Ed Quish - John Rawls, Socialist?

Review of John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

In John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, William A. Edmundson offers a left defense of Rawls by focusing on the philosopher’s most mature and radical writings. By the time of Rawls’s final work, released in 2001 and called Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, he had concluded that capitalism is incompatible with the political equality and fair opportunity that justice demands. Rawls envisioned two kinds of regimes beyond capitalism that might equally realize justice: “liberal democratic socialism” and what he called “property-owning democracy.” Edmundson argues that Rawls’s professed neutrality is misleading, and that his mature theory systematically favors socialism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/john-rawls-reticent-socialist-review-theory-of-justice

Kieran Allen - The radical left & a strategy for growth

In his last book, the political scientist, Peter Mair suggested that the mass roots of conventional parties in Western democracies were declining. By the 1990s, just 5% of the population of Western democracies were members of a political party whereas in the 1960s it was three times higher. Even before the crash of 2008, the fall in mass membership has been accompanied by a decline in the ideological grip of the main conventional political parties. Since the crash, there has been an acceleration in this trend in many parts of the world.

https://mronline.org/2018/08/20/the-radical-left-a-strategy-for-growth/

Ellen Meiskins Wood - The Uses and Abuses of 'Civil' Society

Despite the diversity of current theoretical trends on the left  and their various means of conceptually dissolving capitalism,  they  often share one especially serviceable concept: 'civil society'. After a  long and somewhat tortuous history, after a series of milestones in the works of Hegel, Marx and Gramsci, this versatile idea has become an all-purpose catchword for the left, embracing a wide range of  emancipatory aspirations, as well - it must be said - as a whole set of  excuses for political retreat. However constructive its uses in defending human liberties against state oppression, or in marking out a terrain of social practices, institutions and relations neglected by the 'old' Marxist left, 'civil society' is now in danger of becoming an alibi for capitalism.

https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5574/2472

Wojciech Keblowski - Public Transport Should Be Free

We don’t put coins in street lamps or pay by the minute in public parks. Here’s why we should make subway and bus fares a thing of the past.
For Judith Dellheim, a researcher at Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung in Berlin, providing free access to public transport is the “first step towards socio-ecological transformation.” For Michiel Van Hulten, one of the earliest proponents of free public transport in Europe, “it is about returning to the commons.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/public-transportation-brussels-free-tickets

Бузгалин А.В., Колганов А.И. - Глобальный капитал

Двухтомная монография итожит сотни публикаций известных авторов, профессоров Московского государственного университета, чьи работы переведены на многие языки мира. Она критически наследует метод и теорию «Капитала» К.Маркса и раскрывает анатомию современной глобальной капиталистической экономики.

Wolfgang Streeck - What Should Capitalism Studies Become?

Professor Wolfgang Streeck is one of the most highly regarded sociologists and political economists of our time. His work on corporatism, trade unions and labour, on finance and European democracy has influenced debates in Europe and beyond over the past couple of decades, and his highly acclaimed book, “Buying Time, The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” has been translated into several languages.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K6WfhdoBZ-4

Briahna Gray - Beware the race reductionist

According to an increasingly popular narrative among the center-left, a dispiriting plurality of progressives are “class reductionists” — people who believe that economic equality is a cure-all for societal ills, and who, as a result, would neglect policy prescriptions which seek to remedy identity-based disparities. Of course, race and class are so interwoven that any political project that aims to resolve one while ignoring the other does a disservice to both.

https://theintercept.com/2018/08/26/beware-the-race-reductionist/

Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism

One of the most well established conventions of Western culture is the association of capitalism with cities. Capitalism is supposed to have been born and bred in the city. But more than that, the implication is that any city with its characteristic practices of trade and commerce is by its very nature potentially capitalist from the start, and only extraneous obstacles have stood in the way of any urban civilization giving rise to capitalism. Only the wrong religion, the wrong kind of state, or any kind of ideological, political, or cultural fetters tying the hands of urban classes have prevented capitalism from springing up anywhere and everywhere, since time immemorial or at least since technology has permitted the production of adequate surpluses.

https://monthlyreview.org/1998/07/01/the-agrarian-origins-of-capitalism/

Sophie Grahl - No Direction Home

The far right has made breakthroughs in old Communist heartlands across Europe. A new memoir blames this on the slow and painful erosion of class politics.

The central concern of Eribon’s memoir is not so much his own political trajectory, as that of his parents and their community: a traditional Communist heartland that later turned to the far right. From the 1950s to 1970s his entire family were Communists, not just in the sense that they voted for the Communist candidate at each election, but that the Party was “the organizing principle and the uncontested horizon of our relationship to politics.”  At what point, and for what reasons, did this give way to voting for the National Front and increasingly (if not always) embracing far-right discourse?

