Milica Uvalić - The rise and fall of market socialism in Yugoslavia

This paper is dedicated to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a country that was known for its unique system of ‘market socialism’.
Despite retaining a communist one-party political regime throughout its existence (1945 – 1991), Yugoslavia was the first socialist country to attempt far-reaching economic reforms. Because of its early start and frequency of systemic changes, it was considered the most reformed socialist economy. For over forty years, Yugoslavia has tried to develop its own model of socialism based on workers’ self-management, ample decentralisation, social ownership and increasing reliance on the market mechanism.

https://doc-research.org/2018/03/rise-fall-market-socialism-yugoslavia/

Peter Lawrence - Global Corporate Capitalism and the State

The state under neoliberal capitalism has been undergoing a process of what can best be called colonisation by capital such that the interests of the dominant global capital, both financial and industrial, were effectively aligned with those of the state. Now commonly known as ‘state capture’, this alignment has been enabled by the ‘revolving door’ in which political figures move into business and back into politics and vice versa, by business lobbying, by business funding of political parties at election time, and, as a consequence of privatisations and sub-contracting of public services, by an increasingly systemic relationship between capital and the state. There have always been close relations between powerful business lobbies and governments, but nowhere near as blatant and corrupt as they have become.

http://roape.net/2018/08/03/global-corporate-capitalism-and-the-state/

Peter Thiel - Hypnotic Mass Phenomena

Peter Thiel is one of Silicon Valley’s bigger-than-life characters. Now he is leaving the epicenter of the tech industry.

What was unique about the Trump campaign?

Republican candidates have always been way too glibly optimistic about everything. I’ve thought for many years that it was critical for the Republicans to somehow run a more pessimistic candidate just because that was a more honest description of what was going on. It is very hard to know how to do that because if you are too pessimistic, you demotivate people: If everything is just going down the drain, no point even voting for me. Somehow, the genius of Trump was that it was extraordinarily pessimistic, and yet still extraordinarily motivational. The slogan “Make America Great Again”, the most pessimistic slogan of any presidential candidate in a hundred years: The country used to be great, it is no longer great. That is a shocking, shocking statement!

Which offended some people.

I can understand why it is extremely offensive and why it is maybe uniquely offensive in Silicon Valley. It is the substance of reason why Silicon Valley had some justification to be upset with Trump. Since Silicon Valley tells itself a story that it is making the world dramatically better, in a way that Wall Street does not, there was something about that slogan that was uniquely offensive. But I think the question that Silicon Valley and the country would do well to ask, is: Is it true? How much real progress have we had?

And the answer is?

My judgement certainly is that there is a lot more truth on the Trump side than on the, let’s call it Google Propaganda, the alternative where everything is just automatically getting better. Certainly, one of the experiences throughout the western world is that the younger generation, for the most part, does not expect to have lives as good as those of their parents. We can say they are wrong, they don’t understand anything about their lives. But, again, the common-sense, anti “political correctness” intuition is that you trust people’s common sense, you trust their judgements and that judgement is an incredible indictment of our elites.

https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018-29/artikel/en-hypnotische-massenphanomene-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-29-2018.html

Prabhat Patnaik - Capitalism’s Discourse on “Development”

Capitalisms discourse on “development” which has become quite influential all over the third world in the neo-liberal period proceeds as follows: (i) “development” must consist in shifting the work-force from the traditional (petty production) sector which is overcrowded with low labour productivity, and hence constitutes a repository of poverty,  to the modern (capitalist) sector which has much higher labour productivity. (ii) For this shift to occur, the modern (capitalist sector) must be allowed to grow as rapidly as possible, for which all impediments to capital accumulation must be removed.

https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2018/0729_pd/capitalism%E2%80%99s-discourse-%E2%80%9Cdevelopment%E2%80%9D

Warren Montag - 'Foucault and the Problematic of Origins': Althusser's Reading of Folie et déraison

Althusser, of course, never wrote the text on Foucault's first major work. The sole written record of his impassioned encounter with Folie et déraison are the notes from which he delivered his lecture 'Foucault et la problematique des origines' to his seminar on Structuralism on April 9, 1963. Interestingly, the notes suggest a very careful reading by means of which Althusser discovers, at the heart of Foucault's text, a constitutive contradiction: "Foucault's book is thus really as much a book about reason as about madness. . . . This border freely constituted is haunted by the temptation of being an original abyss, a verticality that is no longer a break (coupure) in history but the originary rupture of time." To make this contradiction intelligible, Althusser must show not only how and to what extent Folie et déraison "is haunted" by the temptation to think the history of madness in terms of an origin, in this case, an original abyss, but also the ways in which Foucault's work escapes that which haunts it, or at least provides the medium through which the haunting presence is other than it originally was, and in so doing calls into question the very concept of origin.

