Pierre Beaudet - The Lesson of Brazil

The catastrophe – expected and foreseeable – has happened. This immense country, with its 200 million inhabitants, is now in darkness. At best, it will take a decade or two to emerge.

https://socialistproject.ca/2018/11/lesson-of-brazil/

Michael Kazin - The Rise of the Security State: From the Great War to Snowden

The American surveillance state was launched 100 years ago during the First World War, primarily to spy on and indict U.S. citizens who protested the war and the draft.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/world-war-i-aftermath-security-state-nsa

Tobias Kaempf - Lean and White-Collar Work: Towards New Forms of Industrialisation of Knowledge Work and Office Jobs?

After revolutionising manufacturing in the 1980s, the ideas of lean production are becoming increasingly significant for today’s white-collar work. Drawing on extensive empirical fieldwork, this article shows the fundamental changes in knowledge and office work as a result of new lean concepts. Two case studies are compared: the implementation of lean in the administration of a traditional industrial company and the reorganisation of software development by combining lean with Agile methods in a leading IT company. Lean is becoming a pioneer for new forms of industrialisation of white-collar work. The spectrum extends from a ‘factory approach’ with rigid work flows in administration to new development models in knowledge-intensive areas that go well beyond Tayloristic approaches. Based on the possibilities of digitisation, lean opens up new ways for the valorisation of knowledge work in modern capitalism, best described with the Marxian notion of ‘real subsumption’ of labour under capital.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1048

Samuel Moyn - The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old

What is “cultural Marxism”? And why does Mr. Lind fantasize about its slaughter? Nothing of the kind actually exists. But it is increasingly popular to indict cultural Marxism’s baleful effects on society — and to dream of its violent extermination. With a spate of recent violence in the United States and elsewhere, calling out the runaway alt-right imagination is more urgent than ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html?partner=IFTTT

Lena Gronbach - Financialising the Poor

The public debate on South Africa’s ‘social grant saga’ portrays the case as a typical example of political corruption, personal incompetence and corporate greed. However, as Lena Gronbach argues, behind the headlines is an agenda developed by the World Bank in the early 2000s, which sees poverty as a problem of financial exclusion and restrictive financial markets, rather than the result of deeper structural issues and the lack of a regular and adequate income. This has been nothing short of a fundamental shift in development policy.

http://roape.net/2018/11/13/financialising-the-poor/

Robert Brenner - What is good for Goldman Sachs is good for America: the origins of the current crisis

The financial crisis of 2008-9 was the largest and most devastating crisis since the Great Depression. What started on Wall Street soon spread to the rest of world and into the balance sheets of nation states. The cycle of austerity and recession in the subsequent decade is still effecting households and the real economy to this day. But what caused the crisis in the first place? In this now classic essay, Robert Brenner traces the origins of the crisis to the long downturn since the mid '70s, and offers what is still one of the best analyses of the financial system.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4122-what-is-good-for-goldman-sachs-is-good-for-america-the-origins-of-the-current-crisis

Miya Tokumitsu - The Self-Serving Myths of Silicon Valley

Review of Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley (Metropolitan Books, 2018)

Silicon Valley's boosters say it's an innovative, meritocratic wonderland that rewards brilliant visionaries and just might save the world. That's nonsense.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/live-work-die-silicon-valley-review-pein

Stacy Mitchell - Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market It Wants to Become the Market

The company is a radically new kind of monopoly with ambitions that dwarf those of earlier empires.

https://www.thenation.com/article/amazon-doesnt-just-want-to-dominate-the-market-it-wants-to-become-the-market/

Jason Barker - The World Is Not Enough

In the early 1840s, Marx was an advocate of liberal reform. He believed that public opinion could be stimulated through exposure to radical ideas, thus leading to democratic social change. A stout defender of the poor, the marginalized, and the socially oppressed, Marx wrote articles critical of government policy, including one targeting proposals by the Landtag of Rhineland-Palatinate to outlaw the gathering of forest timber. It was one provocation too many for the Prussian censors, and under mounting pressure Marx resigned his editorship on March 17, 1843.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-world-is-not-enough/

Ava Kofman - Google’s “Smart City of Surveillance” Faces New Resistance in Toronto

The world’s most ambitious “smart city,” known as Quayside, in Toronto, has faced fierce public criticism since last fall, when the plans to build a neighborhood “from the internet up” were first revealed. Quayside represents a joint effort by the Canadian government agency Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., to develop 12 acres of the valuable waterfront just southeast of downtown Toronto.

