor Derailed

Emmanuel Macron looks to have defeated France’s militant rail unions — where next for the movement against his reforms?
It has been the riskiest of President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business reforms to date. By proposing to abolish the employment advantages of tens of thousands of rail workers and to eliminate the French National Railway Company (SNCF)’s legal status as a public company — in critics’ view, the first step toward full-scale privatization — his government chose to pick a fight with the most militant section of the French working class.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/macron-rail-workers-unions-strikes-public-services-privatization

Robert Brenner - The Origins of Capitalist Development: a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism

I shall argue here that the method of an entire line of writers in the Marxist tradition has led them to displace class relations from the centre of their analyses of economic development and underdevelopment. It has been their intention to negate the optimistic model of economic advance derived from Adam Smith, whereby the development of trade and the division of labour unfailingly bring about economic development. Because they have failed, however, to discard the underlying individualisticmechanist presuppositions of this model, they have ended up by erecting an alternative theory of capitalist development which is, in its central aspects, the mirror image of the ‘progressist’ thesis they wish to surpass.

Goran Therborn - Why Some Classes Are More Successful than Others

A theoretical model of class formation must undergird any serious theory of capitalist politics, just as the concrete analysis of class formation must be the prerequisite for the realistic examination of the historical development of any particular capitalist country. So far, in contemporary Marxist research, two approaches to the problem of class formation have predominated. On one hand, there is the current of social and labour history whose unrivalled exemplar remains Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Primarily concerned with the nineteenth century, the main contribution of this historiographic work has been to tell us when and how, and sometimes to what extent, a distinctive, self-conscious working class first came into existence, set apart from the rest of the population.

Антонио Негри - Перечитывая Пашуканиса: Заметки к дискуссии

В этой работе Негри настаивает на радикальной новизне марксистской теории права, развитой выдающимся правоведом и мыслителем Евгением Пашуканисом (1891–1937), а также на революционных основаниях его мысли. В своем анализе, направленном против нормализующих и институциональных прочтений, Негри одновременно тщательно и полемически реконструирует эти радикальные элементы. Он совершает впечатляющий переход от анализа формы стоимости, государства и капиталистического господства у Маркса к обсуждению теории Пашуканиса, который раскрыл связь этих элементов с юридической «формой» и генезисом права в буржуазном обществе. Это глубокое прочтение Пашуканиса вместе с собственной политической мыслью Негри, которая формировалась в 1970-е годы, предвосхищает его позднейшую работу, включавшую в себя анализ юридических форм глобальной «Империи».

http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/14/121

The Yugoslav Students On The Wave Of Revolts In 1968, Interview With Dragomir Olujić (Part 1)

The year 1968 marked a peak in the class struggle at the international level. Students and workers became protagonists of revolts in the West, but also in the East. The general strike and mass mobilizations of workers and students in France is one of the better known examples from that year. The uprising in Prague is the most famous example from Eastern Europe. 50 years later, a number of commemorations have been taking place around the world, reflecting on the legacy of those years.
Few know that Yugoslavia also saw its own student revolt in 1968, strongly supported by the working class but also by important Yugoslav Marxist intellectuals.

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/the-yugoslav-students-on-the-wave-of-revolts-in-1968-interview-with-dragomir-olujic-part-1/

Елена Вогман - Метаморфозы ценностей: «Капитал» Эйзенштейна

Той же осенью 1927 года Эйзенштейн монтирует «Октябрь», заказанный государством к десятилетнему юбилею революции. Он принимает бодрящие наркотики и на некоторое время даже теряет зрение от работы. Однако самое поразительное, что уже в период той немыслимой нагрузки Эйзенштейн одержим новым проектом и считает «Октябрь» своеобразным этюдом к нему. Его цель — поставить «Капитал» Карла Маркса, используя формальные приемы Джеймса Джойса, которые Эйзенштейн внимательно изучил в романе «Улисс».

http://seance.ru/blog/eisenstein-capital/

Matthieu Renault - Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin

In the “prologue” to his 1932 work, Lenin buonanima, the infamous Italian writer Curzio Malaparte points to what he deems “the clearest sign of the decadence of the bourgeoisie in the West”: namely the fact that it saw the leader of the Soviet revolution as nothing but a “proletarian Genghis Khan, emerging from the depths of Asia to hasten the conquest of Europe,” or better yet, a “Marxist Mohammed.” In reality, like Robespierre and others before him, Lenin was merely an embodiment of the “petit-bourgeois fantasy” that had lit the fires which had swept across Europe over the last three centuries.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/revolution-decentered-two-studies-lenin/

Interview with Moishe Postone: “Critique and Dogmatism”

On the occasions of the seven-year anniversary of the Syrian uprisings as well as the passing of the great scholar and political theorist Moishe Postone, may he rest in power, we present a 2011 interview with him conducted by Slovenian then-doctoral student Anej Korsika, first published in English on Korsika’s blog in 2015.

https://antidotezine.com/2018/03/22/on-dogmatism-and-denial/