Simone Claar - The Great Green Illusion: Business as Usual for African Capitalism

Exposing the illusion of the green economy, Simone Claar argues that while the idea of greening capitalism might provide a clear conscience to regions in the North for addressing the ecological crisis, it perpetuates the exploitative relationship between the North and South. Through the green economy framework capitalism, development, and imperialism are ‘green-washed’ as capital invests in new environmental fields like renewable energy or clean cooking. Such a strategy will only ‘greenwash’ capitalism in Africa, leaving its exploitative and destructive nature unchanged.

http://roape.net/2018/12/11/the-great-green-illusion-business-as-usual-for-african-capitalism/

Daniel Immerwahr - Privacy Settings

Today, we are watched as never before, through surreptitious governmental data collection and through corporate profiles of our desires and habits. Yet we also divulge private matters aggressively, seeking freedom through publicity.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/privacy-settings-known-citizen-identity-watergate

Richard Wolff - There Are No Blueprints for Revolution

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Programs in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. In this interview, Wolff discusses how the revolutions that overthrew feudalism laid the foundations for our current crisis of capitalism, why historical models of socialism put into practice failed, and what lessons we can learn from them in creating a new socialism.

https://truthout.org/articles/richard-wolff-there-are-no-blueprints-for-revolution/

Slavoj Zizek - Evald Ilyenkovs cosmology: the point of madness of dialectical materialism

The radical counterpart to Bloch’s progressive cosmology was provided by Evald Ilyenkov, the only Soviet Marxist to be taken seriously, in his early manuscript on the “cosmology of spirit.” Provocatively relying on what is for Western Marxists the ultimate bête noire – Friedrich Engels’s manuscripts posthumously gathered in Dialectics of Nature, as well as the Soviet tradition of dialectical materialism –, and combining them with contemporary cosmology, he brings the dialectical-materialist idea of a progressive development of reality from elementary forms of matter through different forms of life to (human) thought to its logical Nietzschean conclusion.

http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/evald-ilyenkovs-cosmology-the-point-of-madness-of-dialectical-materialism/

Alain Grosrichard - Sultan’s Court: European’s Fantasy of the East

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has justly attracted great respect and attention for its account of Western perceptions and representations of the Orient, but the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Court is a fascinating and careful deconstruction of Western accounts of “Oriental despotism” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic and opaque structure of the despot’s power and his court of viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives.
Drawing on the writings of travelers and philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, Grosrichard goes further than merely cataloguing their intense fascination with the vortex of capriciousness, violence, cruelty, lust, sexual perversion and slavery which they perceived in the seraglio.

Клотильд Матьё - Жёлтые и красные жилеты налаживают связь

Несмотря на взаимное недоверие, в портовых городах «жёлтые жилеты» и активисты «Всеобщей конфедерации труда» пытаются скоординировать совместные действия.

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1113-zheltye-i-krasnye.html

Майкл Буравой - Транзит без трансформации. Инволюция России к капитализму

Автор статьи обращается к книге К. Поланьи «Великая трансформация» для освещения характера и причин специфического перехода к рынку – «великой инволюции» в России. В заданном К. Поланьи широком историческом контексте (конец XVIII – середина XX в.) предлагается использовать его теорию развития Англии для современной России через деление сюжетов «великой трансформации» Англии на фазы, параллельные «великой инволюции» в России.

Jerome Roos - “The Gilets Jaunes have blown up the old political categories”

France’s neoliberal order trembles as the yellow vest revolt shatters established political conventions. The new terrain presents both dangers and opportunities.

https://roarmag.org/essays/gilets-jaunes-blown-old-political-categories/

Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly and the rise of fascism

A conversation with Julio Escalona

«As long as the welfare state existed and relations of power evolved under it, fascist projects were impeded. There have always been fascist practices, that is to say violence, torture, violations of human rights, attacks on democracy, which generally are fascist practices…They’ve always been present in Venezuela but without being the usual political method. What’s been usual in Venezuela has been a combination of forms of struggle: there was an authoritarian government, which was maintained by concessions to people and workers and also buttressed by repression, in what was called “the war against insurgents.”

https://mronline.org/2018/12/03/venezuelas-constituent-assembly-and-the-rise-of-fascism/

The Idea of Communism

Radical intellectuals discuss the continued importance of communism.

Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it time to get serious once again! (Slavoj Žižek)

Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.

Martin Empson - Rodney’s Russian Revolution

Walter Rodney’s posthumous book The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World  sought to understand the significance of the Revolution in order to the strengthen liberation movements that Rodney was directly involved in. As Martin Empson explains in this review, these movements took place in the context of historical colonial exploitation or in underdeveloped economies, economies that Rodney argues had been depleted of their wealth, resources and population by Western capitalism. What emerges is a fascinating study of 1917 from a different perspective from the one that emerges from the debates and histories written in Europe and North America.

http://roape.net/2018/12/13/rodneys-russian-revolution/

«Marx’s writing more relevant today than ever»

Interview with Wolfgang Streeck, German political economist.

The German political economist Wolfgang Streeck is one of the world’s leading critics of neoliberal capitalism. He received international attention for his essay “How will capitalism end?” written in 2014 for the New Left Review. The much-discussed essay was later republished in book form. Meticulously analysing the present trajectory of capitalism, Streeck argued that “the marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector’s excesses have collapsed and after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalisation of the markets. Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand.”

https://frontline.thehindu.com/economy/article25298071.ece

Karen Gregory - Digital Labour and Exploitation: It's not a Done Deal

Karen Gregory provides an overview of digital labour and exploitation and goes on to discuss how we can move forward in the digital economy and what the political antidotes to the entangled logics of control, capture and expulsion are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC4aNShuoFU

Paul Le Blanc - Antonio Gramsci and the Modern Prince

Antonio Gramsci offers an incredibly rich way of articulating and applying Leninist perspectives. As a Marxist, Gramsci saw future possibilities as being conditioned by past and present “objective” economic and social realities. But his thought was also alive to multiple possibilities–grounded in the understanding that not only are “objective” factors too complex and fluid to be fully grasped in analysis, but that the consciousness and actions of human beings (especially when informed by revolutionary theory and focused through effective organization) can alter the “objective” factors. Consistent with Lenin’s conceptualization of Marxism, this approach dovetails as well with that articulated by Georg Lukàcs in 1923-28.

http://links.org.au/antonio-gramsci-modern-prince

Jonathan Cook - Monsters engineered by our media

With Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil’s presidential election last month, the doom-mongers among western elites are out in force once again. His success, like Donald Trump’s, has confirmed a long-held prejudice: that the people cannot be trusted; that, when empowered, they behave like a mob driven by primitive urges; that the unwashed masses now threaten to bring down the carefully constructed walls of civilisation.

https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/monsters-engineered-by-our-media/

Славой Жижек - Нужно быть полным идиотом, чтобы видеть это

Статья представляет собой философский анализ текущей исторической ситуации, в которой человечество сталкивается с неотложностью радикальных политико­экономических изменений, необходимостью устанавливать новые формы отношений с окружающей средой, которые можно было бы охарактеризовать как окультуривание культур, установление универсальной солидарности и содружества всех человеческих сообществ. Эта задача усложняется происходящим в настоящее время подъемом сектантского фундаменталистского насилия и одновременно — его (кажущейся) противоположностью, циничным безразличием. Обращаясь к известной марксовой характеристике религии как «опиума народа», используя самые реальные примеры из нашей социальной и политической реальности, автор показывает, как работает идеология и как она влияет на наши идеи о равенстве и свободе.

http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/75/131