http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol4no2_2005/montag_foucault.htm

Herve Do Alto - How Evo Morales Stays in Power

Given the return of a neoliberal right across the region, Morales sees himself as Bolivia’s best defense against the counterrevolutionary trend in Latin America.

https://www.thenation.com/article/evo-morales-stays-power/

Organization after Social Media

What is the social today, if not social media? It is not enough to indulge in the aesthetics of revolt. Flaws in the 19th and 20th century models of the party, the union, and the movement are easy to detect, but what’s replacing them? It is tempting to say that the network is the dominant form of the social: a programmed life under permanent surveillance. What can replace the corporate walled gardens such as Facebook and Twitter?

https://www.scribd.com/document/381615409/Organization-after-Social-Media

John Bellamy Foster - Marx, Value, and Nature

Raoul Peck’s 2017 film The Young Karl Marx opens with a quiet scene of poor “peasant proletarians,” men, women, and children, dirty and in rags, gathering dead wood in a forest. Suddenly they are attacked by a troop of mounted police armed with clubs and swords. Some of the gatherers are killed; the rest are captured. The scene then cuts to Karl Marx, age twenty-four, in the Cologne offices of the Rheinische Zeitung, where he was editor, writing an article on “The Debates on the Law on the Theft Wood.” He penned five installments under this title from October to November 1842, and it was this more than anything else that brought the Prussian censors down on the newspaper and its talented young editor and writers.

https://monthlyreview.org/2018/07/01/marx-value-and-nature/

Neoliberalism From the Left

An interview with
Stephanie L. Mudge

In the 1970s and '80s, left parties turned to markets and spin doctors to adjust to economic changes. The results have been disastrous.
In Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism, Mudge looks at left parties in advanced capitalist countries over the last century and shows how the experts aligned with those parties pushed them in the direction of spin doctors and markets. In the process, left parties’ ability to represent the interests of their own working-class constituencies was eroded and ordinary people were shut out of the halls of power.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/left-political-party-economists-neoliberalims-keynesianism

Yohannes Woldemariam - Ethiopia’s Quiet Revolution: From Revolutionary Developmentalism to Neoliberal reform

On June 5 this year in Addis Ababa, Abiy Ahmed, the new Prime Minister and head of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), announced his plan for the privatization of key sectors of the economy and the unconditional implementation of the Ethiopia Eritrea Border Commission (EEBC) border rulings with Eritrea after the war fought at the end of the last century. What spurred this dramatic departure from the long-standing and zealously guarded state developmentalist ideology of Revolutionary Democratic Developmentalism (RDD) and this sudden move to break the deadlock in Ethiopian-Eritrean relations, which have remained hostile since the 1998-2000 war between the two countries?

http://roape.net/2018/08/07/ethiopias-quiet-revolution-from-revolutionary-developmentalism-to-neoliberal-reform/

The Guattari Effect

The Guattari Effect brings together internationally renowned experts on the work of the French psychoanalyst, philosopher and political activist Félix Guattari with philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, anthropologists and artists who have been influenced by Guattari's thought.
Best known for his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, Guattari's own writings are still a relatively unmined resource in continental philosophy. Many of his books have not yet been translated into English. Yet his influence has been considerable and far-reaching. This book explores the full spectrum of Guattari's work, reassessing its contemporary significance and giving due weight to his highly innovative contributions to a variety of fields, including linguistics, economics, pragmatics, ecology, aesthetics and media theory. Readers grappling with the ideas of contemporary continental philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek and Rancière will at last be able to see Guattari as the 'extraordinary philosopher' Deleuze claimed him to be, with his distinctive radical ideas about the epoch of global 'deterritorialization' we live in today, forged within the practical contexts of revolutionary politics and the materialist critique of psychoanalysis.

Dans Cloud - When facebook wants to see your papers

Dana Cloud knows firsthand about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest dystopian policies: shutting down protest pages and requiring online activists to show proof of residency.
Last week, Facebook shut down dozens of pages and accounts, including some that were publicizing plans for protesting the fascist “White Civil Rights Rally” in Washington, D.C., on August 11, claiming suspicions that the accounts were fronts for Russian agents meddling in U.S. politics.
One of the deleted pages, called “No Unite the Right 2 — DC,” was helping to organize a protest among a coalition of anti-fascist groups. The justification for the deletion was that one creator of the page among several was a page called “Resisters,” which Facebook investigators suspected of being connected to Russian hackers.

https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/07/when-facebook-wants-to-see-your-papers

Seth Ackerman - Which Side Are They On?

