Slavoj Zizek – Tragic deaths inspire a Bosnian miracle

The violent deaths of two young men have united Bosnians, crossing rigid ethnic lines. Could something finally be stirring in the divided Balkan country?

Meanwhile, a specific form of the much-publicized PPP (public-private partnership) is flourishing in all of Bosnia: local political elites intertwined with half-legal private businesses, their rule legitimized as protectors of ethnic entities (Bosnians, Serbs etc.) against the "enemy." In such a situation where poverty is everywhere and young people are migrating to Western Europe in search of jobs, nationalism thrives and defense of ethnic identity easily prevails over economic issues.      

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/440974-zizek-bosnia-balkan-croatia/

Рассказ о феодализме.

Борис Кагарлицкий, кандидат политических наук, главный редактор журнала Рабкор.ру, директор Института глобализации и социальных движений (ИГСО), историк и социолог.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXMWXRlP4g

Angela Y. Davis - The generative passion of Walter Rodney

The field of African history would never be the same after the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. At the same time, this meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism in Africa has radicalised approaches to anti-racist activism across the world. In fact, the term “scholar-activist” acquires its most vigorous meaning when it is employed to capture the generative passion that links Rodney’s research to his determination to rid the planet of all of the outgrowths of colonialism and slavery. Almost forty years after his death, we certainly need such brilliant examples of what it means to be a resolute intellectual who recognises that the ultimate significance of knowledge is its capacity to transform our social worlds.

https://www.newframe.com/generative-passion-walter-rodney

Seyla Benhabib - Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach

May 1968 saw our revolt against the oppressive conformism of the postwar Pax Americana. We hoped for liberation from the spirit of consumerism, the shackles of the patriarchy, bourgeois family, nationalism, militarism, and much else. No theoretical tradition captured the aspirations I shared with many contemporaries as well as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. My intellectual journey from Istanbul to Frankfurt began with Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), which I read that fateful spring.

https://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/seyla-benhabib-below-asphalt-lies-beach

Brazil: left unites in support of Haddad as candidate works to woo voters

Brazil’s Socialist Party and the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) have both endorsed Workers’ Party (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad, who will face off with far-right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro in the second of Brazil’s presidential election is scheduled for Oct. 28. Both parties responded to a call by activists and left-leaning politicians to support Haddad, who gained 29 percent of the votes in the first round to finish second behind Bolsonaro’s 46 percent and form a coalition to stave off Bolsonaro’s authoritarian bent.

https://mronline.org/2018/10/11/brazil-left-unites-in-support-of-haddad-as-candidate-works-to-woo-voters/

Geraldo Rojas - Where Is Socialism in Maduro’s Economic Recovery Plan?

Commune activist Gerardo Rojas remembers Chavez’s proposals for the construction of socialism and uses them to analyze the government’s current attempts to revitalise the economy.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14082

Nancy Fraser - From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization

Michel Foucault was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation. Writing at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, he taught us to see the dark underside of even its most vaunted achievements. Viewed through his eyes, social services became disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms became panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures became deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices became vehicles of subjection. From his perspective, the components of the postwar social state constituted a carceral archipelago of disciplinary domination, all the more insidious because self-imposed. Granted, Foucault did not himself understand his project as an anatomy of fordist regulation. Positing a greater scope for his diagnosis, he preferred to associated disciplinary power with “modernity” simpliciter. And most of his readers, including me, followed suit. As a result, the ensuing debates turned on whether the Foucauldian picture of modernity was too dark and one-sided, neglecting the latter’s emancipatory tendencies.

Nathan J. Robinson - Never trust the Cato Institute

Surprise: free market libertarians are going to distort experts’ research to support free market conclusions…

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute

Pelai Pagès i Blanch - War and Revolution in Catalonia, 1936-1939

In War and Revolution in Catalonia, 1936-1939, Pelai Pagès i Blanch analyses the political and military evolution of the events in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War: the street battles that defeated the military rebellion; the social revolution that pervaded all levels of Catalonia's politics, economy, and culture; the gradual erosion of workers' power, culminating in the May Events; and Catalonia's eventual fall to Franco's forces. Pagès i Blanch demonstrates the extent to which the war was lost when the Republican leaders, in order to ‘unify’ the left against Franco and fascism, turned their backs on the social revolution. This translation of Pagès i Blanch's landmark study is the first full-length monograph in English to focus on Catalonia's experience during the war