https://interc.pt/2QFp8LJ

Ronald Aronson - The Philosophy of Our Time

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism offers a radical philosophical foundation for today’s revitalized critiques of capitalism.

https://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/ronald-aronson-philosophy-our-time

Perry Anderson - The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci

Today, no Marxist thinker after the classical epoch is so universally respected in the West as Antonio Gramsci. Nor is any term so freely or diversely invoked on the Left as that of hegemony, to which he gave currency. Gramsci’s reputation, still local and marginal outside his native Italy in the early sixties, has a decade later become a world-wide fame. The homage due to his enterprise in prison is now thirty years after the first publication of his notebooks finally and fully being paid. Lack of knowledge, or paucity of discussion, have ceased to be obstacles to the diffusion of his thought. In principle every revolutionary socialist, not only in the West if especially in the West can henceforward benefit from Gramsci’s patrimony.

Ian Angus - Can the working class change the world?

The title of Michael Yates’ new book asks a question that every socialist has heard many times. We hear it from liberals who think changes can only be made by working inside the system. We hear it from radicals who simply can’t imagine working people moving against the system. And if we are honest we will admit that when radical activity is in a lull and it is hard to get a hearing, we sometimes ask it of ourselves. Is it really possible that people who voted for Trump or Clinton two faces of global reaction might one day overthrow capitalism?

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2018/11/13/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/

Chris Lehmann - The Populist Morass

When historians like Yascha Mounk dunk on populism, they assist in the the great neoliberal work of making run-of-the-mill, market-driven policy look like political wisdom.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-populist-morass-lehmann

Angela Y. Davis - Walter Rodney's legacy: by Angela Davis

In this striking new foreword extracted in full here Angela Davis considers the legacy of Walter Rodney and his seminal How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

When Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980 at the young age of thirty-eight, he had already accomplished what few scholars achieve during careers that extend considerably longer than his. The field of African history would never be the same after the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4127-walter-rodney-s-legacy-by-angela-davis

Ron Augustin - “Hell No!’ Stokely Carmichael twenty year on

In the U.S., Stokely Carmichael has been known for his extraordinary rhetorical skills at the time that the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. Often compared to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, people considered him an oratorical genius, who knew how to interact with different audiences and adapt his discourse to their response. His name has been associated with the Black Power slogan ever since he gave new meaning to it in a famous speech in 1966. What tends to fall into oblivion is that Stokely Carmichael, who eventually adopted the name Kwame Turé, has also been a proficient grassroots organizer, both in the U.S. and abroad.

https://mronline.org/2018/11/11/hell-no-stokely-carmichael-twenty-years-on/

Hiroshi Uchida - Marx's Grundrisse and Hegel's Logic

This book deals with the relation between Karl Marx's Grundrisse and the Logic of G. W. F. Hegel. I attempt to prove that the relation is more profound and more systematic than hitherto appreciated.

https://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/uchida/index.htm

"Отец интернета" Тимоти Бернерс Ли выступил против монополизация корпорациями интернет-пространства и предложил разделить гигантские интернет-корпорации на небольшие компании. "Тревожным звонком, по его мнению, является тот факт, что ИТ-гиганты сегодня сконцентрировали в себе колоссальные финансовые ресурсы, сопоставимые с бюджетами некоторых развитых стран. Так, суммарная капитализация Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google и Microsoft на сегодняшний день составляет порядка $3,7 трлн, что соответствует показателю ВВП Германии по итогам 2017 г." Также его беспокоит бесконтрольный сбор и использование персональных данных: "Другой серьезной проблемой Бернерс Ли назвал превращение Сети в оружие массового воздействия на общественное мнение, причиной возникновения которой является сосредоточенность власти в руках небольшого числа крупных техкомпаний, давно позабывших о существовании такого понятия как конкуренция". http://m.cnews.ru/news/top/2018-11-02_otets_interneta_prizval_unichtozhit_google_i

Маркс против марксизма, марксизм против Маркса

Беседа с Валерием Подорогой о феномене советского марксизма — его месте в истории советской мысли, наследии и актуальности. Впервые опубликована в 2017 году в тематическом номере журнала Stasis: «Античность и современность советского марксизма».

https://syg.ma/@stasis-journal/marks-protiv-marksizma-marksizm-protiv-marksa