Jason McGahan - Chalk One Up for Teachers

A union victory in Los Angeles was fueled by opposition to charter schools

Charter advocates (and the wealthy philanthropists who fund the schools) argue that competition will inspire public education to improve. There’s plenty of evidence that this isn’t the case.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/chalk-one-up-for-teachers-mcgahan

Richard Wolff’s Economic Update: politicians faking it

This week on "Economic Updates" Democracy at Work's weekly TV show Prof. Richard D. Wolff delivers updates on how Europe is evading US sanctions on Iran, Saudi Arabia sleaze deals with Trump, Deutsche Bank’s massive corruption and more.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b7CjpLWqmXE

Bernard Stiegler - Automatic Society: Volume 1, The Future of Work. Trans. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016.

Reviewed by George Tsogas

The theoretical foundation of this book rests on the philosophical conflation that Stiegler makes between autonomism and automata. For Stiegler (contra Greek philosophy, Kant and the Frankfurt School, among others), an interpretation of the Greek word for self (αὐτός) leads to an erroneous identification of an automaton with autonomy. That is, reaching a state of autonomy can be the result of a series of automatic functions. Thus, according to Stiegler, the danger is that – in simple words – machines, through the use of algorithmic automatisms, will one day soon become autonomous from the rest of the society and effectively rule over it, automatically and autonomously.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/16514_automatic-society-volume-1-the-future-of-work-by-bernard-stiegler-reviewed-by-george-tsogas/

Ноам Хомский, Лора Карлсен, Мигель Тинкер Салас, Грег Грандин и другие - Открытое письмо к Соединенным Штатам Америки: Прекратить вмешательство во внутреннюю политику Венесуэлы

Приведенное ниже открытое письмо, подписанное 70 учеными, изучающими Латинскую Америку, политологами и историками, а также режиссерами, лидерами гражданского общества и другими экспертами, было опубликовано в четверг, 24 января 2019 года, против продолжающегося вмешательства Соединенных Штатов в политику Венесуэлы.

http://www.redflora.org/2019/01/blog-post_27.html?m=1

David Harvey. A Critical Reader

David Harvey is among the most distinguished and influential Marxist theorists of his generation. For over three decades he has published works of major insight and originality that have challenged and altered dominant intellectual-political frameworks of understanding in urban studies, geography, sociology and beyond. He remains one of the most trenchant contemporary critics of global capitalism and its effects.
This book critically interrogates Harvey's work as a geographer, a Marxist and a public intellectual. Comprising a series of newly commissioned essays written by contributors from across the human sciences, it considers the entire range of Harvey's oeuvre, from the nature of urbanism and the role of space in capitalist accumulation to environmental issues and postmodernism. To aid further study and research, the volume also contains a consolidated bibliography of Harvey's writings.

Mike Davies - Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory

Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis’s first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause and solution of the planetary environmental crisis?
Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,” whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscape” of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,” which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880–1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.

Рабы смартфонов: жизнь и смерть в виртуальном пространстве

Вы можете на один день отказаться от смартфона? Если да, то почему только на такой короткий промежуток времени? Что вы чувствуете, когда вам приходят уведомления? Можно ли считать это проблемой?

Смартфоны завоевали нас многофункциональностью, простотой использования и множеством приложений. Но, к примеру, американский философ Джон Зерзан полагает, что это изобретение - лишь очередной этап на пути технологической колонизации повседневности.

И чем больше человек зависим от технологий, тем проще его подчинить. Чем моложе - тем сильнее укореняется зависимость. Может быть, пора поставить вопрос ребром: является ли технология нейтральной по своей сути? Или всё дело в том, как она используется?

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

Michael Burawoy - Remembering Erik Wright: Real Utopian in Practice and in Theory

Erik Olin Wright died just after midnight on January 22. He was 71 years old. With his death, the world lost one of its great social scientists – practitioner as well as thinker.

Erik’s class analysis sparked many invigorating debates about the meaning of class. Through these debates and in response to criticism, Erik revised his scheme over the years, sometimes with small adjustments, sometimes by shifting its foundations. If there is one trait that threads through his scholarly work – and indeed through his life – it is the determination to get things right. This not only entailed developing a close dialogue between theoretical elaboration and empirical research, but also deepening the internal logic of his analytical schemes. You can trace the evolution of his thinking through a series of books, starting with Class, Crisis and the State (1978), followed immediately by the publication of his dissertation, Class Structure and Income Determination (1979), and then to the deeper shift that came with his adoption of John Roemer’s notion of exploitation in Classes (1985), and his response to his critics in The Debate on Classes (1989). The summation of the international project in Class Counts (1997) establishes the effects of class on such issues as intergenerational mobility, friendship patterns, gender relations, and class consciousness. His final contribution on this topic, Approaches to Class Analysis (2005), fittingly enough, was recognition of the multiple Marxist but also non-Marxist approaches to class analysis that had sprung up on the ruins of stratification theory where he had begun.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4222-remembering-erik-wright-real-utopian-in-practice-and-in-theory

