Nathan J. Robinson - Dear lobsrers: there is a better way

Jordan Peterson is a bestselling author known primarily for his self-help advice (young men should clean their rooms and learn from lobsters) and his criticism of left-wing social justice politics. He is also, in my opinion, a shallow and toxic thinker. As I have written at length, he uses confident sophistry to create the illusion of depth. Why, then, would people mostly young men be attracted to him? In the New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra said that Peterson’s “fascist mysticism” appealed to “reactionary white men” with a “spiritual hunger,” those “looking desperately for maps of meaning in a world they found opaque and uncontrollable.” Among the ex-lobsters of Reddit, at least, the “looking desperately” aspect is far more salient than the “reactionary” aspect.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/dear-lobsters-there-is-a-better-way

Leo Zeilig - Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution

Frantz Fanon is best known as one of the leading twentieth-century political thinkers and activists against colonialism and imperialism and as the author of the iconic book ‘Wretched of the Earth’. Leo Zeilig here details the life of Fanon from his upbringing in Martinique to his wartime experiences and work in Europe and North Africa and frames his ideas and activism within the greater context of his career as a practising psychiatrist and his politically tumultuous surroundings. The book covers the period of the Algerian War of Independence, national liberation and what Fanon described ‘the curse of independence’. Highlighting Fanon’s role as the most influential theorist of third-world liberation, this book is an essential work for students, academics and general readers.

Чарльз Тилли - Создание России

Та часть Европы, которую до конца 1991 г. занимал Советский Союз, примерно совпадает с европейской частью Российской империи, какой она была к моменту окончания наполеоновских войн. Серьезно передвинуть ее пограничную линию смогли только Крымская война, гражданская война 1917-1921 гг. и немецкое вторжение 1941-1944 гг. Между тем, если возвратиться в 1492 г., мы не найдем здесь России. Вместо нее приблизительно на той же самой территории мы обнаружим тевтонских рыцарей, Псковскую республику, княжество Московское, княжество Рязанское, ханство Золотой орды, Крымское ханство, Казанское ханство, Польское королевство, а также область с размытыми очертаниями, лежащую к востоку от Черного моря, которую упорно не желали никому отдавать черкесы.

Молодёжь разочаровалась в рынке и инициативе, и хочет стабильности

“Молодёжь выделяется среди остальных возрастных групп более «рыночным» типом трудовой мотивации, но, тем не менее, даже в этой группе преобладает мотивация «стабильности» - низкий уровень притязаний, согласие на малое при гарантии стабильности в завтрашнем дне. Даже среди молодёжи рыночный тип мотивации не стал доминирующим: как и десять лет назад, большинство ориентировано скорее на гарантию занятости, чем на успех и риск”.

“Показательно, что снизился возраст, когда происходит «перелом» в доминировании определенного типа трудовой мотивации. Если в 2006 году мотивация стабильности начинает значимо преобладать после 38-летнего возраста, то в 2016 году - уже с 27-29 лет резко сокращается доля лиц с ориентацией на рыночные модели поведения. Позиция «пусть небольшая зарплата, но зато гарантированное рабочее место» принимается уже в молодом возрасте, когда, казалось бы, должны преобладать мотивы успеха и достижения”.

http://ttolk.ru/articles/molodyozh_razocharovalas_v_ryinke_i_initsiative_i_hochet_stabilnosti

С наступающим Новым годом!

Corbynism in 2018

Going in to 2018, Corbynism was presented with a challenge it hadn't encountered before: the relative peace of continuity. The movement began with an event to mobilise around in the 2015 leadership contest, ditto with the the coup that failed in 2016, and last year we had the general election and its fall out. There was nothing scheduled on the horizon for 2018, nor was there likely to be a mobilising moment. The old establishment had nothing to commend themselves, no avenues for striking back, nor any hope of destabilising Corbyn and snatching control of the party away from the membership. And Theresa May wasn't about to call a general election what with Brexit negotiations and a Tory party more divided then any time in, well, perhaps ever. How then has Corbynism fared over the course of the year? How is it developing? What are its successes? And how is it coping with threats and challenges?

https://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2018/12/corbynism-in-2018.html

Mark Jones - William Morris’s Socialist Diary

Originally published in 1981, this is a revised version of Florence S. Boos’s edited presentation of a diary William Morris kept in 1887 which largely focuses on his political activities over the course of a few months. Boos originally came across the fifty one page notebook in 1973 whilst examining several unpublished examples of Morris’s writings in the British Library Manuscript Room. For all its brevity, the document provides an intriguingly unadorned snapshot of Morris’s thoughts and day to day schedule during a period when he combined leadership of the Socialist League (SL) and editorship of its newspaper, Commonweal, with a busy public speaking schedule as well as running Morris & Co, his decorative arts and furniture firm. To give the diary some helpful context, Boos reprints her introduction from the first edition along with an insightful accompanying essay about her evaluation of the document on returning to it for this latest version.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16441_william-morriss-socialist-diary-by-florence-boos-ed-reviewed-by-mark-jones/

Ivan Pagliaro - Disco and Communism

The Italian Communist Party saw culture as a key political battleground. But the arrival of disco challenged its assumptions about what music should be.

