Dana Mills - Rosa Luxemburg. Reaktion Books, 2020. 208 pp.

Reviewed by William Smaldone

More than 100 years after her murder by counterrevolutionary soldiers during the German Revolution of 1918-1919, Rosa Luxemburg continues to demand attention. As one of socialism’s most prominent Marxist theorists and one of its most courageous revolutionary activists, Luxemburg remains inspiring to radicals today. Not surprisingly there is a large literature on most aspects of her life and work, including relatively recent major biographies such as those by Annlies Laschitza (1996) and Ernst Piper (2018), which, unfortunately, have not been translated into English. J. P. Nettl’s massive study, originally published in 1966, remains the standard scholarly work in English, while a more accessible volume by Luxemburg’s comrade, Paul Fröhlich, is now over 80 years old. Likewise, Stephen Eric Bronner’s brief 1981 biography, which examined the applicability of Luxemburg’s thought to the conditions of the late twentieth century, is also dated. Meanwhile, Kate Evans’s recent graphic biography provides an innovative presentation of Luxemburg’s life, but lacks the depth that a more text-oriented biography can provide.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19274_rosa-luxemburg-by-dana-mills-reviewed-by-william-smaldone/

The Communication of Death and Love: A Philosophical Approach

In this episode of the Critical Theory Rocks Podcast, Christian Fuchs talks about what it means to take a philosophical approach on the communication of death and love.

The episode deals with the following questions: What philosophical positions are there on death? What ways are there for humans to mourn their loved ones? What kind of communication process is mourning? What is the role of death in capitalism? What is the relationship of death and love?

https://triplec.podbean.com/e/christian-fuchs-podcast-communication-capitalism-critique-episode-5-the-communication-of-death-and-love-a-philosophical-approach/

Томас Франк - Паранойя - американское наследие эпохи Трампа

Первое, что сделал новый президент США Джо Байден - заявил о своём намерении сплотить народ своей раздираемой противоречиями страны. Также он намерен демонстративно отринуть наследие прежнего главы государства. Одновременное достижение двух этих целей – непростая задача. Отчасти потому, что республиканцы и демократы ненавидят друг друга. А также поскольку горькие чувства параноидального характера, обуревающие одних, лишь усиливают дисциплинарные стремления других.

https://ru.mondediplo.com/2021/02/article803.html

Will Neoliberalism Finally End in Chile?

An interview with Rene Rojas

Chile voted for sweeping structural reform and an end to neoliberalism. It’s a repudiation of Augusto Pinochet and the economic regime he cemented in the country.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/rene-rojas-interview-democracy-new-constitution-constituent-assembly-plebiscite-left-chile/

Olúfémi Táíwò - Except for the Miracles

Liberation as the Fine Art of Losing

They came on a cold morning in the winter of 1973. As Patrick Radden Keefe recounts in the recent book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, doctors and nurses of the London prison strapped Price to a chair that was bolted to the floor and secured her to it with bedsheets. Hands wrenched her mouth open and forced a wooden bit between her jaws, preventing her from biting down. At the center of the bit was a hole just large enough to jam a rubber hose through. A puree of eggs, orange juice, and a vitamin blend coursed through the tube as she gasped for air, fighting to free herself. Before they could remove the tube and bit, she vomited up the food a victory, feeble as it may have seemed, for the hunger strike her captors had decided to break by force. So they came in the very next morning and did it again. And the next morning. And the next. For one hundred and sixty odd days, they came. It was a grueling battle of wills between the Belfast-born Irish republican and the authorities who served as the enforcing arm of British rule.

How many such stories are there in the annals of empire? Two decades earlier and thousands of miles south, like-minded British enforcers in Kenya were inventing the counterinsurgency strategy that was later used to ensnare and torture recalcitrant republicans like Price. Josiah Mwangi “JM” Kariuki was one of many forerunners of the resisters in Northern Ireland.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/except-for-the-miracles-taiwo

Вадим Квачев - Хайек: утопия неолиберализма

Фридрих Хайек — фигура для последующих поколений неолибералов одновременно культовая и неудобная, как это часто бывает с теми, кто стоит в основании интеллектуальных движений. Культовая потому, что многие из его положений не только были взяты на вооружение в области идеологии, но непосредственно претворены в жизнь как в отдельных государствах, так и в глобальной экономической системе. Неудобная потому, что Хайек был слишком подвержен идеализму. Можно провести такую аналогию: если Хайек — Ленин, то Фридман — это Сталин, тот, кто склонялся к прагматизму и благодаря ему воплотил замысел на практике.