A titanic struggle is brewing in California between Silicon Valley capitalists and workers. Democratic Party elites will have to pick a side.
This week, Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson reported on a titanic political struggle that’s brewing in California, where the state Supreme Court issued a ruling last April imposing stringent conditions on when and how firms can classify workers as independent contractors — a practice used throughout the corporate world to get around labor laws and generally keep workers divided and weak. The ruling has stirred panic in the state’s business establishment, which is now in the process of mobilizing what looks to be a massive and very serious counter-attack aimed at neutering or overturning it.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/california-independent-contractors-court-ruling-silicon-valley

Imagining a world with no bullshit jobs

In this interview about his latest book, David Graeber discusses the role of unions, the challenges posed by automation and “the revolt of the caring classes.”

Is your job pointless? Do you feel that your position could be eliminated and everything would continue on just fine? Maybe, you think, society would even be a little better off if your job never existed?
If your answer to these questions is “yes,” then take solace. You are not alone. As much as half the work that the working population engages in every day could be considered pointless, says David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

https://roarmag.org/essays/graeber-bullshit-jobs-interview/

Franco “Bifo” Berardi - Cognitarian Subjectivation

Recent years have witnessed a new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation. And I would like to ask whether a process of autonomous, collective self-definition is possible in the present age. The concept of “general intellect” associated with Italian post-operaist thought in the 1990s (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) emphasizes the interaction between labor and language: social labor is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/20/67633/cognitarian-subjectivation/

Mason B. Williams - Socialism and the Liberal Imagination

How do socialist demands become liberal common sense? The history of the New Deal offers a useful lesson.
What is “democratic socialism” in contemporary America? In November 2015, with the Iowa caucuses on the horizon, Bernie Sanders finally tackled the question head-on in a much-publicized speech at Georgetown University. Democratic socialism, he told his audience, is what Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did. FDR’s unfinished vision of a second bill of rights, an “economic bill of rights,” “is my vision today,” Sanders remarked.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-deal-socialism-liberalism-progressive-reform

Daniel Taylor - Socialism is back, with good reason

The spectre of socialism is again haunting world politics.
Until recently, the word “socialism” was uttered in mainstream politics only as a slur that right wing fanatics hurled at their neoliberal-centrist rivals. It seems like an eternity since former US president Barack Obama and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard were accused by crazed Republicans and Liberals of harbouring a socialist agenda.
Now, in Britain, the US and Australia, “socialism” means something else; the political terrain has shifted. “Socialism” is now a moral value to which young people in particular aspire. It’s recognition that neoliberalism has failed, and that the leaderships of centre left parties are part of the problem, not part of the solution. It shows a desire for a left wing politics that brings inequality and class back to the fore.

https://redflag.org.au/node/6462

Heike Becker - Keeper of the Truth: Claude Lanzmann an Frantz Fanon

Less well-known than the French filmmaker’s engagement with the European holocaust experience and his controversial support of Israel, is his fierce anti-colonialist activism against France’s colonial war in Algeria and his close encounter with Frantz Fanon. Lanzmann, at the time a radical journalist and writer became significant during Fanon’s last year of life as an intermediary between the latter and his publisher and supporters in France. Notably Lanzmann organised a meeting in Rome in July 1961 between Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which resulted in Sartre’s famous preface to the The Wretched of the Earth, the manuscript of which Fanon had brought along to give to Sartre. The physically and emotionally exhausting three days of intensive conversation were the first time Fanon met the French philosopher and activist, arguably his most profound intellectual influence. Lanzmann however had already had some months earlier an intriguing meeting with Fanon in his Tunis exile.

http://roape.net/2018/08/09/keeper-of-the-truth-claude-lanzmann-and-frantz-fanon/

Rebecca Burns - Bargaining with Silicon Valley

Gig economy bosses including the CEOs of both Uber and Lyft are using a narrative of technological inevitability to undermine labor law and the social safety net.
The dwellers of Silicon Valley, we’re led to believe, are preternaturally gifted with powers of prediction. The fifty-square-mile area teems with people manically anticipating the next big thing, whether it’s self-driving buses or an app that lets you text “Yo” (and nothing else) to your friends. Startup staff don’t just work in offices they do their innovating in “futures labs.” “Foresight practitioners” receive large paychecks to tell clients what tomorrow will look like.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/bargaining-silicon-valley-gig-economy-labor-standards