Christian Fuchs - What would Marx have said about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

I have argued on another occasion that commercial social media’s corporate strategies advance the engaging/connection/sharing-ideology. That something is an ideology points towards a darker reality: Someone advancing an ideology makes a claim that does not correspond to reality and that distracts from the actual state of reality in order to hide power structures. ‘Social’ media companies claim they are social in order to advance the unsocial and the anti-social.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/christian-fuchs/what-would-marx-have-said-about-facebook-cambridge-analytica

Cinzia Arruzza - From Women’s Strikes to a New Class Movement: The Third Feminist Wave

The current one is not the fourth or even the fifth feminist wave. It is the third and arrives around 40 years after the end of the second. In the past few decades there has been a certain tendency to label as “feminist wave” movements of thought that took place especially within campuses and their surroundings. These currents of thought have marked important turning points within feminist theory; however, they were not rooted in processes of mass social and political mobilization comparable to the feminist movement of the Sixties and Seventies.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/12/03/from-womens-strikes-to-a-new-class-movement-the-third-feminist-wave/

Гульемо Киоди - О некоторых «криминогенных» чертах экономической теории

При написании этой статьи я во многом отталкивался от последних работ Пасинетти и Нути. В статье Пасинетти ключевой стала так называемая теорема Модильяни-Миллера, использованная для объяснения все еще продолжающегося экономического кризиса в Западном мире. Нути сделал сравнение между курением и мерами жесткой экономии на той основе, что меры жесткой экономии, как и необходимый, для курильщика табак, могут убивать людей. Автор подчеркивает действительную нерациональность сохранения «суицидальной политики» жесткой экономии в большинстве стран ЕС, имеющей место, несмотря на растущую теоретическую и эмпирическую критику по отношению к ней.

http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/vopros_pol_ek/2017_01/6.pdf

Naomi Klein interviews Bernie Sanders on climate change

«Think about what it would mean to the entire planet for people in China, in Russia, in India standing up together, transforming our energy system, and creating millions of jobs as we’re doing it,”  U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said in an interview with Naomi Klein at a Sanders Institute gathering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN1YFLUmcOk

Джорджо Агамбен - От государства контроля к практикам отменяющей власти

Будущее «отменяющей политики»: насколько она «чиста»? Дж. Агамбен отрицает легитимность правительства в современной Италии и все более сомневается в наличии политики в демократическом мире.

http://gefter.ru/archive/13228

Is Lacan an Anti-Philosopher? A Debate between Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou’ by Duane Rousselle

The following debate occurred on May 28th of 2010 in Schoenberg Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was sponsored by the Program in Experimental Critical Theory and moderated by Kenneth Reinhard. Adrian Johnston was in the audience and asked two important questions which have been included in this manuscript alongside responses from Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/alain-badiou/is-lacan-an-anti-philosopher/

Jeff Gottlieb and Jeff Cohen - Was Fred Hampton Executed?

49 years ago today, Fred Hampton was killed by the FBI. In 1976, The Nation published a report on the civil trial that followed, revealing details of COINTELPRO and the gruesome plot to take down the Panthers. Read the full story.

https://www.thenation.com/article/was-fred-hampton-executed/

Four Things About Uber You Wish You Never Knew

Is "ridesharing" safe? Who are these amateur uberX drivers and are they properly screened for criminal backgrounds? Do they have proper insurance? And what happens when inevitable accidents occur? Are riders in danger? Uber thinks they're above regulations and oversight. They claim to only be a technology company. But don't be fooled. Here are four Uber myths debunked. They seem to value profit over protecting the public they claim to serve. UberX services and companies like them want all reward and no responsibility. And they will take it, unless we hold them accountable and protect the public's basic right to safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT8Kv7Et0OI

Лоренцо Винчигуэрра - Спинозистский ренессанс во Франции

Новая спинозистская волна проявила, куда большую открытость к политической рефлексии радикально левого крыла парижской философской сцены, пришедшей в возбужденное движение после событий 1968 года. Спинозизм становится теперь прекрасной концептуальной лабораторией по выработке политической антропологии марксистского чекана. Теперь к Спинозе обращаются потому, что видят в нем предшественника Маркса. Это можно сказать и о Матероне, и о Бернаре Руссэ, и о Робере Мисраи, и об учениках Альтюссера Пьере Машрэ и Этьене Балибаре, об Андрэ Тозеле и, конечно, об Антонио Негри. Несмотря на общую марксистскую платформу, о них, разумеется, нельзя сказать, что их позиции сходны

Пьерик Марисаль - «Жёлтые жилеты» считают себя санкюлотами, борющимися с монархом Макроном

«Мы как в дореволюционной Франции, где крестьянин должен был откармливать трёх свиней – двух для короля, а одну – чтобы хоть как-то обеспечить свою семью», – говорит он. «Это самая настоящая эксплуатация! – вступает в разговор его мать Мари-Клод. – Раньше мы считали, что нужно трудиться для того, чтобы заработать себе пенсию. До 2000 года я работала в магазине, и тогда килограмм помидоров не стоил 20 или 30 франков, как сейчас. Летом я продавала их по полтора франка. А вот моя пенсия с тех пор не увеличилась!».

