Thirteen theses of marxism-feminism

In the face of the deep crises of capitalism, with all the safety valves unscrewed so that each crisis is merely an intensification of the previous one; with crises increasingly affecting the everyday lives and living conditions making planning more precarious for an increasing number of women left alone with a double burden to carry, I sent out a call to the Marxists among the feminists whom I had known from the movement of the 1970s, from meetings, trips, visiting professorships, to jointly deliberate the situation. To our minds, it was high time also for the Marxist-Feminist forces to meet on the global level, just as capitalism and the crises it produced had become global; in short, it was time for a Marxist-Feminist International.

https://mronline.org/2018/11/13/thirteen-theses-of-marxism-feminism/

Hiba Ali - “Seasonal associate”, the human cost of Amazon

People die “mysteriously” working at Amazon. There are too many news stories documenting workers “suddenly” getting sick. I use quotes because it doesn’t take a detective to figure out what’s going on. When you click “deliver in the next 5 to 7 business days,” you enable and sanction a class of indentured employees tasked with strenuous labor, without health insurance or paid time off. As consumers, we are all implicated, but the heaviest burden lies on the company for facilitating such an exploitative and expropriate structure and on the American nation-state which has created this economic reality with lax corporate laws, a vision that spoon feeds us the delusion of trickle-down economics.

http://topicalcream.info/editorial/seasonal-associate-the-human-cost-of-amazon/

Herbert Marcuse - Socialist Humanism?

Almost twenty years ago, Merleau-Ponty raised the issue of socialist humanism with uncompromising clarity. Is the humanistic, nonterroristic construction of a socialist society in the given historical period a real possibility? He rejected the alternative of humanism and terror: there is no choice between violence and nonviolence, but only between two modes of violence capitalist and socialist .

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/marcuse18-humanism.html

Chantal Mouffe - Left populism

Chantal Mouffe presents the theses of her latest book "For a Left Populism" and discusses them with Katja Kipping, co-chair of the party Die Linke.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fdlL86OB3-0

Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe - Socialist strategy. Where next?

Socialist political struggle takes place today on a terrain which has been profoundly transformed by the emergence of new contradictions, with which the traditional discourse of Marxism, centered on the class struggle and the analysis of the economic contradictions of capitalism, has had great difficulties in coming to terms. To what extent has it become necessary to modify the notion of class struggle, in order to be able to deal with the new political subjects women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific 'class interests'?

http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/81_01_17.pdf

Lee Wengraf - U.S-China Inter-Imperial Rivalry in Africa

In a contribution to the debate on imperialism in Africa, Lee Wengraf argues that there is an urgency for left analysis on the centrality of the sharpening inter-imperial rivalry on the continent. Chinese imperialism in Africa is not identical to that of the U.S but it has been able to take advantage of the door kicked open by neoliberal deregulation and privatization promoted by the West. Wengraf argues that African ruling classes do not merely play a ‘lieutenant’ or ‘comprador’ role in a global order dominated by the West but seek to facilitate capital accumulation for their own ruling classes, a project which is both independent of yet constrained by the major imperial powers. She argues that we must turn towards the resistance of African working classes which demand our solidarity, regardless of which imperial players are involved.

http://roape.net/2018/11/16/u-s-china-inter-imperial-rivalry-in-africa/

Brais Fernandez - Spain’s New-Old Monster

Until recently, Spain was uniquely free of neofascism. Not anymore.

On September 7, the far-right party Vox filled Spain’s Vistalegre arena with ten thousand nostalgists for Franco’s regime, neofascists, Catholic extremists, and reactionaries of all kinds.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/spain-vox-far-right-franco-partido-popular-podemos

Bernard Stiegler - For a New Critique of Political Economy

The catastrophic economic, social and political crisis of our timecalls for a new and original critique of political economy - arethinking of Marx's project in the very different conditions oftwenty-first century capitalism. Stiegler argues that today the proletarian must be reconceptualized as the economic agent whose knowledge and memory are confiscated by machines. This new sense of the term‘proletarian' is best understood by reference to Plato'scritique of exteriorized memory. By bringing together Plato and Marx, Stiegler can show how a generalized proletarianization now encompasses not only the muscular system, as Marx saw it, but alsothe nervous system of the so-called creative workers in the information industries. The proletarians of the former are deprivedof their practical know-how, whereas the latter are shorn of their theoretical practice, and both suffer from a confiscation of thevery possibility of a genuine art of living. But the mechanisms at work in this new and accentuated form of proletarianization are the very mechanisms that may spur a reversal of the process. Such a reversal would imply a crucial distinction between one's life work, originating in otium (leisure devoted tothe techniques of the self), and the job, consisting in a negotium(the negotiation and calculation, increasingly restricted toshort-term expectations), leading to the necessity of a new conception of economic value.

David Broder - Hobsbawm in Italy

Eric Hobsbawm's close engagement with the Italian Communist Party demonstrated the sharply political character of his work.

