Nelson Lichtenstein - How Missouri Beat “Right to Work”

With last week’s referendum, the “Show-Me” state showed that the right’s assault on organized labor does not stand the test of democracy.
The most remarkable thing about last week’s rejection by Missouri voters of a right-to-work law enacted by the Republican-run state legislature was its magnitude. Not only did opponents crush the law by a margin of more than two to one, the total vote on the issue nearly 1.4 million exceeded by more than a 100,000 the number of statewide ballots cast on behalf of all candidates in both party primaries that same day.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-missouri-beat-right-to-work

Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson - The enemy between us: how inequality erodes our mental health

Inequality creates the social and political divisions that isolate us from each other.
In our 2009 book The Spirit Level, we hypothesised that this happens because inequality increases the grip of class and social status on us, making social comparisons more insidious and increasing the social and psychological distances between people.
In our new book, The Inner Level, we bring together a robust body of evidence that shows we were on the right track: inequality eats into the heart of our immediate, personal world, and the vast majority of the population are affected by the ways in which inequality becomes the enemy between us. What gets between us and other people are all the things that make us feel ill at ease with one another, worried about how others see us, and shy and awkward in company in short, all our social anxieties.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/kate-pickett-richard-wilkinson/enemy-between-us-how-inequality-erodes-our-mental-heal

Mistaking Identity Politics: A Conversation with Asad Haider (Part I)

I think that the 2016 primaries were actually a pretty pivotal moment in producing a conception of politics around race and class, which are conjoined in the subtitle of my book: race and class, not race or class, or something else along those lines. [The primaries were] a turning point in turning those into an opposition, and a lot of that had to do with precisely the appropriation you describe by the Hillary Clinton camp of the languages of civil rights, identity politics, intersectionality, privilege and all the rest, which were conjoined in her campaign to the continuation of a neoliberal and militarist legacy, that she had participated in, in the Obama administration, and had essentially been inherited from a long line of US presidents from Ronald Reagan.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3972-mistaking-identity-politics-a-conversation-with-asad-haider-part-i

Linda Roland Danil - Freud the Socialist, Freud the Revolutionary

Linda Roland Danil makes the argument for reading Freud as a revolutionary figure, and asks what value Freud's work holds in the age of widening inequality.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3964-freud-the-socialist-freud-the-revolutionary

8 сентября, 17:30, Павильон, Новой Голландии (Санкт-Петербург)

Лекция Паоло Вирно «Современные городские инициативы (и/или) сообщества как не-государственная сфера общественной жизни»

"Современный труд все больше принимает форму труда, в основе которого лежит использование речевой деятельности и знаний. Сегодня трудящийся прежде всего говорит (или пишет), думает и так или иначе имеет дело с присутствием других людей. Можно сказать, что производительная деятельность во многом напоминает выступление виртуоза пианиста или певца. Исполнение реализует не какой-то определенный продукт производства, а сеть социальных отношений. Партитура которую «исполняет» тот, кто работает используя мышление и речь и есть тот General Intellect, которому Маркс посвятил несколько весьма не «марксистких» страниц. «Общий интеллект» — это совокупность знаний, речевой деятельности, способности к кооперации и к вымыслу. «Общий интеллект» является публичной сферой. При работе со словом и знаниями мы предоставляем себя взгляду (и реакциям) других людей. Но та публичная сфера, которая начинает вырисовываться в эпоху лингвистического и когнитивного производства, не имеет ничего общего с государственной публичной сферой. Что именно происходит в общественной жизни, когда слово «публичный» перестает быть синонимом «государственный»?

Nathan J. Robinson - The need for workplace democracy

Workplaces shouldn’t operate like dictatorships.

In Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, James Bloodworth writes about what working in an Amazon warehouse is really like. Turns out, the answer is: It’s awful. Bloodworth says it felt like a “prison,” with workers constantly monitored and having to pass through security whenever they went on break or to the bathroom. (Time spent in the security line is, of course, unpaid.) Warehouse workers frequently walked 10 miles a day across 10.5 hour shifts, and frequently worked mandatory overtime.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/08/the-need-for-workplace-democracy

Georg Lukács - Reflections on the Cult of Stalin (1962)

My first reaction to the Twentieth Congress concerned not only the personality but the organization: the apparatus which had produced the cult of the personality and which had fixed it in a sort of endless enlarged reproduction. I pictured Stalin to myself as the apex of a pyramid which widened gradually toward the base and was composed of many ‘little Stalins”: they, seen from above, were the objects and, seen from below, the creators and guardians of the “cult of the personality.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1962/stalin.htm

Mistaking Identity Politics: A Conversation with Asad Haider (Part II)

That's an interesting question, because the mainstream appropriation of Martin Luther King was introduced by Ronald Reagan. He signed Martin Luther King Day into law. So it's something that actually stretches beyond  if we're talking about the civil rights movement it certainly stretches beyond the kinds of populations who now speak about identity politics. Do you think that a lot of people who are now in the discourse of identity politics are specifically citing the civil rights movement?

