Zack Wasserman - How Silicon Valley Hacked the Economy

Tech entrepreneurs like to present themselves as nerdy tinkerers but they've been politically active since the earliest days of the microelectronics industry.

Over the past two years, data-privacy concerns, growing economic inequality, and the outsize market power of behemoths like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Uber to say nothing of Russian espionage or the proliferation of online hate speech have cost Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial class its most powerful political asset: the myth that what’s good for tech is good for everyone.

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-silicon-valley-hacked-the-economy/

Concept and Form

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation.
The first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation.
The second volume collects newly commissioned essays on the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were either members of its editorial board or associated with its broader theoretical project.

Contributors include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Edward Baring, Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Serge Leclaire, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, and Slavoj Žižek.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/peter-hallward/concept-and-form/

Reassessing the Legacy of Louis Althusser on His 100-Year Anniversary: An Interview with Warren Montag

Louis Althusser was one of the most disputed scholars in the Marxist tradition. Condemned as a revisionist by some, celebrated as a brilliant, innovative Marxist philosopher by others, his theoretical contributions still spur interest and controversy today, almost thirty years after his death.

http://www.leftvoice.org/Reassessing-the-Legacy-of-Louis-Althusser-on-His-100-Year-Anniversary-An-Interview-with-Warren

Christine Berry - John McDonnell is right: we need a new left internationalism

Recent debates on the British and the German left have reopened the question of the relation between socialism, the global economy, and the nation state. In this essay, Christine Berry argues that we must develop a new politics, one that is open to people but closed to global capital, for a truly radical left politics, and one that can overcome the resurgent far right.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4086-john-mcdonnell-is-right-we-need-a-new-left-internationalism

Georg Lukács - A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic

In the mid 1920s Lukács wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin’s onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács’s oeuvre.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/georg-lukacs/a-defence-of-history-and-class-consciousness/

Aldo Cordeiro Sauda, Benjamin Fogel - Bolsonaro’s Most Dangerous Supporters

Establishment outlets like the Economist insist the Brazilian military is a moderating influence on the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. But precisely the opposite is true.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/bolsonaro-military-pt-haiti-lava-jato-lula

Jörg Wiegratz - The Great Lacuna: Capitalism in Africa

Jörg Wiegratz asks why there is such silence in much of African Studies on capitalism. He wonders why capitalism does not feature more prominently in titles of major Western conferences on Africa, and articles of main African Studies journals. In this blogpost he asks why does this analytical lacuna exist? Wiegratz calls for a discussion and explanation of this state of affairs. On the central question of capitalism, the African Studies community, he argues, in Western Europe, and across the Global North, is largely inactive and silent? When it comes to an explicit, focused and sustained collective exploration, about the many, multifaceted features of contemporary capitalism on the continent, and about the characteristics of African society as a capitalist society, there is a gaping silence.

http://roape.net/2018/10/19/the-great-lacuna-capitalism-in-africa/

Louis Althusser - Spectre of Hegel

Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher’s work in 1953. The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser’s engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.

Fredric Jameson - Representing Capital. A Reading of Volume One

Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson's first book-length engagement with Marx's magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx's thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.

Against the Brahmins - An Interview with Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra enjoys upsetting the alleged status quo. The 43-year-old Indian writer has become a leading critic of Western imperialism, globalization, and abuses of power among the political and intellectual upper crust. He charges India’s privileged class with manipulating the democratic process for self-preservation and profit. He publicly blasts peers, such as Salman Rushdie, whom he accuses of choosing to “amplify the orthodoxies of political and military elites,” and Niall Ferguson, whom he condemned as a cheerleader of “neo-imperialist wars.”

