Gareth Dale - Karl Polanyi and the economics of Labour

Karl Polanyi is being hailed as the intellectual inspiration behind Labour's new economic strategy. But, as Gareth Dale notes, his work, though rich, lacks a thorough conception of political power.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4015-karl-polanyi-and-the-economics-of-labour

Юрий Симонов - Шахтерское движение в 1989 г. и современное рабочее движение

Развал советского государства нанес огромный удар по шахтерам и их движению, по их организациям, в том числе и по новым профсоюзам, по способности шахтеров к самоорганизации в новых условиях. Выяснилось вдруг, что в условиях позднего СССР было относительно легко вступать в конфликт с начальством, но куда трудней оказалось вступать в какие-либо конфликты в период экономического коллапса и отсутствия инвестиций со стороны как распавшегося Союза, так и со стороны новых республиканских властей. Шахтеры вместе со всем остальным населением СССР оказались беззащитны перед лицом новых обстоятельств, наступления которых они не могли предвидеть даже в страшном сне. Готовой к этим переменам была только часть номенклатуры — как союзной, так и региональной.

http://scepsis.net/library/id_3487.html

Understanding Steve Biko: Race, Class and Struggle in South Africa

On the anniversary of Steve Biko’s murder, ROAPE’s Remi Adekoya speaks to South African scholar and activist Mosa Phadi. Phadi reflects on the legacy of Biko’s radical and important thought, but also discusses how he did not consider cohesive alternatives that could now serve as a counter to neoliberal ideas. In a wide-ranging interview Phadi also looks at the political and economic crisis in South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters, the failures of the ANC and the possibilities of a solution in the militancy and consciousness of working-class struggle.

http://roape.net/2018/09/12/understanding-steve-biko-race-class-and-struggle-in-south-africa/

Jedediah Purdy - The Bosses’ Constitution

How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.
In an unusually stinging dissent from the final major ruling of the Supreme Court’s 2017–18 term, Justice Elena Kagan accused the Court’s conservative majority of “weaponizing” the First Amendment. In a string of recent decisions, she argued, these justices had turned the protection of free speech into an all-purpose tool for shredding democratic policy choices that they disliked.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-bosses-constitution/

Jacqueline Best - Technocratic Exceptionalism: Monetary Policy and the Fear of Democracy

What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-to-day basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism or emergency-management and pay attention to the practices of technocratic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, I examine the ways in which economic theory and practice has sought to resolve some of the central tensions in liberalism by protecting the market from too much democracy a kind of exceptionalism exemplified by the doctrine of central bank independence.

https://economicsociologydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/technocratic-exceptionalism-monetary-policy-and-the-fear-of-democracy.pdf

Евгений Морозов - Техноненависть: как интернет отучил нас думать

Евгений Морозов – белорусско-американский публицист, один из ведущих критиков технологических инноваций (распространение интернета, гаджеты, соцсети и т.п.). Автор множества статей в ведущих американских изданиях, а также нашумевших книг «Сеть как иллюзия: темная сторона свободного интернета» и «Кликни сюда, чтобы все сохранить». По мнению Морозова, мы склонны недооценивать обратную сторону интернета и новых технологий – то, что кажется решением проблемы, на деле может оказаться новой проблемой, еще более сложной.

http://asmodei.org/opds/py/sopds.cgi?id=91437911

Heike Becker - Black Consciousness and Anti-Capitalism: The Legacy of Steve Biko

Continuing our look at the life of Steve Biko, Heike Becker writes about two extraordinary events. The first was the formation of a Black organisation of student protest in 1968. The South African Student Organisation (SASO) was founded during a meeting exclusively attended by black students. Biko became the new organisation’s first President. The second was the astonishing friendship that developed between Steve Biko and Rick Turner. Together their political and philosophical ideas helped shape the massive strike wave in Durban in the early 1970s. Their murder – Biko in September 1977, and Turner in 1978 – put an end to the conversation between Black Consciousness and anti-capitalist notions of ‘participatory democracy’, which provided a brief glimpse of the possibilities of another South Africa.

http://roape.net/2018/09/13/black-consciousness-and-anti-capitalism-the-legacy-of-steve-biko/

