Peter Osborne - The Postconceptual Condition: Or, The Cultural Logic of High Capitalism Today

Those with long enough memories will no doubt recognize the crossed syntax of my title. It mimics, first, a text that, while in historical terms still recent, is nonetheless already antiquated, though perhaps not yet sufficiently to have acquired those ‘revolutionary energies’ that André Breton (and after him, Walter Benjamin) sought in such objects: Jean- François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. It is approaching forty years since the first publication of that ‘seemingly neutral review of a vast body of material on contemporary science and problems of knowledge or information’, which proved to be (in Fredric Jameson’s phrase) ‘a kind of crossroads’

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4098-the-postconceptual-condition-or-the-cultural-logic-of-high-capitalism-today

Tim Barker - When Economists Took Socialism Seriously

When was the last time anyone talked about the Council of Economic Advisers? We are certainly far from the days when Walter W. Heller, chairman of the CEA under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice in two years. On Tuesday, the CEA made its first newsworthy move of the Trump presidency, releasing a seventy-two-page “report” warning that “socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse.” The reaction has been universal mockery, which the report and its authors richly deserve.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/council-of-economic-advisers-socialism-report-history

Raymond Williams - The British Left (1965)

Any analysis of the state of the Left in Britain must begin with an analysis of the nature of the Labour Party. For here is a mass party, based on an essentially undivided trade union movement. For at least the last 20 years, it has been always a potential government, and in good times for the Left it is capable of governing alone. From its foundation, it has been a coalition of Left organizations, and the essential political battles of the Left have been fought out within it. The Independent Labour Party offered an alternative political organization until its merger with the Labour Party in the early 1930’s: one more strand was then added to the coalition. The Communist Party, since the early 1920’s, has worked as a militant wing of the Labour movement: often involved in local struggles against the Labour Party, often influential in particular trade unions, but never looking likely to become a mass party. A Labour Government, with the maintenance of a militant Communist minority, has in practice been its normal political aim.

Sarah Brouillette - Wageless Life

Phil A. Neels Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict contributes to what is by now a good body of research tracking the collapse of the postwar economic order and the return of global economic turbulence and crisis. Research by the Endnotes and Chuang collectives and in the pages of Sic journal and books such as Golden Gulag (2007), Riot. Strike. Riot (2016), and Dead Pledges (2018), study how fundamentally economic decline has determined our social and political moment.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/wageless-life/

Slavoj Žižek - Trump's rise is a symptom of a dark and subtle force

Instead of focusing on President Donald Trump, the Slovenian philosopher says liberals should incrementally challenge the fundamentals of the economic system.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lnI6E7WiHNE

Pierre Bourdieu - The essence of neoliberalism

What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.

The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms, they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences.

https://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu

Pablo Vivanco - Latin America’s Right-Wing Turn

The far right is on the rise not only in Brazil but across Latin America driven by the middle class that left-wing governments helped create.

“The far-right movement in Brazil mobilized the middle class more than anything, especially around impeachment of Dilma Rousseff,” said Fernandes. The impeachment process, she said, was “mostly white middle and white upper-class,” but also managed to mobilize sectors of the working and lower-classes. The sheer size of the demonstrations against corruption in the country, as well as their heavy anti-Left and anti-PT tone, attest to that.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/latin-america-right-turn-bolsonaro-middle-class

Paul Hockenos - Populism’s Promise: Can Germany’s “Rise Up” Unite the Democratic Masses?

European leftists with diverse populist credentials have fared surprisingly well when one looks at Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, or France Unbowed, which garnered 20 percent in the first round of last year’s presidential election, has captured the imagination of many young people with calls for an economic stimulus package, hefty taxes on the wealthy, withdrawal from NATO, and a 32-hour work week. Mélenchon calls France Unbowed a “citizens’ revolution.” Europeans regularly invoke Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign as a new, popular example of left politics, as well as Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing populism, which has shaken Britain’s political establishment.

https://www.thenation.com/article/populisms-promise-can-germanys-rise-up-unite-the-democratic-masses/

Руслан Костюк - Словения: Левые против консерватизма

Состоявшиеся в начале июня законодательные выборы в Словении показали, что популярность радикальных левых в этой постюгославской республике пусть медленно, но верно растёт. Именно благодаря твёрдой позиции депутатской группы партии «Левица» («Левые») удалось не допустить возвращения к власти национал-консервативной Словенской демократической партии.

