C.L.R. James - Walter Rodney and the Question of Power

Walter Rodney, the great Marxist historian and activist, was killed on June 13th 1980 by a bomb in his native Guyana. In this essay by CLR James, originally published by Race Today in 1983, discusses Rodney's work in relation to the revolutionary seizure of power.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3878-walter-rodney-and-the-question-of-power?

Руслан Дзарасов - Криптовалюта и биткоин

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M9T7Qg3hYvU

Sophie Nakueira - Power, Profit and Sport: The Real Legacy of the Football World Cup

Football in all its glory, brings out the sportsmanship or cheerleader in many of us. It’s the one time many people from different parts of the world convene and celebrate an imagined global community. Or like many of my friends whose countries did not participate in the World Cup, we adopt national teams based on a perceived belonging. Thus, for me it seemed only right that I would support Germany and perhaps any African country being that I am living in Germany and hail from Uganda. However, unlike other football fans, my interest in football and the World Cup has little to do with the sport itself. It has more to do with what takes place behind the scenes, away from the limelight and cameras. The rarely spoken about but much disdained aspects that come with organizing FIFA World Cups. I have researched the governance arrangements that enable FIFA to successfully secure the run the World Cup. My research focused on the contractual arrangements that enabled FIFA to orchestrate security in the mega event zones of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

http://roape.net/2018/07/16/power-profit-and-sport-the-real-legacy-of-the-football-world-cup/

Domenico Losurdo: ‘Liberalism, the most dogged enemy of freedom’

The communist militant, philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo died in June. He worked for many years on the history of liberalism, as he sought to rethink the processes of emancipation. In this 2013 interview for l’Humanité he revisited the themes of his Liberalism: A Counter History.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3926-domenico-losurdo-liberalism-the-most-dogged-enemy-of-freedom

Mark Blyth - “Global Trumpism" And The Revolt Against The Creditor Class

Mark Blyth is a Scottish political scientist and a professor of international political economy at Brown University. At an event on November 9 at Brown's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, he spoke about "Global Trumpism" - a worldwide working-class backlash against harmful macroeconomic trends.
“What we have everywhere are creditor-debtor standoffs," he said. "If you look at the states that really fell hard [for Trump] in the Rust Belt, it is economic. Now, if you recognize that simple fact, you can put Trump in there with Brexit."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vSS4GCA__As

Labor and Liberation: An Interview with Margaret Stevens

The Public Archive. A proud product of New Jersey public schools, historian Margaret Stevens. She is the author of the path-breaking study Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico, and the West Indies, 1919-1939, published by Pluto Press. Red International and Black Caribbean is a provocative and deeply researched account of the transnational connections of Black radicals during the turbulent inter-war years. It demonstrates the importance of the greater-Caribbean to global revolutionary struggle while providing capsule biographies of many un- or lesser-known Black and Brown communists in Haiti, Harlem, Cuba, and Mexico.

http://thepublicarchive.com/?p=5009

Michel Foucault - The Lost Interview

This until now rarely seen 15-minute footage is of an interview that was conducted by the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders in preparation for the debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, which was broadcasted on Dutch television on Sunday, Nov. 28, 1971. The whole interview was essentially lost for decades and was published in the winter of 2012 for the first time. It is now available as a full-length book under the title of "Freedom and Knowledge." It includes an excellent introduction by author of "Mad for Foucault," Lynne Huffer, and additional contributions by Fons Elders.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoOhhh4aJg

Иной Маркс: возвращение к истокам

Интервью с Марчелло Мусто

Подобно многим другим марксистам после него Плеханов повинен в создании окостенелой, негибкой концепции общества и истории. А его идеи оказали большое влияние на русских революционеров, и не только на русских благодаря его международной известности в то время. На мой взгляд, эта концепция, основанная на упрощенном монизме, для которого экономические изменения являются решающими при любых трансформациях общества, имеет весьма мало общего с собственным учением Маркса. Она гораздо больше связана с культурным климатом эпохи, когда большую роль играли позитивизм и детерминизм.

http://logosjournal.ru/arch/27/81_10.pdf

Michael Lowy - Eco-Socialist Romanticism

In Spring 2018, The Polson Institute brought Michael Lowy, Emeritus Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), to teach a course on eco-socialism and the Anthropocene at Cornell. Professor Lowy is a prolific author and internationally renown marxist thinker.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zufuTMbG0tk

Arvind Dilawar - Gonzo Socialism

Hunter S. Thompson was born this day in 1937. While often claimed by the libertarian right, his politics had more in common with the radical left.