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3974-mistaking-identity-politics-a-conversation-with-asad-haider-part-ii

Olivia Rutigliano - The Serve-Us Industry

What's so funny about ads that turn workers into peons?
The advertising tagline puts the customer’s preference first, ignoring that if you order food via delivery, a person has to go near, or into, your home with your food. The Eat24 ad, in other words, achieves in words what the gig-driven food-delivery sector does every day in the economy writ large: it erases the person who (barely) holds down this low-paying, physically arduous job from the rules that govern the socio-economic relations in the outside world.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-serve-us-industry-rutigliano

Паскаль Северак - Сознание и аффективность. Спиноза и Выготский

Статья посвящена сопоставлению философии Спинозы и психологиии Выготского с точки зрения их отношения к проблеме сознания: как определить эту инстанцию внутренней рефлексивности, если отталкиваться не от базового личностного мышления, но от межличностного, социального  отношения, определяющего индивидуальное мышление? Одна из устойчивых дефиниций сознания по Выготскому: «Сознание есть переживание переживаний». Такое понимание близко к концепции Спинозы, который, определяя сознание как «идею идеи», объясняет, каким образом связаны сознание и аффективность. Итак, мы покажем, как сознание, понимаемое как аффект, формируется социальной средой и почему мы можем различать у ребенка степени сознания, в зависимости от которых переживаемый аффект развит в большей или меньшей мере, т. е. более или менее активен. Мы соотнесем силу рефлексивности сознания с силой обратимости телесных впечатлений — начиная с той, что проявляется в словах

http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/16/123

Tom Goodfellow - African Capitalisms, Infrastructure and Urban Real Estate

The series on capitalism in Africa on roape.net has so far provided some excellent reflections focused primarily in two areas: first, the utility of the concept of capitalism (seen as being both historically contingent and culturally loaded) for understanding African economic development processes; and second, the variable ways in which Africa is integrated – usually to its detriment – into the global capitalist system. My contribution takes a different angle by focusing on the inward rather than outward dimension of African capitalisms, and specifically the relationship between capitalism and urbanisation – or, more accurately, the development of urban areas, acknowledging that the ‘urban’ is now another increasingly contested concept both in global debates and in our understanding of changing African societies.

http://roape.net/2018/08/17/african-capitalisms-infrastructure-and-urban-real-estate/

Aníbal Quijano - Beyond Eurocentrism: on José Carlos Mariátegui

Aníbal Quijano, the renowned Peruvian scholar and one of the founders of Decolonial Studies, died last month at the age of 87. In this text, an introduction to José Carlos Mariátegui’s essential writings on socialist politics and culture, published in 1991 by Fondo de Cultura, Quijano underscores the powerful influence that Mariátegui held over the theoretical development of Latin American critical thought

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3976-beyond-eurocentrism-on-jose-carlos-mariategui

Andrew Ryder - The Function of Autonomy: Félix Guattari and New Revolutionary Prospects

Félix Guattari is widely discussed among philosophers, particularly feminists and specialists in ecology and technology. But in the Anglophone world, political organisers tend to ignore him. In part this is due to academic paywalls and university strictures confining his work, but the problem goes further: the stylistic conservatism of so much of the Anglo-American left has impeded the capacity to learn from his insights, because they are presented in an nontraditional and unfamiliar style. This resistance has obscured his continuing activity as a participant and organiser in a variety of international struggles.

http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/the-function-of-autonomy-felix-guattari-and-new-revolutionary-prospects/

Dan Berger - How prisons serve capitalism

In her new book, Jackie Wang dubs this development “carceral capitalism”: a draconian model of economic governance that approaches Black urban communities with a mixture of debt and police violence. Carceral capitalism turns police, prosecutors, and courts into creditors, lessors, and debt collectors. Capitalism, Wang shows, integrates the punitive state through debt. For many people, debt itself is a form of punishment.

http://www.publicbooks.org/how-prisons-serve-capitalism/

Чанг Ха-Джун - Злые самаритяне: миф о свободной торговле и секретная история капитализма

Известный экономист Ха-Чжун Чанг изучает и подвергает сомнению принципы неолиберализма: свободный рынок и свободную торговлю. Так ли они хороши, и действительно ли только благодаря им преуспели нынешние страны-лидеры. Книга предлагает экскурс в историю, анализ современной экономики и прогноз.
Ха-Джун Чанг – экономист и мыслитель из Южной Кореи, лауреат премии Гуннара Мюрдаля и Леонтьевской премии. Он консультировал Всемирный банк, Азиатский банк развития, Европейский инвестиционный банк, ряд агентств ООН.

Харви Д. - Социальная справедливость и город

Перед читателем одна из классических работ Д. Харви, авторитетнейшего англо-американского географа, одного из основоположников "радикальной географии", лауреата Премии Вотрена Люда (1995), которую считают Нобелевской премией по географии. Книга представляет собой редкий пример не просто экономического, но политэкономического исследования оснований и особенностей городского развития. И хотя автор опирается на анализ процессов, имевших место в США и Западной Европе в 1960-1970-х годах XX века, его наблюдения полувековой давности более чем актуальны для ситуации сегодняшней России. Работы Харви, тесно связанные с идеями левых интеллектуалов (прежде всего французских) середины 1960-х, сильнейшим образом повлияли на англосаксонскую традицию исследования города в XX веке.

Richard Sennett - Globalized labour

Nineteenth factories were horrible. But at least there was a boss present on the work floor. In our globalized world a lot of labour is outsourced and the contact between boss and employee lacks a face to face contact. Sociologist Richard Sennett states that, because of a lack of informal communication, the contact between boss and employee became directive instead of communicative.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IvFHb6R_ODc

Ninety-Minute Nationalists - An interview with
Richard Mills

Yugoslavia’s communists recruited so many football players that some even joined the partisans while still wearing their kits. But today, football in the Balkans is famous for its far-right extremism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/yugoslavia-balkan-war-football-riots