The Consolations of Identity

A conversation with Asad Haider

Asad Haider is the founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. In July 2018, I arranged to interview him in the wake of his recently released book, Mistaken Identity: Anti-Racism and the Struggle Against White Supremacy (Verso, Spring 2018), which was generating attention for its critique of “identity politics” from the perspective of a committed leftist. Haider’s book is partly informed by his experience as an organizer and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers Union at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he completed his doctoral degree. But to a significant degree, it is also invested in claiming a central place for the black radical tradition, including figures like Huey Newton, the Combahee River Collective and Stuart Hall, and reviving their thinking within socialist and leftist political discourse.

https://thepointmag.com/2018/dialogue/consolations-identity-conversation-asad-haider

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian - The Rise of the Inequality Industry

After the crash of 2008, the language of inequality began to trickle into the popular discourse. Then the Occupy movement launched it into the mainstream; the fall of 2011 was the first time in generations that concerns about distributive justice drove crowds into the streets and made front-page news. Scholars, pundits, and politicians all took note, and before long, Gornick and her colleagues found themselves at the center of what President Barack Obama called “the defining challenge of our time.” Reporting from a gathering at the Brookings Institution in late 2012, the journalist Chrystia Freeland (now Canada’s minister of foreign affairs) observed: “Three decades later, trickle-down economics” the theory that slashing taxes on businesses and the rich would spur investment and eventually benefit society as a whole “has met its antithesis. We are set for one of the great battles of ideas of our time.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-inequality-industry/

Yanis Varoufakis - Future of the international left

Our era will be remembered for the triumphant march of a globally unifying rightwing – a Nationalist International – that sprang out of the cesspool of financialised capitalism. Whether it will also be remembered for a successful humanist challenge to this menace depends on the willingness of progressives in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom as well as countries like Mexico, India and South Africa, to forge a coherent Progressive International.
Our task is not unprecedented. Fascists did not come to power in the mid-war period by promising violence, war or concentration camps. They came to power by addressing good people who, following a severe capitalist crisis, had been treated for too long like livestock that had lost its market value. Instead of treating them like “deplorables”, fascists looked at them in the eye and promised to restore their pride, offered their friendship, gave them a sense that they belonged to a larger ideal, allowed them to think of themselves as something more than sovereign consumers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2018/sep/13/our-new-international-movement-will-fight-rising-fascism-and-globalists

Andreas Malm - Deeper Into the Dark

On Sunday, the far right had its best ever result in Sweden. And they're pushing the rest of the political spectrum to capitulate to their agenda.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/09/sweden-democrats-election-far-right-left-party

Александр Бикбов - Управление

Социолог Александр Бикбов о понятии управления у Мишеля Фуко, суверенной власти и рождении категории населения.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qx3ekUiQmI0&feature=youtu.be

Victor Lund Shammas - The Illusion of Non-Capitalist Spaces

Capitalism requires zones that appear to be withdrawn from the circuitry of capital so that workers can cultivate their bodies and minds.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/09/the-illusion-of-non-capitalist-spaces/

Wendy Brown - Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric.

Where We Live Now: The Country and the City

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams analyses images of the country and the city in English literature since the 16th century, and how these images become central symbols for conceptualizing the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development in England. Williams debunks the notion of rural life as simple, natural, and unadulterated, leaving an image of the country as a Golden age.

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

Slavoj Zizek - Tolerance as an Ideological Category

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation: the culturalization of politics. Political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, and so on, are naturalized and neutralized into cultural differences, different ways of life, which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but must be merely tolerated. To this, of course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms: from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat and failure of direct political solutions (the welfare state, socialist projects, and so on).

Tom Carson - The Voice and Its Village

The Voice broke its share of hard-news stories, and certainly alerted readers to more than its share of no-longer-fringe trends, sometimes NYC-specific and sometimes not. But the difference between how we went about the job and the staid way the NYT or The New Yorker did was that we never covered that stuff from a settled institutional distance. We let ourselves get stimulated and jostled by it, and brother, did we ever argue about it. We hashed these squabbles out every week among ourselves, as well as with an audience that expected contentious perceptiveness about the latest City Hall shitstorm or collective art-world orgasm, not just a tidy rearrangement of the same reassuringly familiar deck chairs.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-voice-and-its-village-carson

David Harvey on The Contradictions of Capitalism

One of the world's most respected public thinkers visits the RSA to explore the hidden workings of capital. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate School, unravels the paradoxes at the heart of capitalism and offers a manifesto for a new way forward.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f9dLcGJ5NI0