That April, in a letter to a friend, Thompson expressed his affection for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary labor union whose itinerant members began organizing throughout the US in the early twentieth century. “I believe the IWW was probably the last human concept in American politics,” he wrote.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/hunter-thompson-gonzo-socialism-iww

Senegal’s Street Fighting Years

ROAPE’s Remi Adekoya interviews the researcher and activist Pascal Bianchini. For years Bianchini has been researching and writing on protest, activism and the left in Senegal and Burkina Faso. He is widely recognized as an expert on student movements on the continent. Based in Dakar, he has undertaken important new research on the major events in Senegal in 1968, and the impact on the left in the years that followed. He sees the explosion of student and worker resistance that year as triggering the growth of radical left politics and organisations in the country and region. Ultimately, these movements led to a period of democratic transformation on the continent that overturned one-party states and dictatorships.

http://roape.net/2018/07/19/senegals-street-fighting-years/

Эллиот Гейбриэл -Капитализм наблюдения

Этот год может войти в историю как поворотный, когда у мира наконец открылись глаза на темную сторону вездесущего присутствия популярных компаний Кремниевой Долины в нашей повседневной жизни. По крайней мере, можно на это надеяться.
От Amazon до Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft и PayPal среди прочих, прокатилась волна разоблачений, подтверждающих имеющее место злоупотребление данными пользователей монополистическими корпорациями и их растущей роли как поставщиков технологий наблюдения полицейскому государству США, военным ведомствам и ведомствам по задержанию мигрантов.

http://perevodika.ru/articles/1199419.html

Laura Flanders - In the Age of Disaster Capitalism, Is ‘Survival Socialism’ the Solution?

A look at the British Labour Party’s plan to transform the economy from the ground up.

It’s a heady experience for an expat who observed the Labour Party drift right until 2015, when Corbyn, an outspoken anti-war socialist, won the leadership. Labour is now the largest political party in Western Europe, boasting some 552,000 members. Its government-in-waiting is packed with men and women in their 30s or even younger, mostly outsiders to party politics until Labour brought them inside. Still, Corbyn cynics are a dime a dozen: “Not I but we” is just campaign talk, they say; all this participatory process, this “new economics,” is just window dressing on the old, discredited, top-down state socialism of the past century.

https://www.thenation.com/article/age-disaster-capitalism-survival-socialism-solution

Paul Saba - Lessons from One Left to the Next: Revolution in the Air Reissued

Will the ongoing revival of American socialism stimulate interest in one of its lesser known antecedents? Verso Books certainly hopes so. That’s why they’ve reissued Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, originally published in 2002, now with a new foreword by Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter. The book chronicles the history of the US “new communist movement” (NCM) from the late 1960s through the 1980s, when thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and liberation movements in communities of color at home and abroad, embraced Marxism-Leninism and committed themselves to changing the world.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/07/19/lessons-from-one-left-to-the-next-revolution-in-the-air-reissued/

Horacio Tarcus - The Argentine May

As elsewhere, 1968 in Argentina was marked by increasingly militant struggles waged by workers and students, but the “Argentine 68” had its own tempo and would not explode until May 1969.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3935-the-argentine-may

James Bridle - Racially biased software shows that we need to democratise A.I

James Bridle, author of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, on the prejudices of artificial intelligence.

In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zDHSD4twyIA

Slavoj Zizek - Provocations: The 1968 revolution and our own

Half a century after May 1968 events in Paris (and elsewhere), the time has come to reflect upon the similarities and differences between the sexual liberation and feminism of the 1960s and the protest movements that flourish today, from LGBT+ to #MeToo. Although an immense abyss separates the revolt of the 60s from today’s protests, we are now witnessing a similar reappropriation of the energy of protest and revolt by the capitalist system.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/world-policy-journal/article-standard/35/2/124/134878/ProvocationsThe-1968-revolution-and-our-own

George Monbiot - The Future of Labour depends on Big Organizing

In this video George Monbiot explains how Labour's election success was hugely driven by Bernie Sanders-style organising techniques, and how, going-forward, this must be combined with "a thrilling new political vision fit for the 21st century, that isn’t defined to destroy the living planet and pull away the environmental rug from under us".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L-LmANCP0b4

"It Is Simply All Too Much"
An Interview with the Italian Philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Franco "Bifo" Berardi is an author, philosopher and media activist. Alongside Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, he is one of the most influential proponents of so-called post-operaism. He was in charge of the magazine »A/traverso« (1975–1981) and associated with the left-wing radical radio station Alice (1976-1978). Like many other members of the Autonomia movement, he fled to Paris in the 1970s, where he made the acquaintance of Félix Guattari. With Guattari, he studied schizoanalysis, which led to experimental collaborations with many artists and activists.

http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/46886

George Monbiot - We need to radically reorganize politics

In this interview George Monbiot argues that the "society-crushing system of neoliberalism has destroyed our natural capacity for altruism", and that we must fight against it to create "a politics of belonging that revives community and returns land to the people as a source of common wealth". We need meaningful participatory democracy, finer-grain involvement in politics, and power given back to people so that wealth isn't continually distributed to the rich.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M2SxP4PANr4