Erik Olin Wright - Class, Crisis and the State

One of the major works of the new American Marxism, Wright’s book draws a challenging new class map of the United States and other, comparable, advanced capitalist countries today. It also discusses the various classical theories of economic crisis in the West and their relevance to the current recession, and contrasts the way in which the major political problem of bureaucracy was confronted by two great antagonists Weber and Lenin. A concluding essay brings together the practical lessons of these theoretical analyses, in an examination of the problems of left governments coming to power in capitalist states.

William Lazonick - Stock Buybacks: Free-Market Ideology's License to Loot

William Lazonick, Professor Emeritus, U Mass Lowell, speaks at the forum, “Destroying the Myths of Market Fundamentalism,” held in Washington DC, on October 19, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Octedsnwfs0

Если раньше люди были ослеплены религией, то сегодня они подчинены технократии и капитализму, считает философ Славой Жижек. Для него всё является идеологией: будь то капитализм или толерантность, ислам или просто повседневная жизнь. Покупка мобильного, выбор одежды, зубной пасты - всё это идеологический выбор.

В этом видео немецкий журналист просит Жижека надеть "очки-правды" из фильма Джона Карпентера "Они - живы", чтобы увидеть послание, зашифрованное в обычных потребительских товарах: IPhone и шоколаде для веганов.

https://youtu.be/OxuNwsaWz8I

Юрген Хабермас: «Я не уверен, что у философии есть будущее»

«Введение евро разделило валютное сообщество на север и юг - победителей и проигравших. Причина этого заключается в том, что структурные различия между национальными экономическими регионами не могут компенсировать друг друга, если нет прогресса на пути к политическому союзу. Эвакуационные клапаны, такие как мобильность на едином рынке труда и общая система социального обеспечения, отсутствуют. Европе также не хватает силы для выработки общей фискальной политики. Добавьте к этому неолиберальную политическую модель, включенную в европейские договоры, которая усиливает зависимость национальных государств от мирового рынка. Уровень занятости молодежи в южных странах скандален. Неравенство возросло по всем направлениям и разрушило социальную сплоченность. Среди тех, кто сумел адаптироваться, появилась либеральная экономическая модель, которая способствует индивидуальной выгоде. Среди тех, кто находится в опасной ситуации, распространяются регрессивные тенденции и реакции иррационального и разрушительного гнева».

https://monocler.ru/juergen-habermaas-interview/

Wendy Liu - Silicon Inquiry

A personal inquiry into the tech industry

A few weeks ago, WIRED Magazine published an article subtitled Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They’re the Good Guys. They’re Not. The article described a noticeable shift in public discourse on the tech industry:

“As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten”

How did we get here? How did we get to a point where even traditionally techno-evangelist publications like WIRED have become so critical? And why is it that so many people inside the industry seemingly refuse to even see it, much less acknowledge their own culpability?

https://notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-inquiry

John Holloway - Change the World Without Taking Power

This new edition of John Holloway's contemporary classic, Change the World Without Taking Power, includes an extensive new preface by the author.
The wave of political demonstrations since the Battle of Seattle in 2001 have crystallised a new trend in left-wing politics. Modern protest movements are grounding their actions in both Marxism and Anarchism, fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centres on the overthrow of government. In this book, John Holloway asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power.
After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. John Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism in a critical development of the subversive Marxist tradition represented by Adorno, Bloch and Lukacs, amongst others, and grounded in a rethinking of Marx's concept of 'fetishisation' how doing is transformed into being.

«The goal is to automate us”: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

In The Guardian, John Naughton interviews scholar of business administration Shoshana Zuboff, whose highly anticipated new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power examines what she calls a fundamentally new phase of capitalism. “Surveillance capitalism,” she suggests, is less about the production of commodities for a consumer market, and more about the widespread automated collection of data about us, for sale to corporations. Google and Facebook are the paragons of a new form of capitalism that is more opaque than any that has gone before.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook

Marco Teruggi - The Social Fabric of Chavismo

On January 23, Juan Guaidó, who had recently been installed as president of the country’s opposition-led National Assembly, declared himself interim president of Venezuela in an attempt to oust the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro. But with Venezuelan society deeply divided, and the military continuing to support Maduro, it isn't clear how Guaidó can succeed. In this article, Marco Teruggi, who has spent the last six years observing first-hand this complexity as a participant in Venezuela’s communal project, reflects on the opposition’s attempt to form a parallel government and their failure to grasp the social reality of the Chavista base.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4223-the-social-fabric-of-chavismo