Jason Barker - Marx Returns

Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers’ revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx’s revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn… Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels’s collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history’s most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/jason-barker/marx-returns/

Константин Мильчин - Любитель капибар

Рецензия на книгу «Венесуэла и Уго Чавес»

Книга о венесуэльской истории от гигантских броненосцев до социализма ХХI века и о ее легендарном президенте Уго Чавесе. Финальную точку в спорах о том, кем же был для своей страны Чавес, спасителем или могильщиком, она вряд ли поставит.

«После Боливара и вплоть до Чавеса история Венесуэлы разворачивается по одной и той же схеме: короткий период правления гражданского правительства сменяется приходом к власти очередного „сильного человека“. Иногда такой человек приходит к власти в результате военного переворота, иногда для этого требуется гражданская война. Для недовольных всегда есть тюрьма или эмиграция в голландские колонии. Большая часть населения пребывает в нищите вне зависимости от того, кто у власти, гражданские или военные, правые или левые. Уго Чавес родился в деревне, где не было электричества».

https://gorky.media/reviews/lyubitel-kapibar/

Aram Aharonian and Álvaro Verzi Rangel - Atlas Network, the right-wing libertarians

The capitalist international exists, it mobilizes the libertarian movement of right-wing, they are known as “libertarians” and it is obviously very well financed. It works through an immense conglomerate of foundations, institutes, NGOs, centers and societies united by undetectable threads, which include the Atlas Economic Research Foundation or the Atlas Network.
In the Latin American Forum on Liberty of the Atlas Network, held in May 2017 in the luxurious Brick Hotel in Buenos Aires, in the presence of Argentine President Mauricio Macri and the Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa, it was discussed how to defeat socialism at all levels, from the battlefields on the university campuses to the mobilization of a country to embrace the removal of a constitutional government, as in Brazil.

https://mronline.org/2018/09/07/atlas-network-the-right-wing-libertarians/

https://mronline.org/2018/09/08/the-atlas-networks-insidious-impact-on-the-ground/

Nancy Fraser - The Significance of Rosa Luxemburg for Contemporary Social Theory

A hundred years since the first Berlin edition of "The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism," no one needs a commemorative address to introduce the work. The work is still being referenced by scholars, writers and people all around the world who fight for democracy and justice; for a life of dignity, solidarity and ecological responsibility; and for socialism. Its continued prominence is a tribute to its author, her academic methodology and the topicality of the questions she posed, yet also demonstrates a corresponding weakness in the modern Left, particularly among socialists.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zk2VJAW_jHw

Йоран Терборн - Мир. Руководство для начинающих

Как будет выглядеть мир XXI века, когда теперь главенство Запада больше не является данностью? Как сформировались общества и культуры, существующие сегодня в мире, и как они связаны между собой? И что движет человеческим обществом в наши дни? Короче говоря, каково состояние мира сегодня, когда мы вступаем во второе десятилетие XXI века? Это первая книга, в которой рассматривается планетарное человеческое общество в целом. В ней излагается социокультурная геология мира, его основных цивилизаций, его исторических волн глобализации, его систем семьи - пола - тендера и его путей к современности; описывается динамика мира, его основные движущие силы и очертания наиболее важных глобальных и субглобальных процессов. В книге показаны большие командные игроки на мировой сцене (богатые страны, разнообразные религии и движения, корпорации и города) и прослеживаются жизненные пути мужчин и женщин на всех континентах от их рождения и детства до старости и смерти.

Дерьмовые работы

Перевод главы из книги Дэвида Грэбера

В мае этого года у британского антрополога Дэвида Грэбера вышла книга с интригующим названием «Bullshit Jobs: A Theory».

Мы перевели первую главу исследования, в которой Грэбер объясняет, что же представляют из себя «дерьмовые» работы и почему они бесполезны для общества, в чём заключается культурная ценность фильма «Автостопом по галактике» и почему киллеры любят своё ремесло.

http://doxajournal.ru/translations/bullshit_jobs

Veronica Lazar - The Age of Eclecticism: Some Rearrangements in the Romanian Political Ideologies

"Ideology has several speeds and very little memory." Thus begins Veronica Lazăr's analysis of the vertiginous twists and turns of protest politics in Romania from 2012 to the present. Resistance, corruption, diaspora, Europe: as Romanians wrestle over these ideologically charged terms, what are the chances that an alignment will come into place that might challenge the true pillars of the post-socialist order?

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/age-of-eclecticism-rom/

Lars Tragadh - Is the «Swedish Model»
of Social Democracy Endangered?