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1095-schitayut-sebya.html

Christian Fuchs - The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism

Jan-Werner Müller has recently renewed this proposal in his book What Is Populism? In the book, he defines populism as “a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified […] people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior. […] Populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people.” He also notes that populism is “an exclusionary form of identity politics” that poses “a danger to democracy” and aims to “suppress civil society.”
Such approaches use one and the same category for Syriza, Evo Morales, Podemos, or Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, or Marine Le Pen on the right. The outcome is that, just like in the theory of totalitarianism, the radical right is compared to the left and thereby the dangers of the first are trivialized. For Müller, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both populists. Bernie Sanders certainly is an unconventional politician, but in contrast to Trump there are no doubts about his democratic orientation.

http://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/the-rise-of-authoritarian-capitalism/

Ronan Burtenshaw, Anton Jager - The Guardian’s Populism Panic

Britain’s leading liberal newspaper has set out on a mission to define and defeat “populism.” It has not gone well.

Last week, amid much fanfare, the Guardian launched its new series on populism. Its contributions include research into the rise of populist parties in Europe, investigations into international networks supporting these new populist forces, and quizzes that place participants on a scale of populism. These are supplemented by analysis from some of the leading political scientists in the field of populism studies.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/guardian-populism-europe-cas-mudde-hillary-clinton-immigration-tony-blair

Alain Badiou - The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Both events occurred after what was commonly thought to be the end of a revolutionary epoch: in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon; and in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union. But the revolutions of 1848 proclaimed for a century and a half the return of revolutionary thought and action. Likewise, the uprisings underway today herald a worldwide resurgence in the liberating force of the masses despite the attempts of the ‘international community’ to neutralize its power.

Badiou’s book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/books/alain-badiou/the-rebirth-of-history/

Samir Amin - Theory is History

This book focuses on a central concept that “Theory is History”, as the theory of capitalism can only be formulated on the basis of an analysis of its history. In contrast, bourgeois thinking replaces the analysis of historical capitalism with an abstract theory without any links to reality. “Economics”, which is the theory of an imaginary system, then becomes an apologia intended to give legitimacy to the behaviour of the owners of capital. The author pays special attention to the globalization of the law of value. The individual chapters illustrate the author’s thesis by focusing on the links between capital and land ownership, between modernity and religious interpretation, and on questions of the global expansion of capitalism, particularly the ways it has evolved in certain countries, in this case Russia and China. This anthology supplements the author’s previous work, centred on the rise of the South his reading of capitalism focusing on its imperialist nature.

John Saul - In Defence of Radical Political Economy

In a powerful defence of Marxist political economy John Saul argues that ‘facing down the hulk of capital that presently bestrides the world was never going to be easy.’ Though as ‘powerful and ill-intentioned as capitalists’ might be ‘as they destroy the world, environmentally and morally’, everything, in Africa and elsewhere, continues to depend on the struggle of the oppressed. In this contribution he blends his on-going work on Africa with a more general analytical and theoretical consideration on progressive political economy.

http://roape.net/2018/12/05/in-defence-of-radical-political-economy/

Chantal Mouffe - The ‘gilets jaunes’: ‘A reaction to the explosion of inequalities between the super-rich and the middle classes’

What is the nature of the gilets jaunes protests that have rocked France over recent weeks? In this interview, originally published in Libération, Chantal Mouffe analyses the protests and the chances for them coalescing into a left-wing political movement.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4149-the-gilets-jaunes-a-reaction-to-the-explosion-of-inequalities-between-the-super-rich-and-the-middle-classes

Plateforme d'Enquêtes Militants - On a Ridgeline: Notes on the “Yellow Vests” Movement

Below you will find the English translation of the analysis by the Parisian collective Plateforme d’Enquêtes Militantes, published Friday, November 30th.

A movement born online, with a petition, with the typical features of French “citizenism,” but which soon married direct practice, the economic blockade, and assault on the places of political power. A return of popular violence inscribed in the history of a country whose temporality is marked by cycles of revolts and revolutions. Now this demand [istanza] of dethronement, which has sedimented as a widespread sentiment in French society, is interpreted differently by the forces of the opposition.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/12/06/on-a-ridgeline-notes-on-the-yellow-vests-movement/

Confrontation: Alain Badiou & Alain Finkielkraut – A Conversation with Aude Lancelin

Everything in their respective positions divides them: Alain Badiou is the thinker of a revitalized communism and Alain Finkielkraut the mournful observer of the loss of values. The two opponents, gathered here for their first-ever debate, have irreconcilable visions. Yet neither is a stranger to controversy, and in this debate they make explicit the grounds of their personal dispute as well as addressing, in a frank and open exchange, their ideas and theories. Guided by Aude Lancelin, the two philosophers discuss subjects as diverse as national identity, Israel and Judaism, May 1968, and renewed popularity of the idea of communism. Their passionate debate is more than just the sum total of their disagreements, however, for neither of them is satisfied with the state of our society or the direction in which its political representatives persist in taking it. They agree that there needs to be change and their confrontation in this volume shows the importance of asking difficult questions, not only of each other, but also of our political systems.