Gavin Walker - The Postcolonial and the Politics of the Outside: Return(s) of the National Question in Marxist Theory

Today, the field of inquiry called “postcolonial studies” appears to be in a crisis of self-legitimation. This crisis concerns not the “success” of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary formation in the production of knowledge, but rather the foundational assumptions and political directions implied by the emergence of this disciplinary formation. In other words, the crisis of postcolonial studies is a profoundly political crisis, a crisis of the political possibilities contained within its original project. But the very existence of this crisis is simultaneously a testimony to the dynamism and complexity of the issues it raises: the very fact of the crisis itself can be a new point of departure towards a turn or transformation of postcolonial studies, a new reading and new writing of this field that returns our focus to the most immediate and profound political questions of our time.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/postcolonial-politics-outside-returns-national-question-marxist-theory/

Andre Gorz - Reclaiming Work. Beyond the Wage-Based Society

Over the last twenty-five years, Western societies have been reversing into the future. They are able neither to reproduce themselves in accordance with past norms, nor to exploit the unprecedented freedom offered by the savings in working time which new technology has generated. In this major new book, André Gorz argues that the societies created by Fordism have been falling apart and have given way to "non-societies", in which a tiny dominant stratum has grabbed most of the surplus wealth. In the absence of any alternative political project, social disintegration and individual despair have prevailed. Mainstream economists seek solutions to this "crisis", but Gorz argues that we are in fact in the grip of a new system which is abolishing work as we know it. The worst forms of exploitation are being restored, as each is forced to fight against all in a desperate struggle to obtain the diminishing supply of work.In the face of these developments, Gorz argues that we should fight not against the destruction of work itself (in the sense of stable employment), but against the new system's efforts to perpetuate the ideology of work as a source of rights. We should welcome the reduction in the working hours required to meet our material needs and should realize the creative potential that this reduction could release. Through measures such as a sufficient unconditional basic income for all and new, co-operative economic structures, we can reclaim work and rebuild a future beyond the wage-based society.

Domenico Losurdo - Liberalism and Racial Slavery: A Unique Twin Birth

Domenico Losurdo looks at the foundational link between liberalism and Atlantic slavery, and liberal philosophers' shifting positions on slavery in the period between Somersett v Stewart and the American Civil War.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3899-liberalism-and-racial-slavery-a-unique-twin-birth

Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva - The Neue Marx-Lektüre. Putting the critique of political economy back into the critique of society

The project to re-examine Marx’s critique of political economy at the end of the 1960s by pupils of Horkheimer and Adorno is nowadays known as the Neue Marx-Lektüre (hereafter NML). This ‘new reading of Marx’, initiated principally by Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, attempted to free Marx from the petrified schemes of Marxist orthodoxy. In this article we will try to reconstruct the beginnings of this project, tracing its roots to Adorno’s critical theory of society. From this perspective we will proceed to examine NML’s original approach to Marx’s theory of value, its understanding of the ‘logical’ character of this theory, and how the contradictions of the commodity form and the double character of labour constitute an autonomization of society. Finally, we will outline some problems with NML, where criticism and further dialogue would be fruitful.

https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/article/the-neue-marx-lekture

The 1968 Student Revolt In Yugoslavia: “We Demanded A Radically Different Socialism!” (Part 2)

We publish here the second part of our interview with Dragomir Olujić (Oluja) on the “student revolt” of 1968 in Yugoslavia, in which Oluja took part as a student in Belgrade. In the first part of the interview we discussed the international situation, the struggles of the workers and the youth around the world, struggles against the Vietnam War, the wars of national liberation in the so-called ‘Third World,’ dissident movements in the ‘socialist camp,’ etc. All of this influenced the situation in Yugoslavia, but Yugoslav society was also undergoing its own political, economic, and societal changes as well, creating internal contradictions that prepared the ground for dissatisfaction and revolt.
In this second part of the interview we asked Oluja to talk about the demands of the youth in Belgrade, their relationships and links with workers and other social sectors, the intellectual influences of the students, and their attitudes towards the regime and Tito’s figure.

