В.В. Крылов - Теория формаций

В этой книге собраны труды Владимира Васильевича Крылова по теории общественно-экономических формаций. В первой части книги рассматриваются по преимуществу остро дискутируемые фундаментальные вопросы методологии теории; среди них вопросы об исторических системах производительных сил в их процессуальных, структурных и иных проявлениях, о разграничении экономических и внеэкономических, волевых производственных отношений и обусловленных этим разграничением различиях в «формуле собственности», об обосновании типологии докапиталистических исторических систем, о развертывании категории «капитал» в категорию «многоукладность». Во второй части книги методами теоретического анализа воссоздается целостная картина социально-экономического бытия обществ «третьего мира» в их исторической динамике, исследуются «аномалии» в их формационных характеристиках.

Evgeny Morozov - From Airbnb to city bikes, the «sharing economy» has been seized by big money

In The Guardian, Evgeny Morozov proclaims the demise of the sharing economy “fairytale” the idea that digital technology will empower grassroots economies and undermine corporate monopolies by facilitating decentralized peer-to-peer transactions. As Morozov argues, this vision can be realized only if it is backed by a social movement or political party committed to shielding such projects from market forces. Instead, as companies like Uber and Airbnb grow richer and capture more market share, they increasingly behave like the monopoly corporations they used to decry.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/27/airbnb-city-bikes-sharing-economy-big-money

Benjamin Y. Fong - Log Off

Social media will always be destructive for the Left. We should log the fuck off.

The fantasy of social media as a magical tool of social connection contrasts starkly with its reality as a cesspool of vicious personal attacks and paranoid indignation.

It is tempting to attribute this yawning gap to unregulated capitalism: Facebook and Twitter have virtually no competition and are perfectly comfortable doing everything from manipulating user data to providing a platform for hate speech so long as it is in the interest of their bottom line. Perhaps taking social media out of private control would allow us finally to realize the fantasy that sustains it.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction

Andrew Keen - Uber's Behavior is Untenable and Morally Suspect

Andrew Keen is a author and entrepreneur whose latest book, "The Internet is Not the Answer," explores the internet's negative effects on our psychology, economy, and culture. In this interview, Keen uses Uber as an example of an internet innovation that is wreaking havoc on an entire industry while taking advantage of its unregulated status to exploit customers and employees alike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_er85psPOrM

Julie Greene - The Condition of the Working Class in Shenzhen

While gleaming shopping malls dot the urban landscapes of China, selling Nikes, Coach bags, and Prada shoes, a more authoritarian regime is making it harder for workers to organize or protest their low wages and poor working conditions.

Consumer capitalism is king. “We have one freedom only,” a labor activist explained to me, “the freedom to consume.” With consumerism as the only panacea, harsh working conditions, low wages, virtually no union protections, and a legal system that denies full rights to peasant-workers in cities like Shenzhen, Chinese communism has created the most brilliant system on earth for capitalist exploitation of its working class.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/condition-working-class-shenzhen-peasant-workers-authoritarian-consumerism

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)

Edited by D. Ambrose and with a foreword by S. Reynolds, this comprehensive collection brings together the very best work of acclaimed blogger, writer, publisher, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher who died in 2017.

Covering the period 2004 – 2016, it includes some of the most incendiary and influential posts from his seminal blog k-punk, as well as a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews, together with his extraordinary writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines. Also included is his final unpublished k-punk post, the unfinished introduction to his planned book on “Acid Communism”, and a number of important interviews from the last decade.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/mark-fisher/k-punk-the-collected-and-unpublished-writings-of-mark-fisher-2004-2016/

Norman Birnbaum - Modes of denial: On the legend of US liberal hegemony

In Eurozine, sociologist and professor emeritus Norman Birnbaum dissects the end of US global hegemony, a development brought about by the concurrent stagnation of the US economy and the rise of nations like China. Interestingly, Birnbaum insists that Trump is not the cause of the US’s faltering dominance, but rather the consequence of it.

https://www.eurozine.com/modes-denial-legend-us-liberal-hegemony/

Charlotte Shane - A House Divided

A new book examines the price of emotional labor

As Wilkerson predicted, feminism’s most visible agenda would remain that of the upper classes over the coming decades, and what she noticed then is still true today: The freest women are often those most hesitant to extricate themselves from circumstances they resent. Wilkerson, on the other hand, wasn’t married and hadn’t had children, because activism was her prevailing commitment. She gave up many comforts in order to live in line with her political beliefs so why weren’t more feminists doing the same?

https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_04/20419

Slavoj Zizek - The mysterious case of disappearing Chinese Marxists shows what happens when state ideology goes badly wrong

In dealing with critical voices, Chinese authorities increasingly seem to resort to a particular procedure: a person (an ecological activist, a Marxist student, the chief of Interpol, a religious preacher, a Hong Kong publisher, even a popular movie actress) suddenly disappears for a couple of weeks before reappearing in public with specific accusations raised against them. This protracted period of silence delivers a key message to citizens: China can exert impenetrable power on anyone without any requirement of any proof. Only when this is accepted does legal reasoning follow.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/china-missing-marxists-communists-dissidents-students-beijing-peking-university-a8657621.html

Tony Norfield - Amazon, Google & Big Tech’s productivity paradox

Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google, there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search. Yes, there is quite a list of undeniable negative facts too–poor working conditions in Amazon ‘fulfilment’ centres, the hoovering up of personal data by Google, how each company’s rise to power has upended the economics of other businesses, and much else besides. But the productivity benefits of their services seem unimpeachable. It lies behind Amazon’s increasing share of the consumer market and Google is now used in around 90% of Internet searches. Nevertheless, a closer look at these tech giants shows that all is not what it seems.