https://syg.ma/@antiuniviersitet/khaiiek-utopiia-nieolibieralizma

Contreras E. - Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco

The "Latino vote" has become a mantra in political media, as journalists, pundits, and social scientists regularly weigh in on Latinos' loyalty to the Democratic Party and the significance of their electoral participation. But how and why did Latinos' liberal orientation take hold? What has this political inclination meant and how has it unfolded over time? In Latinos and the Liberal City, Eduardo Contreras addresses these questions, offering a bold, textured, and inclusive interpretation of the nature and character of Latino politics in America's shifting social and cultural landscape. Contreras argues that Latinos' political life and aspirations have been marked by diversity and contestation yet consistently influenced by the ideologies of liberalism and latinidad: while the principles of activist government, social reform, freedom, and progress sustained liberalism, latinidad came to rest on promoting unity and commonality among Latinos. Contreras centers this compelling narrative on San Francisco America's liberal city par excellence examining the role of its Latino communities in local politics from the 1930s to the 1970s. By the early twentieth century, San Francisco's residents of Latin American ancestry traced their heritage to nations including Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and Peru. These communities formed part of the New Deal coalition, defended workers' rights with gusto, and joined the crusade for racial equality decades before the 1960s. In the mid- to late postwar era, Latinos expanded claims for recognition and inclusion while participating in movements and campaigns for socioeconomic advancement, female autonomy, gay liberation, and rent control. Latinos and the Liberal City makes clear that the local public sphere nurtured Latinos' political subjectivities and that their politicization contributed to the vibrancy of San Francisco's political culture.

К. Мейясу - Метафизика и вненаучная фантастика

В настоящем эссе французский философ Квентин Мейясу развивает тему постоянства/непостоянства законов природы, рассматривая возможные отношения между хаосом и порядком в контексте литературного вымысла и трансцендентальной логики. Сталкивая позиции Юма, Канта и Поппера, Мейясу задается вопросом, что мы имеем в виду, когда говорим о «вымысле вненаучных миров», или о «вненаучной фантастике», и выделяет три типа миров: миры, где возможны и сознание, и наука; миры, где возможно сознание, а наука может быть невозможна; и миры, где невозможно ни сознание, ни наука.

George Scialabba - Free and Worldly

Louis Menand’s questionable pantheon of Cold War–era luminaries

Helpfully, Menand explains that this is “not a book about the ‘cultural Cold War’ (the use of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy).” Nor is it a book about “‘Cold War culture’ (art and ideas as reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions).” (A good example of the former is Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War; of the latter, Duncan White’s Cold Warriors.) The Free World is intellectual history, primarily a narrative of ideas talking to ideas and works of art talking to works of art, while also trying to take into account “the underlying social forces economic, geopolitical, demographic, technological that created the conditions for the possibility of certain kinds of art and ideas.”

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/free-and-worldly-scialabba

А. Рогожин - Как народовольцы выбросили листовки и взялись за бомбы

Об «Антологии народничества» Михаила Гефтера

«Антология народничества» — объемный сборник документальных материалов, посвященных непродолжительной истории одного радикального демократического движения, которая завершилась убийством императора Александра II. А. Рогожин о том, как эта книга проливает свет на достаточно неясные мотивы и стратегии самых известных русских террористов XIX века.

https://gorky.media/reviews/kak-narodovoltsy-vybrosili-listovki-i-vzyalis-za-bomby/

Joshua Makalintal - Abolishing the United States’ empire of policing

US policing has never been limited to the national sphere when we demand to defund the police, this includes ending the global policing powers of the US.

https://roarmag.org/essays/abolish-us-empire-policing/

Славой Жижек - Привыкнуть к вирусу, лесным пожарам и т.д.?.. Спасибо, нет!

Последние слова умирающего Биг Босса из легендарной видеоигры Хидео Кодзимы Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots сегодня актуальны как никогда: "Дело не в том, чтобы изменить мир. Речь идет о том, чтобы сделать все возможное, чтобы оставить мир таким, какой он есть".

