Ben Tarnoff - Building Socialism From Below

Figuring out how to fight for state power and popular power at the same time is tough. The work of Nicos Poulantzas shows how socialists in the twenty-first century can do it.

When it comes to our own situation, the insights of Nicos Poulantzas are especially useful. A Greek sociologist who taught in France from 1968 until his suicide in 1979, Poulantzas wrote on class, fascism, and the state. But the work of his that bears most directly on the question of US socialist strategy today is “Towards a Democratic Socialism,” a remarkable essay published one year before his death.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/nicos-poulantzas-socialism-from-below-democratic-power

Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti - «Action Will Be Taken": Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents

Activistism is also intimately related to the decline of Marxism, which at its best thrived on debates about the relations between theory and practice, part and whole. Unfortunately, much of this tradition has devolved into the alternately dreary and hilarious rants in sectarian papers. Marxism's decline (but not death: the three of us would happily claim the name) has led to wooly ideas about a nicer capitalism, and an indifference to how the system works as a whole.

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html

Bence Kemeny - With 10,000 People on the Streets, The Slave Law Means a New phase

The Hungarian Parliement  accepted a bill referred to as “slave law” on December 12th in a scandalous session.. The governing party endorsed the proposition with no social dialogue beforehand. Setting new standards for maximum overtime and its payment the bill sparked outrage and militant protests unseen for over a decade. The parallel privatisation of a university and attacks on academic freedom put students next to workers in the line. The opposition also found its voice while the government blames on George Soros. Newly emerged possibilities place great stress on the trade union movement, opposition parties, and the “civil sphere” in Hungary. At the same time these possibilities open prospects for renewing leftist strategies.

http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/with-10000-people-on-the-streets-the-slave-law-means-a-new-phase/

The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia

The concept of hope is central to the work of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), especially in his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1959). The “speculative materialism” that he first developed in the 1930s asserts a commitment to humanity’s potential that continued through his later work. In The Privatization of Hope, leading thinkers in utopian studies explore the insights that Bloch’s ideas provide in understanding the present. Mired in the excesses and disaffections of contemporary capitalist society, hope in the Blochian sense has become atomized, desocialized, and privatized. From myriad perspectives, the contributors clearly delineate the renewed value of Bloch’s theories in this age of hopelessness. Bringing Bloch’s “ontology of Not Yet Being” into conversation with twenty-first-century concerns, this collection is intended to help revive and revitalize philosophy’s commitment to the generative force of hope.

Contributors. Roland Boer, Frances Daly, Henk de Berg, Vincent Geoghegan, Wayne Hudson, Ruth Levitas, David Miller, Catherine Moir, Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Welf Schröter, Johan Siebers, Peter Thompson, Francesca Vidal, Rainer Ernst Zimmermann, Slavoj Žižek

Joel Rogers - Public Goods: When Markets Fail

Prof. Joel Rogers, of University of Wisconsin Law School, speaks at the forum, “Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism,” held in Washington DC, on October 19, 2018

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

Johannes Maerk - Plan Oder Markt: the battle of ideas between Austro-Marxism and neoliberalism in Vienna

This lecture analyses the battle of ideas on the role of the state in society between the neoliberals of the so-called Austrian school of Economics (Menger, von Mises, von Hayek) and the Austro-Marxists (Hilferding, Bauer, but also the Vienna Circle member Neurath) in Vienna of the 1920´s and 1930´s. Both proposals sought to achieve hegemony in a Gramscian sense with their respective outlooks over society. While the ideas of von Hayek et. al. did not find a fertile ground in their homeland and had its concrete political applications outside of Central Europe (mainly from the 1970s onwards in many countries of Latin America and from the 1980s in the UK and USA), the Austro-Marxists counterproposal was developed exclusively through specific Viennese public policies (social housing; culture and sports, public health, education) and did not have much influence outside Austria. The lecture attempts to recover the forgotten ideas of “Red Vienna”, analyses the rise of neoliberal thinking and its impact in current times.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mTSE-F0EEnE

Елена Вознесенская - Молодые рабочие: из села в город

На материале социологического исследования рабочей молодежи промышленных предприятий России рассматриваются профессиональные и образовательные траектории особой группы молодых рабочих выходцев из села. Анализ мотиваций и поведения этой группы в сфере образования и трудовой деятельности позволяет понять, как и с какими издержками перебирается в город сельская молодежь. Исследуются такие специфические обстоятельства, как качество и уровень доступного образования, служба в армии, квартирный вопрос в городе, факторы, тормозящие образовательную активность и профессиональное продвижение молодых рабочих сельского происхождения.

http://jour.isras.ru/index.php/socjour/article/download/421/394

Есть ли у «жёлтых жилетов» политические цвета?

Движение «жёлтые жилеты» привлекает внимание исследователей и специалистов по опросу общественного мнения. Интересный эмпирический подход для изучения этого явления общественной жизни был разработан группой исследователей из университета Бордо, занимавшихся сбором информации для анализа мобилизационных возможностей «жёлтых жилетов» непосредственно на местах. Благодаря тому, что социологи особое внимание уделяли более пристальному изучению данных о народной поддержке движения, удалось сформулировать основные характеристики его социальных установок.