https://economicsofimperialism.blogspot.com/2018/11/amazon-google-big-techs-productivity.html?m=1

David Graeber - Debt, service, and the origins of capitalism

Professor David Graeber (LSE) speaking at the University of Birmingham as part of the Birmingham Research Institute of History and Cultures' interdisciplinary conference 'Debt: 5000 years and counting'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0t50D4lQrs

Шуджа Хайдер - Тьма в конце тоннеля

Если создатели технологии передают свои ценности машинам, это делает культуру Кремниевой долины феноменом с далеко идущими последствиями. Калифорнийская идеология, по известному определению Ричарда Барбрука и Энди Камерона, представляет собой синтез кажущихся противоположностей: с одной стороны, утопизма новых левых, который легко был поглощён либеральным центризмом Третьего пути 1990-х, а с другой айнрэндовского индивидуализма, более-менее непосредственно приведшего к финансовому кризису 2000-х.

Но за прошедшие десятилетия, поскольку консьюмеристский либерализм Билла Гейтса и Стива Джобса уступил место технологическому авторитаризму Илона Маска и Питера Тиля, это странное образование проложило путь ещё более странным тенденциям.

http://september.media/archives/2740

Eric Toussaint - Facing the left-wing challenge in the European Union

It is shocking to see that the right-wing government in power in Italy since Summer 2018 refuses to reduce the budgetary deficit while so-called left-wing governments bow to the constraints of austerity. It is now, when the peoples of the Eurozone are ever more disgusted by the policies imposed by European leaders and big capital, that the radical left should start fighting the structures of the European Union and the Eurozone. The time is ripe to expose their legitimacy crisis and use it as a means of tackling the challenges populations are faced with. The left needs to adopt an internationalist, anticapitalist break strategy and push ahead with an eco-socialist federation of the peoples of Europe.

http://www.cadtm.org/Facing-the-left-wing-challenge-in-the-European-Union

Карин Клеман - Цена бензина

17 ноября во Франции начались многотысячные протесты. Возмущение населения вызвал рост цен на топливо с начала года стоимость бензина увеличилась для потребителей на 7,5%, а дизельного топлива на 15%. Ситуация усугубляется тем, что власти уже анонсировали новый рост цен в начале 2019 года. Участники стихийных манифестаций назвали свои акции движением «жёлтых жилетов», которые являются обязательным атрибутом французских автомобилистов: водители обязаны надевать светоотражающие жёлтые жилеты в темноте или в условиях плохой видимости, когда выходят из машины. Политолог, эксперт Центра ПРИСП Арсений Беленький поговорил с социологом Карин Клеман о причинах этих протестов и о том, что общего между массовыми выступлениями во Франции и России.

http://www.prisp.ru/analitics/1374-belenkyi-kleman-vosstanie-zheltyh-zhiletov-3011

Victor Albert - Brazil’s Homeless Workers’ Movement is an assertive social work organization

So, what then might prompt Bolsonaro’s extreme characterization of the MTST as a terrorist organization? Apart from the political motive of criminalizing social movements that are opposed to his political project, there can only be a couple justifications: first, that the MTST participants take what is not theirs and, second, that they terrorize the public with protests and blockades of traffic and workplaces.

http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/11/30/victor-albert-brazils-homeless-workers-movement-is-an-assertive-social-work-organization/

California’s Political Revolution

An interview with
Gayle McLaughlin

Richmond, California has become a bastion of independent working-class politics. And its organizers want even more.

Gayle McLaughlin is one of the leading political revolutionaries in the United States today. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and one of the founders of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), an independent political organization based in Richmond, California that unites left activists across party lines. She served as a Richmond city council member from 2005-7, mayor from 2007–2015, and again as a city council member from 2015–17.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/richmond-progressive-alliance-gayle-mclaughlin-chevron-political-revolution

Nicol Poulantzas - The Problem of the Capitalist State

Ralph Miliband’s recently published work, The State in Capitalist Society, is in many respects of capital importance. The book is extremely substantial, and cannot decently be summarized in a few pages: I cannot recommend its reading too highly. I will limit myself here to a few critical comments, in the belief that only criticism can advance Marxist theory. For the specificity of this theory compared with other theoretical problematics lies in the extent to which Marxist theory provides itself, in the very act of its foundation, with the means of its own internal criticism. I should state at the outset that my critique will not be ‘innocent’: having myself written on the question of the State in my book Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales, these comments will derive from epistemological positions presented there which differ from those of Miliband.

Марк Блашер - «Жёлтые жилеты» защищают истинные ценности

На круговом перекрёстке дорог, ведущих в небольшую коммуну Монтабон, «желтые жилеты» разбили настоящий боевой лагерь. Городок это ничем не замечателен, расположен в глубокой деревне, между полей и фруктовых садов. Он расположен на трассе А8 не самого интенсивного движения, соединяющей юг Сарта с направлениями Руан-Манс-Тур. Но с 17 ноября всё изменилось. С первых часов после начала акций протеста люди заняли территорию шоссе, прилегающую к пункту оплаты проезда на дороге, в результате чего 10 дней машины могли проезжать бесплатно. Жандармерия потребовала от протестующих удалиться, применив различные аргументы в подтверждение своих слов. Но «победа» оказалась неполной. Хозяева соседнего фруктового официально, по форме, пригласила участников акции перенести протесты на их землю.

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1091-jilety-cennosty.html