John McDonnell - Let’s Bury Thatcherism in 2019

This year can be the end not just of austerity but of forty years of neoliberalism.

Europe has not always been a subject for unanimity on the left, of course. We only have to look through past issues of Tribune to find opposition to EEC membership in the 1970s and support for a more pro-European position in the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the Conservatives, however, we can truly speak for Labour voters and constituencies across the country if we remain united against Theresa May’s attempts to bounce the UK into a bad Brexit deal.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/lets-bury-thatcherism-in-2019

M. Montgomery, S. Allan - Ideology, Discourse, and Cultural Studies: The Contribution of Michel Pêcheux

This article offers an evaluative assessment of the potential contribution of Michel Pêcheux's research to a current movement within cultural studies to secure a conceptual framework for the critical discourse analysis of the linguistic mechanisms of ideology (examples of which are drawn from news accounts).

https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/661/567

Slavoj Zizek - Current trends in self-reproach & guilt serve interests of elites

Ethical and political “correctness” have reached extreme levels recently. This suits the powerful perfectly right now, but may come back to bite them soon.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/448585-metoo-zizek-migrants-elites/

JS Chen - The Tech Education Con

Big tech companies are spending millions to get young people into coding and STEM not out of altruism, but to create a future supply of cheap labor.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the champions of teaching tech in schools. For many, they are saving education. Apple cuts prices on their hardware for dot-edu email owners to make their products available to students. Google competes by selling cheap Chromebooks and provides a suite of education services to improve teamwork and collaboration. Microsoft has countless programs to empower classrooms with new technologies, such as teaching with Hololens.

These companies have catchy slogans for their programs like “expanding learning for everyone” and “empower every student on the planet to achieve more.” But we shouldn’t be fooled. These companies position themselves as good corporate citizens by empowering students with tech skills and accelerating STEM education; their motives, however, aren’t pure.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/stem-coding-bootcamp-education-scam-philanthropy

Jodi Dean - Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason.
Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.

Гаэль де Сантис - «Движение пяти звёзд» пытается привлечь на свою сторону «жёлтые жилеты»

Нелегко выполнять свои функции, когда находишься в рядах такой демагогической партии, как «Движение пяти звёзд» (M5S). Её политический лидер Луиджи ди Майо, став в июне прошлого года вице-президентом Совета министров Италии, сегодня демонстрирует чудеса эквилибристики. Он балансирует между римским правительством, оппозицией Брюсселю, а с минувшего понедельника… ещё и оппозицией Франции! «Жёлтые жилеты, не отступайте!», - написал ди Майо в своей статье, размещённой в блоге партии M5S. В ней Луиджи Ди Майо нападает на «другие европейские правительства такие, например, на правительство Франции», которое в первую очередь пытается «защитить интересы элиты». Ди Майо приветствует требование «прямой демократии», выраженное «жёлтыми жилетами», делегация которых была приглашена в Рим.

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1165-dvijenie-pyati-zvezd.html

Klaus Geitinger - When the Sailors Mutinied

In January 1919, the German Social Democratic Party turned guns on its own supporters, brutally putting down the Spartacist uprising. In this article historian and writer Klaus Geitinger argues that as right-wing mass movements rock countries across Europe and the good old SPD seems doomed to collapse, the party must finally confront its own history.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4204-when-the-sailors-mutinied

Константин Корягин - Один за всех и все за одного

Рецензия на книгу: Ciccariello-
Maher G. We created Chávez: a people’s history of the Venezuelan Revolution

Книга американского политического теоретика и активиста Джорджа Чикарелло-Майера «Мы создали Чавеса: народная история венесуэльской революции» вызвала большой резонанс в академическом и активистском сообществах и впоследствии была переведена на испанский, французский и арабский языки. Она создавалась еще при жизни лидера Боливарианской революции,
но опубликована в 2013 г., спустя месяц после его смерти. Прошло более пяти лет, и за это время в Венесуэле разразился широкомасштабный экономический, социальный и политический кризис. Страна находится на грани дефолта, большая часть населения говорит о недоедании, а оппозиционный парламент жестко противостоит Верховному суду, который остается подконтрольным правительству. Кажется, все достижения Боливарианской революции сведены на нет. В чем же тогда состоит актуальность этой книги сегодня, и почему на нее важно обратить внимание именно в российском контексте?

http://www.socofpower.ranepa.ru/files/docs/4_2018/9.pdf

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein - Feasting on Precarity

In 2017, a man with the first name Ramon was driving for Uber in the suburbs of Atlanta. He worked the late shift, ferrying intoxicated passengers around, often until early in the morning. Ramon’s cab likely reeked of alcohol from his myriad riders. During one of these late-night rides, a driver swerved into his lane. Ramon jerked the car to one side in an attempt to avoid a crash. The riders came to the conclusion that Ramon was driving drunk and reported it in their review. Ramon was immediately deactivated from Uber. He had effectively been fired on the spot by an algorithm.

Ramon is diabetic, which makes it very difficult (though not impossible) to drink to intoxication. Being fired for a debatable mistake mattered to Ramon because driving a cab was his livelihood. In fact, he drove so much, he wouldn’t be faulted for believing that he worked for Uber and that Uber was his employer.