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1135-cveta.html

Михаэль Лёви - Ни калька, ни копия: Че Гевара в поисках нового социализма

Политическая и публицистическая деятельность Че, особенно в 1960-е годы, была направлена на выход из тупика рабского подражания советской и восточноевропейской модели. Его идеи относительно построения социализма были именно попыткой героического созидания чего-то нового, поиском, прерванным и неоконченным иной парадигмы социализма, во многих аспектах фундаментально противоположной «реальной» бюрократической карикатуре.

http://scepsis.net/library/id_3798.html

Antonio Negri - Starting again from Marx

Let us start again from Marx. Why? Is it because we are communists? No, this answer is not convincing. We could start again from somewhere else, from Lenin, or Mao; or, we could believe that current feminist or anti-racist struggles have no need for Marx; we could even think that Marx’s Eurocentrism makes him an enemy. Writing an apology for Karl Marx is not what I wish to do here. It is not my style. For too long I have hated tenured Marxists and every call for a reading of Marx that turns him into a closed system, so closed that to put it forward in its perfection one has to engage in nonsense in-fighting with other communists. Instead, here I would just like to clarify why, in my view, if we are communists we cannot do without Marx – and, in fact, why Marx can be a formidable means of promoting communism.

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/starting-again-from-marx

Prabhat Patnaik - The Yellow Vest Movement

Nothing shows the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism more clearly than the popular uprising in France that is occurring under the banner of the “Yellow Vest” movement. Thousands are congregating in Paris over week-ends to protest against the intolerable burdens being imposed upon them in the name of “austerity” and to demand that resources be raised instead through taxing the rich. This movement had begun initially as a protest against the diesel price-hikes, but has now taken on a more general character and is drawing huge support from the people.

http://www.networkideas.org/featured-articles/2018/12/the-yellow-vest-movement/

Rebecca McCarthy - Will Amazon Finally Kill New York?

In 2010, Heike Geissler took a temporary position at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Geissler was a freelance writer and a translator but, more pressingly, she was the mother of two children and money was not coming in. Seasonal Associate, which was translated by Katy Derbyshire and released by Semiotext(e) this month, is the product of that job. It’s an oppressive, unsettling book, mainly because the work is too familiar. The book is written almost entirely in the second person, a style that might’ve come off as an irritating affectation with a lesser writer or a different subject. Here, it’s terrifying you feel yourself slipping along with Geissler, thoughts of your own unpaid bills and the cold at the back of your throat weaving their way through the narrative. It’s not just that this unnamed protagonist could be you, it’s the certainty that someday she will be you. “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes.

https://longreads.com/2018/12/24/will-amazon-finally-kill-new-york/

Remy Herrera - The Macron scam fails to deter Yellow Vest and union protests

Between threats of increased repression and overplayed compassion, Macron the magician pulled out of his hat a thin bouquet of faded flowers: four measuring spoons that made the French look like beggars and served as a pretext for the dominant media to shout out for an end to the mobilization of Yellow Vests.

https://mronline.org/2018/12/21/the-macron-scam-fails-to-deter-yellow-vest-and-union-protests/

Silicon noir and the end of techno-optimism: the Intercept’s 2018 tech coverage

This will likely go down as the year in which technology, once envisioned as an empowering and equalizing force, finally went headlong down the path toward dystopia and oppression. Our story this summer about Google planning to return to China with censored search at first shocked Silicon Valley, but it was the dark nature of what followed internal dissent squelched, executives dissembling, Chinese users to be closely tracked that proved most surprising.

Other depressing developments seemed right out of an ominous sci-fi film like “Blade Runner,” whether it was reporting that revealed the National Security Agency’s prowess at voice recognition, Facebook’s plans to use artificial intelligence to predict users’ future behavior, or just how badly ultrawealthy Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was exploiting underlings. As tech enters 2019, its brightest days seem to be well behind it.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/24/the-intercept-2018-tech/

Greg Leroy - Corporate Tax-Break Subsidies: Boosting Monopolies, Fueling Inequality

Greg Leroy, Executive Director of Good jobs First, speaks at the forum, “Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism,” held in Washington DC, on October 19, 2018

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

«Кризис глобального капитализма». Заседание клуба «Диалог» памяти Самира Амина.

Эта встреча посвящается памяти Самира Амина - одного из выдающихся теоретиков социализма и основателей школы мир-системного анализа - человека, который много раз бывал в России, выступал в клубе «Диалог».  На встречу приглашены в качестве докладчиков ученые, не только глубоко знакомые с работами Самира Амина, но и хорошо знавшие его лично: проф. А.В. Бузгалин, д.э.н. Р.С. Дзарасов, к.п.н. Б.Ю. Кагарлицкий

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfJ910NzH98

Лионель Вентюрини - «Жёлтые жилеты»: «VI-й акт» сыгран, но пьеса не окончена

«Следует признать, что протестное движение действительно пошло на спад. В минувшую субботу на улицы французских городов вышли 39 000 протестующих, и это при том, что неделей раньше их было 66 000, что уже считалось существенным снижением численности», – отметил министр внутренних дел Кристоф Кастане в своём Твиттере. Кастане уточнил, что в минувшие выходные в стране насчитывалось 104 «горячие точки», то есть втрое меньше, чем неделю назад.

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1140-shestoy-akt.html

На блаженном острове постмодернизма

Николай Проценко о самой известной книге американского философа Фредрика Джеймисона

Как постмодернизм связан с поздним капитализмом и почему из него не видно выхода? Что представлял из себя модернизм, благодаря которому Джойс мог в одиночку творить целые миры? И как вышло, что культурная атака постмодерна началась с области архитектуры?

https://gorky.media/reviews/na-blazhennom-ostrove-postmodernizma/