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/the-1968-student-revolt-in-yugoslavia-we-demanded-a-radically-different-socialism-part-2/

On Marx and Epicurus

Some notes on elements of Marx's 1841 doctoral thesis on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature and the profundity of the Epicurean "swerve".
Given the fragments, literally, of the works of Epicurus available to Marx at the time, the materialist analysis that he manages to develop from them is pretty amazing.

https://mronline.org/2018/06/25/on-marx-and-epicurus/

Michael Kinnucan - Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Won

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory is a shot across the bow of the Democratic machine. Here's how it happened.
The more you know about New York politics the more surprising Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over Joe Crowley is. Crowley wasn’t merely the fourth-ranked Democrat in the House; he was the dominant force in Queens politics for a decade, the king of the Queens machine.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-election-crowley-democratic-socialists

Richard Hyman - Andre Gorz and his disappearing proletariat

Farewell to the Working Class (first published in French in 1980) was written after the defeat of the French Left in 1978; and though no overt reference is made to the immediate political context, the demoralisation and recrimination of the period must have influenced the writing of this book-accentuating its relevance for socialists in Britain today. It is a work characteristic of Gorz's perceptive and rigorously (if often selectively) critical intelligence; and characteristic also in its limited overall integration. In its 152 pages the book provides a preface, an introduction, nine main chapters, a postscript and two appendices, in the course of which a variety of themes emerge, combine, diverge, disappear and reappear. Rarely can so brief a work have been so discursively fashioned. Rather than attempting to impose my own structure, however, I propose to set out Gorz's arguments according to his own format before offering a critical assessment of what I regard as the central themes.

Michael Burawoy: Marxism engages Bourdieu

The influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s thought has spread across disciplines and over the world. Like all the great sociologists before him, his theory emerges from a critique of Marx. In Bourdieu’s case the critique revolves around Marx’s failure to develop a theory of cultural domination. But, like his predecessor sociologists, Bourdieu reduces Marxism to Marx and, thus, never engages such figures as Georg Lukács, members of the Frankfurt School, Simon de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci, all of whom address the question of cultural domination. In this talk, Burawoy develops the comparison of Bourdieu and Gramsci, starting out from the difference between symbolic domination and hegemony that entails further contrasts: field of power vs. civil society; classification struggle vs. class struggle; academic vs. subaltern theories of knowledge; and traditional vs. organic intellectuals.

https://mronline.org/2018/06/29/michael-burawoy-marxism-engages-bourdieu/

Луи Альтюссер - Идеология и идеологические аппараты государства (заметки для исследования)

Известно, что понятие “идеология” было выработано П. Кабанисом, Д. де Траси и их друзьями, которые положили в качестве его объекта (врожденную) теорию идей. Когда 50 лет спустя Маркс употребляет этот термин, то уже в своих ранних работах он дает ему совершенно иное значение. Идеология – это система идей, представлений, которые владеют умом человека или социальной группы. Идеологическо-политическая борьба, которую Маркс вел уже в своих статьях для “Рейнской газеты”, должна была быстро столкнуть его с этой реальностью и вынудить пересмотреть свои изначальные представления о ней. Тем не менее, мы сталкиваемся тут с достаточно удивительным парадоксом. Кажется, все вело Маркса к тому, чтобы сформулировать теорию идеологии. Действительно, в “Немецкой идеологии”, написанной после “Экономическо-философских рукописей 1844 года” нам предлагается такая теория, но… она не марксистская (скоро мы увидим почему). А что касается “Капитала”, хотя в нем и содержатся многочисленные намеки на теорию идеологий (самая очевидная из которых – идеология заурядных экономистов), в нем все же нет самой этой теории, которая в значительной степени зависит от теории идеологии как таковой.