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/wajahat-ali-pankaj-mishra-against-brahmins

A Different Kind of Collective Agency: Talking to Asad Haider

From where might a non-Eurocentric notion of universality arise? From where might we draw a new language to describe a different kind of collective politics? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Asad Haider. This present conversation focuses on Haider’s book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump.

http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/different-kind-collective-agency-talking-asad-haider/

Андрей Ланьков - СССР и КНДР 1953-1961

В рамках проекта «Публичные лекции "Полит.ру"» с лекцией «СССР и КНДР 1953-1961» выступил известный российский востоковед, публицист, кореевед, кандидат исторических наук, профессор университета Кукмин (Сеул) Андрей Ланьков.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8EroQftWqUY

Yanis Varoufakis - What Has Google Ever Done for Us?

We all manufacture a portion of Big Tech companies' capital. We all deserve to be shareholders.

In using Big Tech’s services, we manufacture a portion of its capital in real time. Property rights over that portion – for all of us, rather than for any of us – should be the basis of a universal basic income.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/social-ownership-of-google-big-tech-by-yanis-varoufakis-2018-10

Franco Fortini - Letter to a Communist

Franco Fortini (1917-1994) was one of the most fascinating intellectuals associated with Italian Marxist in the twentieth century. One of the country's most famous poets and essayists, his work remains sadly neglected outside of Italy. A lifelong Socialist Party militant, Fortini remained a staunch anti-Stalinist and lead to his position as one of the foremost anti-systemic thinkers in Italy, alongside Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti. His work always resisted the path of bourgeois progressivism, in favour of what Alberto Toscano terms a "a communism without guarantees", and "a politics of unevenness, of a difference, an otherness, an antagonism that couldn’t be happily resolved" unlike the stale dogmas of both Stalinism and Liberalism.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2608-franco-fortini-letter-to-a-communist

Michael Hardt – Assembly

In recent years "leaderless" social movements have proliferated around the globe, from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Some of these movements have led to impressive gains: the toppling of authoritarian leaders, the furthering of progressive policy, and checks on repressive state forces. They have also been, at times, derided by journalists and political analysts as disorganized and ineffectual, or suppressed by disoriented and perplexed police forces and governments who fail to effectively engage them. Activists, too, struggle to harness the potential of these horizontal movements. Why have the movements, which address the needs and desires of so many, not been able to achieve lasting change and create a new, more democratic and just society? Some people assume that if only social movements could find new leaders they would return to their earlier glory. Where, they ask, are the new Martin Luther Kings, Rudi Dutschkes, and Stephen Bikos?

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

Sean Captain - How tech workers became activists, leading a resistance movement that is shaking up Silicon Valley

Employees at Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech companies are discovering their power to bend the trajectory of multibillion-dollar corporations.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90244860/silicon-valleys-new-playbook-for-tech-worker-led-resistance

Ella Joyner - A Pale Shade of Green

The German Greens are on the brink of becoming the country’s second-largest party. But they're no friends of the working class.

The development spells bad news in particular for the once-mighty SPD. The old party of the German center-left has hit historic lows in opinion polls and has even been overtaken by the fiercely anti-migrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was founded in 2013. Against this backdrop, it might seem like a good thing for the floundering Left if CDU/CSU voters are shifting to the Greens. The reality is rather less promising.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/german-greens-afd-spd-bavarian-elections

Robert Biel - Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement

Robert Biel's Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement traces the history of Eurocentric and anti-Eurocentric currents in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, arguing that this distortion was key to the development and spread of revisionism, and ultimately to the failures of the communist project, in the 20th century. A work of intellectual history, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement explores the relationship between Eurocentrism, alienation, and racism, while tracing the different ideas about imperialism, colonialism, "progress", and non-European peoples as they were grappled with by revolutionaries in both the colonized and colonizing nations. Teasing out racist errors and anti-racist insights within this history, Biel reveals a century-long struggle to assert the centrality of the most exploited within the struggle against capitalism. The roles of key figures in the Marxist-Leninist canon Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao within this struggle are explored, as are those of others whose work may be less familiar to some readers, such as Sultan Galiev, Lamine Senghor, Lin Biao, R.P. Dutt, Samir Amin, and others.