Six months after Saturday Night Fever, Travolta again hit the screens with Grease (in Italian released as Brillantina). In September 1978 the Communist Youth newspaper La città futura dedicated two pages to an article entitled “Brillantina e discoteche.” Massimo Buda’s piece focused on the rising phenomenon of disco, which had dominated the dance floors that summer, as well as the disapproving attitude many Communists had taken toward the new popular culture coming from the United States.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/disco-saturday-night-fever-italian-communist-party-gramsci

Лекция писателя Алексея Цветкова «Что нужно знать про современный марксизм?»

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2F3WDxGAk

Шон Сейерс - Идея коммунизма

С момента крушения «реального коммунизма» в СССР и Восточной Европе и с начала триумфа неолиберализма нам говорят, что коммунизм мертв. Но в настоящее время капитализм претерпевает затяжной кризис, и идея его альтернативы коммунизм вновь выходит на повестку дня. Идея коммунизма имеет очень давнюю историю. Ее можно отследить уже в «Государстве» Платона. В наши же дни она ассоциируется, прежде всего, с марксизмом. Недавно к ней привлекли особое внимание постмарксисты, такие как Ален Бадью, Славой Жижек и другие философы. В предлагаемой статье я собираюсь сфокусировать внимание на Бадью и Альтюссере, с которым Бадью разделяет некоторые позиции. Как известно, марксисты традиционно различают два вида коммунистической идеи: утопическую и научную.

Every woman is a working woman

Silvia Federici interviewed by Jill Richards.

In 1972 feminists from Italy, England, and the United States convened in Padova, Italy, for a two-day conference. Associated with the extra-parliamentary left, anti-colonial struggles, and alternatives to the communist party, these activists composed a declaration for action, the “Statement of the International Feminist Collective.” The statement rejects a separation between unwaged work in the home and waged work in the factory, pronouncing housework as a critical terrain in the class struggle against capitalism.

Silvia Federici, an Italian expat living in New York, attended the conference and afterward returned to New York to found the New York Wages for Housework Committee. In the following years, Wages for Housework committees were launched in a number of U.S. cities. In each case, these groups organized autonomously, apart from waged male workers. As “Theses on Wages for Housework” (1974) put it, “Autonomy from men is Autonomy from capital that uses men’s power to discipline us.”

https://mronline.org/2018/12/22/every-woman-is-a-working-woman/

Ernesto Laclau - On Populist Reason. New York: Verso Books, 2018.

Reviewed by James Hodgson

Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason. Originally published in 2005, it has recently been re-released in paperback form. Laclau himself was a noted Argentine political theorist and was based for many years at the University of Essex. His political thought was in the genre of what might broadly be called post-Marxism or post-structuralism, drawing upon the work of such eminent European philosophers as Saussure, Derrida and Lacan. He was primarily concerned with the analysis of such thorny issues as discourse, identity and hegemony.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16457_on-populist-reason-by-ernesto-laclau-reviewed-by-james-hodgson/

Facility Waters and Jamie Woodcock - Far From Seamless: a Workers’ Inquiry at Deliveroo

There has been a rapid growth of companies offering food delivery services through online platforms, including: Deliveroo, UberEATS, Amazon Restaurants, Foodora, foodpanda/hellofood, and Seamless, to name a few. The basic premise is to replace existing arrangements for takeaway delivery food, centralizing the process on an online platform. There are similarities with Uber’s business model, seeking to (as the current popular term states) “disrupt” an existing business model. The emergence of these companies connects eager venture capital with startup founders, often trying to hide the labor of the workers on which the platforms rely. Yet, the branded uniforms of these companies either on bicycles or mopeds have becoming an increasingly common sight in major cities.

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/09/20/far-seamless-workers-inquiry-deliveroo/

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein - The Death of Job Stability

Louis Hyman, a professor of economic history at Cornell University, offers an answer. In his latest book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, he attempts to explain the origins of what is often called the “gig economy,” the “sharing economy,” or “platform capitalism,” exemplified by companies like Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, and Upwork.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-death-of-job-stability/

Laura Tyson, Lenny Mendonca - America’s New Democracy Movement

While media coverage since the 2018 US midterm elections has focused squarely on Donald Trump, a growing movement of citizens and activists from across the political spectrum is thinking more broadly about the future of American democracy. And progressive political reforms have been winning support in some unexpected places.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-new-democracy-movement-political-reforms-by-laura-tyson-and-lenny-mendonca-2019-01

How to Think About Empire

Boston Review speaks with Arundhati Roy on censorship, storytelling, and her problem with the term ‘postcolonialism.’

Her critical essays, many published in major Indian newspapers, take on nuclear weapons, big dams, corporate globalization, India’s caste system, the rise of Hindu nationalism, the many faces of empire, and the U.S. war machine. They have garnered both acclaim and anger. In India Roy has often been vilified by the media, and accused of sedition, for her views on the Indian state, the corruption of the country’s courts, and India’s brutal counterinsurgency in Kashmir.

https://bostonreview.net/global-justice/arundhati-roy-thinking-about-empire