http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2011/3/al3.html

Эндрю Осборн - Обмен за гроши: дешифровка биткойна и блокчейна

Дэвид Голумбиа начинает свою книгу «Политика биткойна» с вызова левым пользователям криптовалюты: в каком виде биткойн может стать прогрессивным? Вместо прямого ответа на этот исходный вопрос он объясняет, почему биткойн и политическая основа, на которую он опирается, являются правыми. Таким образом, это не книга о технических аспектах биткойна и блокчейна, но аналитическая деконструкция идеологических амбиций сторонников криптовалюты.

https://commons.com.ua/ru/obmen-za-groshi-deshifrovka-bitkojna-i-blokchejna/

Christy Thornton - López Obrador and the Fight Ahead

Christy Thornton reports from Mexico on Andrés Manuel López Obrador's victory in Sunday's election and reflects on the forces lined up to oppose his agenda.  

“When the polls closed on Sunday night, giving an overwhelming victory to leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, I was in a remote, rural area of the State of Mexico. We had spent the day driving along the rutted, half-paved roads, visiting polling stations installed in primary schools and bus stations and tin-roofed football fields”.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3910-lopez-obrador-and-the-fight-ahead

Elliot Gabriel - Surveillance capitalism

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

MPN spoke to Yasha Levine, the author of “Surveillance Valley,” and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about the rise of the Amazon.com empire and the merger of Big Data, finance capitalism, and the U.S. state apparatus.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/amazons-fusion-with-the-state-shows-neoliberalisms-drift-to-neo-fascism/244967/

David-Hillel Ruben - Marxism and materialism. A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge

It is an irony of history that Marxism, born from the decomposition of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit and the death throes of German Idealism, and whose intention it was to provide a materialist theoretical basis for the struggle of the working class, stands in need of the very same purge that its inception was meant to provide. Although for the first fifty years of its life Marxism may have been subjected to positivist distortions, it has in its second fifty years found itself beset with idealist tendencies. Those positivist distortions, as they arose within the theory and practice of the discredited Second International and especially within German Social Democracy, are now well documented and understood. But the nature and importance of the idealist tendencies within Marxism have not been equally understood. Why should they have arisen? What were the material conditions, either of capitalist society after the first world war, or more particularly of the workers' movements during that period, which were responsible for the appearance of those idealist tendencies?

Возможен ли в Армении левый поворот?

Отвечают местные социалисты
Майский переворот в Армении, прошедший крайне мирно и при этом массово, вдохновил всех политически мыслящих жителей всей плеяды постсоветских диктатур – оказывается, можно было так. Но что происходит за красивой картинкой, и есть ли место в новой Армении нашим идеологическим левым соратникам? Редактор информационного ресурса Socialist Armenia Эдгар Саакян рассказал Hevale о Бархатной революции в Ереване, аполитичности населения и демократическом конфедерализме на Кавказе.

https://hevale.nihilist.li/armenia/

Susan Kang - How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine

The transactional political class was no match for the passion and moral clarity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the broader socialist movement.
The election of Donald Trump has demonstrated that American politics is riven with unpredictable openings and that applies to the Left as well. While Ocasio-Cortez’s impressive field operation was a testament to the value of a motivated volunteer force, perhaps the strongest asset was Alexandria herself. O

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-joe-crowley-democratic-machine

Э.В. Ильенков - Вершина, конец и новая жизнь диалектики (Гегель и конец старой философии)

«Противоречие есть критерий истины, отсутствие противоречия – критерий заблуждения». Этим дерзким парадоксом возвестила о своем рождении философская система, которой было суждено стать высшей – и одновременно последней в истории нашей науки – попыткой объединить в едином энциклопедическом синтезе все достижения диалектической мысли человечества, попыткой критически обобщить задним числом главные уроки ее более чем двухтысячелетней истории – истории самопознания диалектики.

http://caute.tk/ilyenkov/texts/phc/hegfin.html