The rise of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats is stunning but the Social Democrats have been losing ground for decades.

https://www.thenation.com/article/is-the-swedish-model-of-social-democracy-endangered/

David Broder - Zoo Without a Giraffe

Italy’s Democratic Party wants to lead the resistance against the government’s hard-right policies. Yet the party seems close to its death-knell.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/09/italy-democratic-party-festa-m5s-lega-renzi-orfini-zingaretti

Jeremy Gong & Eric Blanc - Race, class and social strategy

Marxists have long understood that the workplace is the primary strategic site of class struggle, and that class struggle is essential for cohering a radicalized working-class majority with the capacity and will to overthrow capitalism in favor of socialism. At the same time, Marxists recognize our moral responsibility to oppose and the strategic necessity to fight all forms of exploitation and oppression.

https://mronline.org/2018/09/12/race-class-and-social-strategy/

Dani Rodrik - Can Trade Agreements Be a Friend to Labor?

To date, labor clauses in trade agreements have remained a fig leaf, neither raising labor standards abroad nor protecting them at home. Real change would require a significantly different approach, including how trade agreements uphold and enforce workers’ rights.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trade-agreement-labor-provisions-small-practical-effect-by-dani-rodrik-2018-09

Robin Blackburn - The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848

In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by independence movements, slave revolts, abolitionists or some combination of all three. How did this happen? Robin Blackburn’s history captures the complexity of a revolutionary age in a compelling narrative. In some cases colonial rule fell while slavery flourished, as happened in the South of the United States and in Brazil; elsewhere slavery ended but colonial rule remained, as in the British West Indies and French Windwards. But in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated. This story of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the “first emancipation” in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel actions of slave resistance and metropolitan abolitionism, and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism. The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point, showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottabah Cuguano to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America, and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean.

Evan Malmgren - Socialized Media

What will it take to remake Facebook and Twitter in the public’s interest?

Earlier this month, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and an absent Google representative found themselves before the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC), where they endured an uncomfortable grilling on topics ranging from the manipulation and value of user data to how one might police the “truth.” These lines of questioning inevitably generated vague speculation about regulation, though it’s difficult to imagine the scope of federal action that would be required in a serious effort to confront the crisis unfolding on the backs of privatized platforms.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/socialized-media-malmgren

Nataliya Mykhalchenko - Lifting the Veil on Capital Flight and Tax Havens in Africa

Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, Sigrid Klæboe Jacobsen, Peter Henriksen Ringstad, Honest Prosper Ngowi Lifting the veil of secrecy: Perspectives on international taxation and capital flight from Africa (Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2017).

http://roape.net/2018/09/20/lifting-the-veil-on-capital-flight-and-tax-havens-in-africa/

https://www.cmi.no/publications/6382-lifting-the-veil-of-secrecy

Eugene Brennan - The International Black Panthers

Meanwhile, in France, the tendency to describe ’68 as a generational revolt against French paternalism often misses the instrumental role of anti-imperialism. It’s worth recalling that student mobilization was initially focused on international opposition to the war in Vietnam and that the arrest of protestors against the war directly led to the 22 March student movement. But there is also a broader sense in which internationalism animated the ’68 years, providing not only an expression of moral solidarity but also a heightened consciousness of the very material connections between the local and the global. For example, the documentary Loin du Vietnam, released eight months before the events of May 1968, has come to appear a powerful, retroactive suggestion of the ways in which discontented youth in Paris (as well as New York and elsewhere) were highly conscious of the ways in which their interests might be bound up with those in Hanoi and beyond.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-international-black-panthers/

The uprooting in Haiti: whispers of a revolutionary past and future

In July 2018, protests developed in Haiti and then escalated against the government. The immediate spur for the protests came when the government of Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant raised fuel prices by 38% (gasoline) and 51% (diesel and kerosene). The price rise was announced during the popular World Cup football match between Brazil and Belgium. It is thought that the government hoped to avoid public scrutiny of the price rise. No such luck for the Prime Minister. Within hours after the game ended, thousands of people took to the streets. They set up road blocks and expressed their anger against shops that sold goods unaffordable for the mass of the people.

https://www.thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/180905_Dossier_8_EN_Final_Web.pdf

Frédéric Lordon - The Economic Catastrophe as a Passionate Event

By going no further than common sense, mainstream economists are accustomed to considering the “crisis” as “when things go wrong” in technical terms: “when we’re out of equilibrium”. How puzzling, then, that mass unemployment and inequalities definitely things going wrong last for decades. Can the sheer idea of a thirty year crisis make sense? This rhetorical question gives rise to quite another concept of crisis, in line with French “Regulation theory”: it’s not “when things go wrong” but when “things change.” Actually they do change! They do because capitalism is a historical succession of patterns of accumulation. Crisis is the name of the more or less disorderly transition from one accumulation regime to another. In other words, a crisis occurs when significant changes in the institutional setting of capitalism can be observed. However, such a change cannot be determined only by an “objective” economic state of facts. It all depends on the way the agents (the social groups) make judgements about it, and are consequently driven to take a new, transformative (and conflictual) course of action. In its essence institutional change is a political process and, considered from a Spinozian perspective, a political process is a matter of collective affects and desires. In order to complete “Regulation theory” we are required to see that crises breakout through the mediation of political affects and desires. They are passionate events.