Richard Lourie - Out of the Picture: On Tony Wood’s “Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War”

Beginning with its very title, Tony Wood’s Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War is a maverick book. “Russia without Putin,” an actual battle cry of the opposition, is not used here to build a political case against Putin, nor does it seek to forecast Russia’s fate after Putin’s last term in office ends in 2024. Believing the media is “overly fixated” on Putin, Wood sets himself the task of describing today’s Russia not as the result of one man’s will and vision but of the greater forces that preceded his assumption of office, function independently of him in the present, and will outlast him. This a work of background, context, and systemics, not history as biography.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/out-of-the-picture-on-tony-woods-russia-without-putin-money-power-and-the-myths-of-the-new-cold-war/

Дмитрий Пономаренко - Спираль неолиберального разрушения

В Латинской Америке одно за другим терпят поражение реформистские правительства, чья политическая стратегия определила в 2000-х годах «левый поворот». В условиях ухудшающейся экономической конъюнктуры политика классового мира, которую проводили эти власти, оказалась невозможна. Статья Дмитрия Пономаренко «Спираль неолиберального разрушения» рассказывает об истории реформизма в Бразилии и указывает на истоки ультраправого правительства, продолжающего и углубляющего неолиберальную политику своих предшественников.
«Фашистская агитация Болсонару не опирается на конкретную политическую организацию. Ультраправые пришли к власти на фоне распада традиционных партий и стремительной потери сторонников традиционными правыми, причём весь этот процесс сопровождался массовой мобилизацией среднего класса и части рабочих. В основе пропаганды Болсонару лежит психология представителя средних слоёв, страдающего от кризиса и обвиняющего в этом не капиталистов, а различных козлов отпущения, и заключающего, что демократия — это, в сущности, слишком дорого».

http://scepsis.net/library/id_3864.html

James A. Smith - The Fight Is Far From Over

Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders transformed their respective countries’ policy agendas. That’s exactly why they can’t step aside for other candidates.

From the other side of the Atlantic, the British left watches the Democrat 2020 primary field take shape with a sense of déjà vu. The impossible has been done. On health care, climate change, and inequality, the protest fantasies of yesterday are, we are assured, the party dogmas of now. Centrists no longer get to tell the Left what’s popular and what isn’t. “Capitalist realism” — if not broken is at least looking a bit scuffed and shopworn.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/bernie-sanders-jeremy-corbyn-election-socialist

Gilets Jaunes “Assembly of Assemblies” calls for massive strike

The Gilets Jaunes of Commercy recently organized an “Assembly of Assemblies” to coordinate the radical democratization of the popular resistance in France.

We, Gilets Jaunes of the roundabouts, parking lots, squares, assemblies and demonstrations, gathered on January 26 and 27 for an “Assembly of Assemblies”, which united members of over a hundred Gilets Jaunes delegations from across France, all answering the call of the Gilets Jaunes of Commercy.

https://roarmag.org/2019/01/30/gilets-jaunes-commercy-assembly/

Moishe Postone - Capitalism, Temporality, and the Crisis of Labor

The current crisis has laid bare the contradictory and shaky character of contemporary capitalism. Yet the essentially inchoate responses to the crisis have dramatically revealed the absence of a robust conceptualization of post-capitalist society and, by implication, of a robust critique of capital. One result has been the continued hegemony of neoliberal discourses and policies. Moishe Postone seeks to fundamentally rethink the core categories of Marx’s critique of political economy in the fall 2015 Ellen Maria Gorrissen lecture. He argues that Marx’s mature critique of political economy, as elaborated in the Grundrisse and Kapital, provides the basis for a different critical theory of modernity with contemporary significance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgMvTGO1j-k

David Harvey on China's influence

The Chinese economy is now the 2nd largest in the world. Prof. David Harvey argues that China's expansion saved capitalism after the 2008 crash.

https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_chinasinfluence

Max B. Sawicky - 8 Points on Venezuela

The Trump administration's aggression toward Venezuela is grotesque, self-serving, and imperialistic. The US should stay out of Venezuela.

Dwelling on the shortcomings of targets of phony US human rights campaigns provides no benefit to the victims of those regimes. All it does is enlarge the political space for future, disastrous US military intervention. It also glosses over the history of US assaults on the sovereignty of the targeted nation.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/venezuela-maduro-united-states-intervention-sanctions

Liam Connell - Flexible Labour and the Crises of Work: Fictional Precarity

Liam Connell (University of Winchester) speaking at the Neoliberalism, Crisis and the World System

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4il0ZNo1rLg

Evgeny Morozov - The Internet of Things - Solutionism at Its Worst, or Humanity’s Last Savior?