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/french-working-class-pcf-ps-national-front-eribon

Ellen Meiskins Wood - C.B. MacPherson: Liberalism, And The Task Of Socialist Political Theory

C.B. Macpherson has for many years.been the single major voice from the left in the traditional disciplines of political philosophy and the history of political thought. His work, especially his classic The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, has been groundbreaking. Above all, it has done much to repoliticize  political philosophy, giving it some foundation in history and revealing its ideological function. Macpherson's theory and  method are not, however, Marxist and questions can  be raised about what his standpoint actually is. Certainly he writes from a perspective that rejects the consequences of capitalism, but the rejection of capitalism is not consistently grounded in a commensurate analysis of capitalist social relations.

https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5428/2327

Corey Robin - The New Socialists

Why the pitch from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders resonates in 2018.
Public support for socialism is growing. Self-identified socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are making inroads into the Democratic Party, which the political analyst Kevin Phillips once called the “second-most enthusiastic capitalist party” in the world. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, is skyrocketing, especially among young people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/what-socialism-looks-like-in-2018.html

Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth’ by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis & Slavoj Žižek

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of Vladimir Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made Karl Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in the mode of production. Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance of the consequences that follow from action.

Contributors: Kevin B. Anderson, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Sebastian Budgen, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Stathis Kouvelakis, Georges Labica, Sylvain Lazarus, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Savas Michael-Matsas, Antonio Negri, Slavoj Žižek

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/slavoj-zizek/lenin-reloaded-toward-a-politics-of-truth/

Alexandra Ghit - Not as good as they look: Romania’s latest anti-corruption protests

In a nutshell, #rezist is a right-wing populist movement. Its anti-corruption message is fundamentally a punitive law-and-order platform. It could be argued that the movement is broader than that, considering the other claims have become appended to it, including a claim to dignity and political belonging for those working abroad, and a demand for functional public services. But these demands are embedded within a neo-liberal anti-corruption discourse of a coherence and virulence that was unknown in the large-scale mobilizations of previous years. Certainly, all major protests in Romania in the past ten years have been ideologically checkered; but the most recent ones seem ideologically unsalvageable.

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/not-as-good-as-they-look/

Ecuador’s Great Betrayal - An interview with
Guillame Long

Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno was elected to continue Correa’s Citizens' Revolution but has set about dismantling it instead.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/ecuador-correa-moreno-alianza-pais

Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ by V. I. Lenin and Slavoj Žižek

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, Žižek shows why Lenin’s thought is still important today

V. I. Lenin’s originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, in this new study and collection of Lenin’s original texts, Slavoj Žižek argues that his true greatness can be better grasped in the last two years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as the one at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated. As the anticipated world revolution receded into the distance, new paths had to be charted if the Soviet state was to survive.
With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Žižek suggests that Lenin’s courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat unflinchingly. In today’s world, characterized by political turbulence, economic crises and geopolitical tensions, we should revisit Lenin’s combination of sober lucidity and revolutionary determination.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/slavoj-zizek/lenin-2017-remembering-repeating-and-working-through/

Samir Amin - It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples

One of the last articles written by the late Samir Amin. "We are now in the phase of the ‘autumn of capitalism’ without this being strengthened by the emergence of ‘the people’s spring’ and a socialist perspective.…There is no alternative other than that enabled by a renewal of the international radical left, capable of carrying out–and not just imagining–socialist advances."

http://www.networkideas.org/featured-articles/2018/07/it-is-imperative-to-reconstruct-the-internationale-of-workers-and-peoples/

Lewis Bassett - Facebook After Capitalism

Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a “free and democratic media” promises to break the stranglehold of the established monopolies. And that also means taking on tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg.
For years governments have seemed scared of challenging the tech giants, refusing either to tax or regulate the new platforms which presented themselves in a near-magical aura. But Corbyn’s speech represents a breakthrough in the public debate on new media. Once apparently the domain of free-spirited libertarians, Silicon Valley is fast becoming a chief concern for states and governments. As social media monopolies are increasingly politicized, other proposals like introducing democratic oversight over the biggest platforms can offer a way to take control over sites that have become public utilities in all but name.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/facebook-social-media-capitalism-regulation-advertising

Vijay Prashad - Walter Rodney and the Russian Revolution

Vijay Prashad on the importance of Walter Rodney's lectures on the Russian Revolution.
In this excerpt from the foreword to The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, Vijay Prashad looks back at the political development and extrordinary legacy of the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3994-walter-rodney-and-the-russian-revolution