Slavoj Zizek - Can One Exit from The Capitalist Discourse Without Becoming a Saint?

In his Television, Lacan evokes the “exit from the capitalist discourse,” but the context in which he does it is crucial: he posits the psychoanalyst “in relation to what was in the past called: being a saint”1 , and, after some qualifications of the excremental subjective position of a saint, he concludes: “The more one is a saint, the more one laughs; that’s my principle, to wit, the way out of capitalist discourse which will not constitute progress, if it happens only for some”.

http://theoryleaks.org/text/journals/crisis-critique/can-one-exit-from-the-capitalist-discourse-without-becoming-a-saint/

Political Left in Peripheral Countries of Europe and the Lessons of Syriza (Stathis Kouvelakis, Eric Toussaint)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEaEHmHK4Sc

Nathan J. Robinson - Why we are all better off working for the collective good

Here’s the simplest way to avoid the so-called “tragedy of the commons”: don’t have a society in which “rationality” is defined as “trying to maximize your individual gain.

One of the most damaging popular ideas is the belief that the best outcomes emerge from everyone pursuing their “self-interest” in a free market. There is a kind of “folk libertarianism,” affirmed even by people who do not self-identify as libertarians, that sees nothing wrong with the “rational” pursuit of one’s own “ends,” even if in practice that amounts to “caring about very little beyond getting rich.” This is because market transactions are “voluntary” and therefore only occur when they create “mutual benefit.”

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/why-were-all-better-off-working-for-the-collective-good

Lea Ypi - The Politics of Reticent Socialism

There is no huge gap between liberal egalitarianism and socialism, if we ask what justice requires from an impartial moral perspective. But the demands of justice as fairness cannot be realized by liberal political institutions. They require a different vision of democracy, an alternative account of public reason, and a more radical critique of the state issues on which contemporary liberal egalitarians are either wrong or silent.

https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no3/the-politics-of-reticent-socialism

Знаменитая книга Ричарда Хоггарта - О пользе грамотности: Некоторые стороны жизни английского рабочего класса

Richard Hoggart - The Uses of Literacy (1957)

The Uses of Literacy is a book written by Richard Hoggart and published in 1957, examining the influence of mass media in the United Kingdom. The book has been described as a key influence in the history of English and media studies and in the founding of cultural studies.

Экс-топ-менеджер Facebook Чамат Палихапития: "Я не использую эту дрянь"

Венчурный инвестор Чамат Палихапития значительную часть жизни проработал программистом в Силиконовой долине в компании Facebook. Выступая в Высшей школе бизнеса Стэнфордского университета, он заявил, что старается избавиться от социальных сетей и ограничивает детей: “Им нельзя использовать этот отстой”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwlg4uLpWg

Firoze Manji - Amilcar Cabral’s revolutionary anti-colonialist ideas

The writings of revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral provide key insights on the importance of culture in the contemporary struggle against neoliberalism.

Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon are among the most important thinkers from Africa on the politics of liberation and emancipation. While the relevance of Fanon’s thinking has re-emerged, with popular movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa proclaiming his ideas as the inspiration for their mobilizations, as well as works by Sekyi-Otu, Alice Cherki, Nigel Gibson, Lewis Gordon and others, Cabral’s ideas have not received as much attention.

https://roarmag.org/essays/amilcar-cabral-revolutionary-anticolonialism/

Marcel van der Linden - Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917

If the Soviet Union did not have a socialist society, then how should its nature be understood? The present book presents the first comprehensive appraisal of the debates on this problem, which was so central to twentieth-century Marxism.

The “Russian Question” was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century. Numerous attempts were made to understand the nature of Soviet society. Here Marcel van der Linden describes the development of these theoretical contributions since 1917.

Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval - With the ‘gilets jaunes’: against representation, for democracy

The Gilet Jaunes protests have rocked the French political establishment in recent months. There has rarely been a president as hated as Macron is today, and his leadership looks increasingly enfeebled. In this article, Dardot and Laval analyse the protests and what they might mean for French poltics.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4213-with-the-gilets-jaunes-against-representation-for-democracy

Alex Gourevitch - When King Was Dangerous

Martin Luther King Jr is remembered as a person of conscience who only carefully broke unjust laws. But his militant challenges to state authority place him in a much different tradition: radical labor activism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/martin-luther-king-civil-disobedience-injunction-birmingham

Фабьен Руссель - «Один не может быть счастлив, когда несчастны другие»

Новый генеральный секретарь Французской коммунистической партии Фабьен Руссель произнёс вчера, 21 января 2019 г., пожелания на грядущий год. На встрече помимо руководства ФКП присутствовали также представители от профсоюзов, левого движения и члены дипкорпуса некоторых стран, в частности, Венесуэлы.