Evgeny Morozov, Bosh Public Policy Fellow in the Spring 2015, is a leading critics in the discourse around the Internet of Things. The ability to turn passive and analogue objects into smart and interconnected ones has been widely hailed as a revolutionary development. Not only could it help us run cities, markets, and our own households more efficiently but it can also help solve problems like congestion and climate change -- or this is what the utopian vision tells us. The dystopian vision suggests that, thanks, in part, to ubiquitous sensors and overconnectivity, we are careening towards a privacy disaster, that the "Internet of Things" would belong to the same few monopolies that already dominate the online world, and that the amount of control over individual behavior would only increase. This talk tries to articulate a middle ground between the two positions, showing how to put the Internet of Things to the more humane and citizen-focused use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_MI0YpcD4k

McKenzie Wark - АBillion Black Anthropocenes

What happens when the Anthropocene meets critical race studies? One answer might be that you get Kathryn Yusoff’s provocative small book A Billion Black Anthropocenes, (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). If geologists are going to name a geological epoch after ‘Anthropos,’ then it might be an idea to put that in contact with one of the deepest critiques of the whole category.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4225-a-billion-black-anthropocenes

Jane H. Caelinnan - Rubber-Bullet Liberalism

The Yellow Vests movement has faced shocking police violence. And it’s not just from a few bad apples: it’s part of President Macron’s strategy to silence protest.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/gilets-jaunes-police-repression-macron

Николай Проценко - Габитус для начинающих

О лекциях Пьера Бурдьё по экономической антропологии

В прошлом году на русском вышел курс лекций Пьера Бурдьё по экономической антропологии. Он может стать хорошим началом для знакомства с наследием великого социолога: в лекциях Бурдьё не только объясняет логику возникновения своих ключевых понятий (габитус, поле, символический капитал и др.), но и обращается к своим философским предшественникам, среди которых особое место занимает Лейбниц.

https://gorky.media/reviews/gabitus-dlya-nachinayushhih/

Katherine Anderson - The Banality of Empire: On the Ordinary Lives of Brits in India

At Public Books, Katherine Anderson, a scholar of Victorian literature and culture, reviews The British in India: A Social History of the Raj (2018) by historian David Gilmour. As Anderson explains, Gilmour’s aim in the book is to show the individual lives of ordinary British subjects living in India during the period of imperialism. To this end, he spends little time discussing the brutal machinery of British rule in India, prefering slice-of-life portraits instead. But in her review, Anderson argues that the “ordinary lives” of Brits living in India during this period cannot be so easily separated from the realm of politics.

https://www.publicbooks.org/the-banality-of-empire/

Callum Cant - The wave of worker resistance in European food platforms 2016-17

Militant research into food platforms matters for two reasons. First, the segment of the capitalist class that owns these platforms have been early adopters of algorithmic management technology, which has transformed the labour process of traditional food delivery through the automation of supervision. Second, platform workers have resisted the conditions created by this reorganisation of the labour process, leading to a widespread series of skirmishes between workers and bosses.

https://notesfrombelow.org/article/european-food-platform-strike-wave

Sam Biddle - “A fundamentally illegitimate choise”: Shoshana Zuboff on the age of surveillance capitalism

«Surveillance capitalism in general has been so successful because most of us feel so beleaguered, so unsupported by our real-world institutions, whether it’s health care, the educational system, the bank … We’ve all been driven in this way toward the internet, toward these services, because we need help. And no one else is helping us. That’s how we got hooked».

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/02/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/

Ross Webb - The Strike Returns to New Zealand

Over the last year, New Zealand has seen tens of thousands of workers walk off the job, challenging the Labour government’s self-imposed austerity.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/new-zealand-strikes-unions-labour-party-austerity

Олеся Орленко - «Желтые жилеты»: испытание политикой

При оценке движения «жёлтых жилетов» в постсоветском информационном поле озвучивается ряд заблуждений, что во многом вызвано элементарной нехваткой информации. Нашей аудитории очень сложно понять, что это движение действительно не имеет руководящего центра, а значит, оно не является единым, и применять к его участникам общие оценки бессмысленно. В частности, речь идёт о насилии, в котором обвиняют участников акций. Никто из российских и украинских экспертов не говорит о том, что виновниками столкновений 1 декабря на Площади Звезды являются члены ультраправых неофашистских организаций, в частности – «Bastion social», имеющий связи с небезызвестным украинским батальоном «Азов», и парижская группировка «Zouaves». Судить по ним о движении «жёлтых жилетов» глубоко ошибочно, хотя правые тоже одевали на себя эти накидки.

http://liva.com.ua/zheltyie-zhiletyi-ispyitanie-politikoj.html

John Nichols - Erik Olin Wright envisioned Real Utopias in Madison and around globe

Erik Olin Wright never gave up on the dream of a just and equitable society in which human beings might treat one another as kindly as the University of Wisconsin sociology professor and internationally renowned public intellectual treated his students, his colleagues and the communities that he nurtured in Madison and around the world.

https://madison.com/ct/opinion/column/john_nichols/john-nichols-erik-olin-wright-envisioned-real-utopias-in-madison/article_b6ed2a66-711c-59ee-ac7a-3d43db5d3172.html

Nicos Poulantzas -  General Propositions on Fascism and the Dominant Classes

The global far-right is returning at an alarming rate, with the latest example being that of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But, is this fascism? The first thing we need to know before we can answer that is a full definition of fascism as an historical phenomena. In this extract from his classic Fascism and Dictatorship, Nicos Poulantzas explains the relationship between fascism and the dominant classes.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3062-weekend-read-general-propositions-on-fascism-and-the-dominant-classes

Jeffery R. Webber - E. P. Thompson’s Romantic Marxism

E. P. Thompson brilliantly chronicled the ravages of early capitalism and the fierce resistance it provoked.

Fifty-two years after its initial publication, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class continues to afford fresh vantage points on the dialectic of Marxism and Romanticism. Indeed, a utopian-revolutionary dialectic, looking backward to elements of a pre-capitalist past and pointing forward simultaneously to a socialist future, constitutes a connecting thread linking Thompson’s many eclectic lines of argumentation in The Making.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/making-english-working-class-luddites-romanticism