Yet as well as being a CPGB man Hobsbawm also declared himself a “spiritual member” of Italy’s PCI. Through personal ties, conferences, and his writing, he built a relationship with the West’s largest Communist party, a force that emerged from the Stalin-era Comintern to indicate a never-fulfilled democratic, reforming vision of transformation.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/eric-hobsbawm-italy-pci-gramsci

Юрген Хабермас - Отношения между системой и жизненным миром в условиях позднего капитализма

Критическое рассмотрение теории стоимости позволяет включить динамичный процесс накопления, ставший самодостаточным, в модель взаимоотношений, складывающихся между “системой” (экономикой и государством), с одной стороны, и “жизненным миром” (частной и общественной сферами) — с другой. Эта модель позволяет избежать односторонне экономистской интерпретации развития общества, сосредоточить внимание на взаимодействии государства и экономики и таким образом выявить основные характеристики политических систем развитых капиталистических обществ.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040307230936/http://znl.boom.ru/bibl/Hbrms.htm

Экосоциализм или варварство

Чтобы спасти экологию планеты, нужно обобществить энергетический сектор и разработать систему энергоснабжения на основе полностью возобновляемых источников энергии без ископаемого или атомного топлива; закрыть бесполезные и вредные для общества производства; покончить с планируемым устареванием и перевозками товаров с целью максимизации прибыли мультинациональных корпораций, заменить агробизнес на экологически чистое крестьянское сельское хозяйство, способное обеспечить продовольственную независимость.  

http://www.redflora.org/2018/11/blog-post.html?m=1

Jesse Barron - Prime of life

In Bookforum, journalist Jesse Baron reviews Seasonal Associate by German writer Heike Geissler, a startling account of the author’s six weeks working at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Geissler, a novelist and translator, took the job when she was low on money and desperate for a way to support her two kids. As Baron writes, Seasonal Associate is “a hybrid of memoir and theory” that captures the hyper-exploitation and unbelievable tedium experienced by the invisible workers that enable our “convenience addiction.”

https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_04/20426

Борис Славин - Бухарин и Грамши: два взгляда на историю

В истории общественной мысли есть тексты, которые со временем не теряют, а приобретают все большую актуальность, ибо затрагивают глубинные философские вопросы, определяющие познание и мировоззрение многих людей. К таким текстам можно отнести книгу Николая Бухарина «Теория исторического материализма. Популярный учебник по марксистской социологии» и связанные с нею «Критические заметки о попытке создания “Популярного очерка по социологии”», написанные основателем компартии Италии Антонио Грамши.

G.A. Cohen - The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation

The Value Controversy, published by Verso in 1981, followed a series of debates over Marx's labor theory of value that began with the publication of neo-Ricardian economist Piero Sraffa's The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), and which took particular salience in socialist economic theory with the 1977 publication of Ian Steedman's Marx After Sraffa.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3128-the-labour-theory-of-value-and-the-concept-of-exploitation

А. Бузгалин, А. Колганов - Эксплуатация XXI века. От наемного рабочего и прибавочной стоимости к «креативному классу» и интеллектуальной ренте?

Проблема эксплуатации в последние десятилетия как бы «исчезла» из поля проблем, активно дискутируемых в социальных теориях. Эксплуатации как бы нет. Впрочем, схожая участь постигла и более широкий класс явлений проблемы социального отчуждения. Авторы, уже не раз заявлявшие свою принадлежность к постсоветской школе критического марксизма, хотели бы противопоставить этому исследование феномена эксплуатации, никогда и никуда не исчезавшей из бытия капиталистического мироустройства. Кокетничая с постмодернистской лексикой, мы бы определили основную задачу этого текста так: реактуализировать дискурс эксплуатации в контексте большого нарратива «критический марксизм».

Dan Georgakas - Letter from America (1969)

Dan Georgakas first visited Italy to teach at the Overseas School of Rome in 1964. The contacts he established would help to foster a transatlantic, political, and intellectual exchange over the next decade between heterodox Marxists in Italy and the United States – especially between Detroit and Turin, two centers of worker struggle, capitalist accumulation, and automobile production the mid-20th century. In the fall of 1970 Georgakas facilitated the travel of the radical newspaper editor John Watson, who was one of the founding leaders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to sell foreign rights to the League’s 1970 film, Finally Got the News.

Georgakas began to share his insights from the Italian experiences with U.S. readers through journals like Radical America. Upon returning to the United States he was the major researcher for Black Power, an Italian title by Roberto Giammanco published by Radiotelevisione Italia. Georgakas also wrote a series of dispatches on developments in Black Power and New Left movements that were translated for publication in the Italian journal Quaderni Piacentini and read by Italian comrades seeking details about the evolving political scene in the United States. The essays subsequently were published in French translation in Jean Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/11/20/letter-from-america-1969/

Александр Бирюков - Диалектика «Накопления капитала» Розы Люксембург

Постмодернистская вакханалия, царившая в российском обществознании последние годы, постепенно сходит на нет. Исследователи обращаются к анализу масштабных и серьезных социальных проблем. На этом фоне происходит возрождение интереса к марксистской теории. К числу подобных «открытий» можно отнести и главный теоретический труд Розы Люксембург «Накопление капитала». В свое время это исследование вызвало обширнейшую дискуссию в среде европейской социал-демократии и было признано оригинальной попыткой переосмысления и развития системы категорий «Капитала». К проблемам, поднятым ею в этом труде, исследователи вернулись лишь в 1950-1960-е годы. Такие ученые, как Ф. Бродель и И. Валлерстайн, признавали за Р. Люксембург первенство в изучении проблем роли периферии в процессе глобального накопления капитала.