http://rabkor.ru/columns/left/2018/10/17/slovenia/

Nathan J. Robinson - The Limits of liberal history

These Truths is Lepore’s effort to create a fair and representative history, one in which voices like that of Maria Stewart and Alice Paul are given the platform they deserve. And yet: diverse and kaleidsocopic as the book was, it seemed to be missing something critical. I got up to about 1980 (page 668) before I realized what it was: the labor movement. The history of American labor is almost completely absent from the book. Lepore’s history is full of racial and gender diversity. But it doesn’t include much about workers or their struggles.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/the-limits-of-liberal-history

A social history of the internet

The initial public appearance of the Internet (1990s, with the World Wide Web) generated a series of unprecedented social circumstances which capital for decades was unable to really subsume to the commodity and capital-form. For about twenty years, piracy (of software, knowledge, and art) was irrepressible and widespread. There were literally thousands of media (debate forums, sites dealing with specific themes) where it was possible for anyone usually operating under pseudonyms to appropriate, develop, create, and share all sorts of knowledge and art for free, directly, with any human being on the face of the earth searching for them on the Internet.

https://intransigence.org/2018/10/22/a-social-history-of-the-internet/

Conor Foley - Jair Bolsonaro and the threat to democracy in Brazil

Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right politician, has won the Brazilian Presidential election, beating the PT's Fernando Haddad. During the campaign, Bolsonaro repeatedly threatened not just the PT and the Brazilian left, but the foundations of Brazil's democracy. In this report from Brazil, Conor Foley asks what Bolsonaro's victory could mean for the future of the country.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4102-jair-bolsonaro-and-the-threat-to-democracy-in-brazil

Alex Hochuli - Bolsonaro Rising

One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals.

The one thing that unifies Bolsonaro supporters from big financiers to small businessmen, young urban liberals to neo-Pentecostal evangelicals is antipetismo, or hatred of the Workers Party (PT), the former ruling party cofounded by former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known familiarly as Lula. They stole the state and broke Brazil, runs the refrain in the centers of respectable opinion. They’re Bolivarian Bolsheviks come to turn Brazil into Venezuela and/or our kids gay. Who’d want that? Better to go with the guy who’s marketed himself as the anti-that.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/bolsonaro-rising-hochuli

Philosophy and the Idea of Communism: Alain Badiou in conversation with Peter Engelmann

In a well-known text called ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, first published in 2007, the renowned philosopher Alain Badiou breathed fresh life into the idea of communism as an intellectual representation that provides a critical perspective on existing politics and offers a systemic alternative to capitalism. Now, in the course of this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Engelmann, Alain Badiou explains why he continues to value the idea of communism against the background of current social crises and despite negative historical experiences. From the anticipation of a communism without a state to the problem of the concept of democracy and an analysis of capitalism as a system, the two thinkers discuss the key political issues of our time. Whilst explaining his political philosophy, Badiou also reflects on current socio-political developments such as the turmoil in the Middle East and the situation in China. This compelling dialogue is both a highly topical contribution to the question of how we might organize our societies differently and an accessible introduction to Badiou’s philosophical thinking.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/alain-badiou/philosophy-and-the-idea-of-communism/

Timothy Cheek and David Ownby - Make China Marxist Again

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has reembraced Marx. But Xi’s state Marxism is a top-down attempt to unify the population behind a nationalist ideology, not to inspire class struggle.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/making-china-marxist-again-xi-jinping-thought

Piner Donmez -
The crisis of capital, money and state in Turkey: An attempt at demystification

The recent developments in Turkey help us open up more fundamental questions, beyond this specific context. Why does the management of money make a difference in how contemporary societies are governed? We often do not think it does or feel lacking in the kind of knowledge we assume is needed to fully understand its mechanisms. The management of money is too technical, a matter too removed from everyday social relations and interactions – a domain exclusively reserved for financial analysts, economists and technocrats.

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/the-crisis-of-capital-money-and-state-in-turkey/

Vanessa Tait - Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below

A classic account of low-wage workers' organization that the US Department of Labor calls one of the "100 books that has shaped work in America."

"Poor Workers' Unions is a much-needed reinterpretation of the labor movement since the 1960s. Vanessa Tait offers an expansive notion of both the meaning of labor and labor organizing those who worked in traditional and non-traditional venues, for pay or not, nearly all of whom understood class as intimately bound up with race, gender and ethnicity. This book offers hope and a vision for building a broad-based workers' movement. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about social justice or the future of the labor movement."