Amber Murrey - Remembering Thomas Sankara Through Art and Music

Today marks the 31st anniversary of the assassination of Thomas Sankara, leader of the Burkinabè August Revolution which overthrew country’s corrupt military leadership in 1983. In this essay, Amber Murrey reflects on Sankara's legacy, and the ways in which that legacy is remembered via art and music in West Africa

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4080-remembering-thomas-sankara-through-art-and-music

Robert Green - Remembering the Black Panther Party

The creation of local Oakland activists and radicals Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers soon developed into the largest, most prominent manifestation of “Black Power” ideology following their formation in October 1966. Yet much about the Panthers remains either forgotten or distorted, gun-toting iconography standing in for a deeper understanding of their aims.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/black-panther-party-fifty-year-anniversary-founding

Daniel Schönpflug - Berlin, 1918–1919: Käthe Kollwitz, Witness to History

Elsewhere in Berlin on that same day, a completely different new state is proclaimed. This time the speaker is the socialist Karl Liebknecht, and the setting is the Hohenzollerns’ Berlin Palace, “the very window where the Kaiser always spoke.” In contrast to Scheidemann, Liebknecht speaks of a radical socialist republic not a “German” one. The two rival declarations reveal the dangerous tensions within the socialist movement, the schisms between the more moderate Social Democratic Party (SPD), the far more leftist Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), and the emerging revolutionary “Spartakusbund”.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/10/15/kathe-kollwitz-witness-to-history/

Alain Badiou - Second Manifesto for Philosophy

Twenty years ago, Alain Badiou’s first Manifesto for Philosophy rose up against the all-pervasive proclamation of the “end” of philosophy. In lieu of this problematic of the end, he put forward the watchword: “one more step”.
Badiou’s second manifesto therefore seeks to demoralize philosophy and to separate it from all those “philosophies” that are as servile as they are ubiquitous. It demonstrates the power of certain eternal truths to illuminate action and, as such, to transport philosophy far beyond the figure of “the human” and its “rights”. There, well beyond all moralism, in the clear expanse of the idea, life becomes something radically other than survival.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/alain-badiou/second-manifesto-for-philosophy/

Lewis Bassett - Hegemony 2.0

Recent events have conclusively proved that social media is not the neutral global community that it is often taken to be – not least the recent purge of Facebook profiles of those voices critical of US foreign policy. In this article, Lewis Bassett argues that we are beginning to witness the growth of a tech monopoly capitalism that backs up US imperialism, and asks how, in the face of this, can we build a new left media.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4087-hegemony-2-0

Louis Althusser - On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Louis Althusser’s renowned short text “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks of cultural, political and literary theory. The piece is, in fact, an extract from a much longer book, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, until now unavailable in English. Its publication makes possible a reappraisal of seminal Althusserian texts already available in English, their place in Althusser’s oeuvre and the relevance of his ideas for contemporary theory. On the Reproduction of Capitalism develops Althusser’s conception of historical materialism, outlining the conditions of reproduction in capitalist society and the revolutionary struggle for its overthrow. Written in the afterglow of May 1968, the text addresses a question that continues to haunt us today: in a society that proclaims its attachment to the ideals of liberty and equality, why do we witness the ever-renewed reproduction of relations of domination?

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/louis-althusser/on-the-reproduction-of-capitalism/

Zhiming Long, Rémy Herrera and Tony Andréani - On the Nature of the Chinese Economic System

China’s ruling class admits that the capitalist private sector plays a very important role in the country’s economy. However, it claims that this sector is one of the many components of a mixed economy, in which the public sector and the power of the state must be strengthened. Based on their speeches, many Chinese leaders seem to argue that China is currently in a “primary phase of socialism,” an essential step toward developing the necessary productive forces for full-fledged socialism. Are such statements accurate? Do they deserve to be taken seriously? Put another way: Is Chinese socialism over? We do not think so.

https://monthlyreview.org/2018/10/01/on-the-nature-of-the-chinese-economic-system/

Pepe Escobar - Future of Western Democracy Being Played Out in Brazil

Nothing less than the future of politics across the West – and across the Global South – is being played out in Brazil. Stripped to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a direct clash between democracy and an early 21st Century, neofascism, indeed between civilization and barbarism.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/09/future-of-western-democracy-being-played-out-in-brazil/#comments

Мария Нестеренко - Дьявольская пружина Георга Лукача

Александр Дмитриев о жизни и творчестве автора «Истории и классового сознания»

Зачем немецкий философ-марксист Георг Лукач остался жить в Советской России 1930-х годов, почему он был похож на масона конца XVIII века и призывал давить троцкистских собак?

https://gorky.media/context/dyavolskaya-pruzhina-georga-lukacha/