Но актуальны они по-настоящему, только если придать им новый поворот. Мир, в котором творятся наводнения, горят леса и разгуливают вирусы, разрушающие нашу повседневную жизнь, в котором нищета становится продуктом нового обогащения, мы должны изменить радикально, если мы хотим иметь хотя бы шанс оставить его таким, какой он есть. Если мы ничего не сделаем, наш мир скоро станет неузнаваемым для его обитателей. А то, что мы уже делаем, близко к нулю - все эти разговоры о мерах по борьбе с глобальным потеплением лишь маскируют это ничто: "Мир за последнее десятилетие не смог достичь ни одной цели, чтобы остановить уничтожение дикой природы и жизнеобеспечивающих экосистем", - говорится в новом пугающем докладе ООН о состоянии окружающей среды.

https://centerforpoliticsanalysis.ru/position/read/id/privyknut-k-virusu-lesnym-pozharam-i-td-spasibo-net

Aryeh Neier - The Conservative Court

Since the Nixon era, the Supreme Court’s treatment of poverty and racial justice has made it a consistent enemy of society’s most marginalized.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-conservative-court

Ruqaiyah Zarook - Jean-Paul Sartre and the Problem of Being “Progressive Except for Palestine

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was famous for his anti-colonial positions, but waffled when it came to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Why did he struggle to be consistent, and what does that tell us about “progressive except for Palestine” intellectuals today?

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/jean-paul-sartre-and-the-problem-of-being-progressive-except-for-palestine

Adewale Maja-Pearce - Get It and Waste It

The landlocked, resource-rich Central African Republic has been in a state of almost perpetual turmoil since independence from France in 1960. The latest bout of unrest started with the 2013 overthrow of President François Bozizé, the former army chief of staff. Within a year, the UN had accused Bozizé of ‘engaging in or providing support for acts that undermine the peace, stability or security of CAR’, having tried and failed to take Bangui, the capital. Three-quarters of the country which is almost the size of France came to be controlled by 14 separate militias. A peace accord in 2019 brought a brief respite, but this ended in the run-up to the 27 December 2020 presidential election when the Constitutional Court declared Bozizé ineligible to stand because he failed to fulfil the ‘good morality’ requirement. According to the court, he was still subject to a government-issued arrest warrant for his alleged role in murders, kidnapping, arbitrary detention and torture. Everyone knew that the matter was personal. The incumbent, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, previously an obscure academic, was picked by Bozizé to be Prime Minister in 2008, only to be dismissed by Bozizé less than a year later. When the election took place Touadéra swept to victory although only one third of the electorate was able to vote after militia warfare displaced of hundreds of thousands. Various militias have since come together as the Coalition of Patriots for Change, with Bozizé accepting the ‘call’ to be its ‘general coordinator’.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/get-it-and-waste-it

Kwame Nkrumah - Handbook of revolutionary warfare: a guide to the armed phase of the African revolution

Opening with a diagnosis of present-day imperialist and neocolonialist intervention in Africa, and the repressive role of racist settler, minority governments, the author explains why the armed phase of the African Revolution became necessary. As ever, Kwame Nkrumah is the ardent advocate of the co-ordination of policy and strategy on a continental scale.

Сол Ньюмен - Политика профанного

Перевод заключительной части книги «Political Theology. A Critical Introduction» (2019).

Мой общий тезис состоял в том, что политическая теология, будучи проблемой политической легитимности и основания, появляется как специфический ответ на секуляризацию и представляет собой место трансцендентности, оставленное теологией вакантным в эпоху модерна. Современные формы политической и экономической власти стремятся занять это пространство и включить в себя его сакральное измерение. Смещая религию подобным образом, современная власть секуляризирует себя и в то же самое время становится божественной и трансцендентной. Таким образом, как мы видели, идея политического суверенитета создается по образцу трансцендентности Бога и его авторитета над миром. И даже экономическая и технологическая власть, которую следует понимать в терминах теологии имманентности, а не трансцендентности, приобретает, тем не менее, статус абсолютной истины сродни религиозному откровению. Проблема политической и экономической теологии связана не столько с современной властью религии с которой она все–таки продолжает переплетаться, сколько с современной религией власти.

https://syg.ma/@riedaktsiia-akrateia/politika-profannogho-sol-niumien