Опыт общественной и политической активности Русселя был виден из его речи. Одной из важнейших тем стал социальный протест «жёлтых жилетов», который, по его словам, превратил 2018 год в самый значимый с истории Франции 21 века. В 2018 г. «сверкали молнии», а температура «накалялась до 153 тыс градусов», сказал он, намекая на количество человек, принимавших участие в акциях протеста. Он упомянул проект муниципального правления некоторых городов, в котором участвуют депутаты от ФКП, по сбору письменных претензий и предложений от граждан с целью отправки их в правительство, чтобы простимулировать их общение с народом и учитывать это в корректировке своего политического курса. На данный момент, по словам Русселя, премьер-министр не согласен идти на уступки, о чём лично заявил при встрече с Русселем и другими сенаторами от ФКП.

http://humanite-russie.ru/news/1187-odin-ne-mozhet-byt-schastliv.html

The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left

Edited by Jela Krečič. With contributions by Boris Buden, Boris Groys, Mladen Dolar, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Jamil Khader, Robert Pfaller, Frank Ruda, Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek.

There is a commonly accepted notion that we live in a time of serious crisis that moves between the two extremes of fundamentalist terrorism and right wing populism. The latter draws its power from the supposed threat of immigrants: it proposes to resolve the immigrant crisis by placing the blame on the principal victims themselves, that is to say, on some form of otherness (immigrants, Islam, the LGBT community and similar). The predominant leftist position, which advocates multicultural tolerance and understanding, is no match for such aggressive populism.
The premise of The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left is that our situation is indeed extremely dangerous, that near unimaginable catastrophes are lurking on the horizon, but that these new dangers also open up new spaces for radical emancipatory politics. Eleven distinguished thinkers take these perils as a challenge to provide sharp, specific analysis of our social and political predicament, combining a merciless critique of the prevailing leftist humanitarian approach with elements of a new vision for the Left.
The Final Countdown is therefore also a countdown to a new beginning; it is a practice of theory that is not here to lament but to re-think and reframe the very basic coordinates of how we understand and deal with today’s major political issues.

Riccardo Bellofiore - Forever young? Marx’s Critique of political economy after 200 years

This article suggests a reconstruction of Marx’s Critique of political economy as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. The first part of what follows will provide a sort of methodological introduction to Das Kapital. I am questioning the meaning of critique versus criticism, the distinction between fetish-character and fetishism, the role of dialectics, and the difference between reading, interpreting and reconstructing. I will focus especially on volume I. At the centre of the discussion are: the multiple meanings of abstract labour and socialization, the role of money as a commodity for the labour theory of value, the ‘method of comparison’ in grounding valorisation (the emergence of gross profits) as the constitution of capital from class struggle in production, the unity of absolute and relative surplus value extraction, the key notion of Technologie in the real subsumption of labour to capital, the law of the tendential fall in relative wage, Marx’s two notions of competition, and the macro-monetary class perspective in capitalist reproduction crucial to Capital, volume I. Some considerations are devoted to the transformation problem, the so-called “New Interpretation”, and crisis theory.

https://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/PSLQuarterlyReview/article/download/14580/14174

Wendy Brown - Neoliberalism's Scorpion Tail: Markets and Morals Where Democracy Once Was

Recent hard right political mobilizations in the West are commonly framed as rebellions against neoliberalism. In this lecture Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown questions that framing as it identifies neoliberal reason with the aim to replace robust democracy and social justice with authoritarian liberalism, traditional morality and, of course, unregulated markets. Politically pacified citizens disciplined by patriarchal families and free markets, themselves secured by lean, strong statesā€”this was the neoliberal dream. The dream twisted, of course, and the lecture concludes with reflections on the current conjuncture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x95st5oN8zQ

Kishore Mahbubani - Трамп, Макрон и нищета либерализма

Ни один западный либерал не станет спорить с утверждением, что избрание Дональда Трампа стало катастрофой для американского общества, а избрание Эммануэля Макрона – триумфом для французского общества. Но в реальности верным может оказаться обратное, как бы еретически это ни звучало.

Если либералы хотят победить Трампа, у них есть только один путь: восстановить доверие избирателей, формирующих основную часть его электоральной базы. Для этого им придётся реструктурировать свои общества таким образом, чтобы экономический рост приносил беднейшей половине населения больше выгод, чем самому богатому 1%. В теории это легко можно сделать. Но на практике влиятельные лоббисты неизбежно попытаются заблокировать подобные реформы. Выбор, стоящий перед либералами, очевиден: они могут создавать себе хорошее настроение, проклиная Трампа, или же они могут сделать что-то реальное хорошее, начав атаку на корыстные интересы элиты, которые в итоге привели к его избранию.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-macron-inequality-and-trust-by-kishore-mahbubani-2019-01/russian

Clare Birchall - Data Goes Pop: Transparency as Neoliberal Tool

Clare Birchall (King's College, London) speaking at the Neoliberalism, Crisis and the World System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFrH7vlyr94

Mebratu Kelecha - Protest, Repression and Revolution in Ethiopia

Since 2014 an unprecedented protest movement has shaken Ethiopia to its core. A wave of popular struggles have rocked the country, and pushed the regime into permanent crisis. Mebratu Kelecha writes that while repression has been severe, and thousands have died, the regime has been forced to embark on an unparalleled programme of reforms. Popular struggles across the country, with solidarity between different ethnic groups, have become the true arbiter of political power in Ethiopia.

http://roape.net/2019/01/24/protest-repression-and-revolution-in-ethiopia/