As sociologist Alex Rosenblat explains in her new investigative book, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, many other factors would give Ramon this impression too.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/feasting-on-precarity/

Lucio Magri - The Tailor of Ulm: A History of Communism

Twenty years have passed since the Italian Communists last Congress in 1991, in which the death of their party was decreed. It was a deliberate death, accelerated by the desire for a new beginning. That new beginning never came, and the world lost an invaluable, complex political, organizational and theoretical heritage.
In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italian Left, assesses the causes for the demise of what was once one of the most powerful and vibrant communist parties of the West. The PCI marked almost a century of Italian history, from its founding in 1921 to the partisan resistance, the turning point of Salerno in 1944 to the de-Stalinization of 1956, the long 68 to the historic compromise; and to the opportunity missed forever of democratic transformation.
With rigor and passion, The Tailor of Ulm merges an original and enlightening interpretation of Italian communism with the experience of a militant heretic into a riveting read capable of broadening our insights into contemporary Italy, and the twentieth-century communist experience.

Одна из лучших книг о теории и практике неолиберализма

The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective

What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism’s origins and growth as a political and economic movement.
Although modern neoliberalism was born at the “Colloque Walter Lippmann” in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a partisan “thought collective,” in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus.
The Road from Mont Pèlerin presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their political and corporate allies regarding trade unions, development economics, antitrust policies, and the influence of philanthropy. The book captures the depth and complexity of the neoliberal “thought collective” while examining the numerous ways that neoliberal discourse has come to shape the global economy.

Минутка юмора.
Хороший сатирический скетч из немецкой телепрограммы «Дурдом»

О «государственно-частном партнёрстве» как механизме разрушения социального государства и субсидирования частного сектора

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8MlY303zxVY

Étienne Balibar - Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics

Reviewed by Lewis George Bloodworth

In the evacuation of the political space, the religious rears its head. This, in short, is the central problem that drives Etienne Balibar’s excellent new book Secularism and Cosmopolitanism, the text offering a range of brilliant analyses that not only deepen our understanding of the problematics of religion within contemporary society, but also how secularism is in vital need of theoretical and conceptual reform. In the book, Balibar attempts to found ‘a new critique of religion’ which stretches the very concept of the religious beyond religion into the secular domain. What does this mean?

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16496_secularism-and-cosmopolitanism-critical-hypotheses-on-religion-and-politics-by-etienne-balibar-reviewed-by-lewis-george-bloodworth/

Nathan Robinson - Who's afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

In Ocasio-Cortez we see what it might look like for left to retake control – to begin talking about what we want to talk about rather than whatever Trump is spewing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/15/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democrats-congress-trump-afraid

Феликс Гваттари - Три экологии. (Часть 1)

Первая часть перевода книги философа, психоаналитика и активиста Феликса Гваттари, впервые выпущенной на французском языке в 1989 году. В скором будущем будут опубликованы и оставшиеся ее части.

Традиционные бинарные оппозиции, которые направляли общественную мысль и геополитические картографии, уже в прошлом. Конфликты остаются, но они задействуют мультиполярные системы, несовместимые с регламентацией под идеологическими манихейскими флагами. Например, оппозиция между странами «третьего мира» и «развитыми» странами взрывается со всех сторон. Мы уже наблюдали, что продуктивность новых промышленных сил несоизмерима с традиционными промышленными бастионами Запада, но это явление сопровождается своего рода превращением «развитых» стран в «третий мир» изнутри в сочетании с обострением вопросов, касающихся иммиграции и расизма. Не обманывайтесь, великая суматоха на тему экономического объединения Европейского сообщества не остановит превращение значительных зон Европы в «третий мир».

https://syg.ma/@lesia-prokopenko/fieliks-gvattari-tri-ekologhii-chast-1

Panagiotis Sotiris - Is a Left Populism Possible?

This presentation deals with theories and political projects that can be defined as ‘left populism’. It begins with a reading and critique of the work of Ernesto Laclau on the theory of populism and then moves to recent debates about the possibility of left populist movements. In contrast to these positions it attempts to present an alternative theoretical framework based upon Gramscian notions, in order to rethink the notion of the people in ways that do not delink it from class analysis and social relations of production.

Panagiotis Sotiris works as a journalist and editor in Athens. He also teaches at the Hellenic Open University and is an Editorial Board Member of Historical Materialism Journal. He recently edited a collective volume entitled 'Crisis, Movement, Strategy: The Greek Experience' (Leiden, Brill/Historical Materialism Book Series, 2018)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nqvDmUzWVM

Mод Верньоль - «Жёлтые жилеты» не поддаются на уловки властей

Письмо о широком общегосударственном референдуме не поможет Эммануэлю Макрону взять ситуацию под контроль. Не в силах побороть кризис, власть придумывает всё новые уловки для того, чтобы дискредитировать и погасить вспышку народного гнева. Но ничего не получается. Была надежда на то, что после праздников люди поленятся вновь выходить на улицы. Однако IX-й этап протестов, прокатившихся по стране в минувшую субботу, не только доказал обманчивость этих иллюзий, но и превзошёл по масштабам акции 15 декабря.

http://humanite-russie.ru/politic/1175-ne-poddayutsya.html