Асад Хайдер - Земля и существование в секторе Газа

Во время жестокого одиннадцатидневного нападения Израиля на Газу, ставшего, в сущности, лишь эскалацией ежедневного разрушения им жизни палестинцев, я обратился к работам палестинского писателя и активиста Гассана Канафани. В его повести “Письмо из Газы” рассказчик пишет своему другу в Калифорнию, куда того взяли получать инженерное образование. Он вспоминает о том, как в 1948-ом году Газа была атакована силами, которые позже станут государством Израиль, и как сильно ему хотелось оставить это место позади, освободиться от поражения. Но что-то притупило его страсть к побегу. Прежде чем уехать, он навещает в больнице свою тринадцатилетнюю племянницу, Надию, девочку “из поколения, которое было воспитано поражением и переселением до такой степени, что мыслило счастливую жизнь формой социального отклонения”. Её ногу ампутировали; она потеряла её, бросившись укрыть собой от бомб своих братьев и сестёр. Она могла бы спастись, убежать, но не сделала этого. И рассказчик тоже теперь никогда не уедет. Он пишет своему другу:

«Это маленькое смутное чувство, что было у тебя, когда ты покинул Газу, должно быть, выросло в великана в глубине тебя. Оно должно расти, ты должен искать его в себе, чтобы отыскать себя — здесь, среди обломков поражения. Я не приеду к тебе. Но ты — возвращайся к нам! Возвращайся, чтобы учиться у ноги Надии, ампутированной от самого бедра, тому, что есть жизнь и чего стоит существование».

Читая эти строки, я вспомнил слова Карла Маркса, написанные столетием ранее, из его лондонской речи в декабре 1867-го года, и его письмо 1870-го года к товарищам в Нью-Йорке; оба текста об “ирландском вопросе”. В записи речи Маркса есть слова о том, что ирландский вопрос — это “не просто вопрос национальности, но вопрос земли и существования”. В письме, Маркс говорит, что “в Ирландии земельный вопрос до сих пор является исключительной формой социального вопроса, так как он представляет собой вопрос существования, вопрос жизни или смерти для огромного большинства ирландского народа, и, в то же время, является неотделимым от национального вопроса”.

https://syg.ma/@radical-translations/asad-khaidier-ziemlia-i-sushchiestvovaniie-v-siektorie-gaza

Bringing Antonio Gramsci Back to Turin

An interview with Angelo D'Orsi

Turin was once Italian labor's most famous heartland, inspiring a young Antonio Gramsci to become a Communist. Today, Gramsci scholar Angelo D'Orsi is bidding to win the mayor's office by mobilizing the working-class voters that the neoliberalized center-left abandoned.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/antonio-gramsci-turin-italy-angelo-dorsi-mayoral-election

Александр Соколов - Госкорпорация «Правосудие».
Часть вторая.

Исследование о том, кто в России судьи

Кого в нашей стране назначают судьями и можно ли считать их независимыми в новой части исследования о состоянии российской судебной системы.

https://www.proekt.media/research/nezavisimost-sudey/

Lucia Pradella - From post-Marxism back to Marxism?

The Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism I co-edited with Alex Callinicos and Stathis Kouvelakis aims to present the development of Marxism as a militant tradition in dialogue with other traditions and within itself. Even if it was conceived almost six years ago, the multiple crises we are confronting today economic, political, social, gender, environmental and biological vindicate the spirit of our project. The project seeks to look at Marxism as a tradition that is rooted in and addresses the totality of capitalist social antagonisms and, by doing so, is able to think strategically beyond capital.

Several contributions challenge reductionist interpretations of Marx’s critique of political economy, and the idea that Marxism is irremediably Eurocentric and underestimates race, gender and ecology. This opens a space for a more complex, and I would say fertile, dialogue with Post-Marxists currents. The format of the Handbook combining longer contextual essays and shorter essays on individual thinkers mainly aims at facilitating this dialogue. We chose this format, rather than concentrating on themes and concepts, in order to capture the specificity of, and interactions between, individual thinkers and problematics.

https://developingeconomics.org/2021/06/05/from-post-marxism-back-to-marxism/

Alfred Sohn-Rethel - Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology Brill, 2020.

Reviewed by Fabian Van Onzen

People who have studied Marxist philosophy will probably at some point have learned of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, either through the work of Slavoj Žižek or in surveys of the Frankfurt School. It is less likely that they will have had an opportunity to read his Intellectual and Manual Labour, for it has long been out of print and is hard to acquire. Fortunately, the Historical Materialism series has released a new edition of Intellectual and Manual Labour, which contains a useful introduction discussing the context in which the book was written and its impact on Western Marxism, as well as a collection of articles from the Italian autonomist journal Lotta Continua that show how Sohn-Rethel was received by leftist circles in Italy. Upon reading Sohn-Rethel it becomes clear that his work is important for contemporary debates on ecology, the Marxist critique of science and debates on post-revolutionary societies such as the former Soviet Union.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19315_intellectual-and-manual-labour-a-critique-of-epistemology-by-alfred-sohn-rethel-reviewed-by-fabian-van-onzen/

Максим Коваленко из марксистского кружка КрасноBY и Антон Бархатков обсуждают идеи ключевых представителей русской религиозной философии второй половины XIX – начала XX вв., а также критику некоторыми из них марксистской теории.

https://youtu.be/CFFdVkpkTJc

Brianna Rennix - The Politics and “Pretentiousness” of Reading James Joyce

Is this modernist tome full of fart jokes and dense allusions worth all the irritating discourse around it? Brianna Rennix says yes.

Liberal darling and overgrown Student Council President Pete Buttigieg is, of course, the most notorious Ulysses fan on the modern political stage, having repeatedly commented on his fondness for the novel and put it on his official list of Favorite Books. When asked about Ulysses by an Esquire interviewer, Buttigieg described it as an “extremely relevant” book: “it is a difficult text, but its subject matter couldn’t be more democratic. It’s about a guy going about his day for one day. … You’re in this guy’s head, and you’re kind of seeing life through his eyes, and at the end through his wife’s eyes. That’s how politics ought to be, too.” The reaction on social media was polarizing: Buttigieg was enthusiastically commended by a number of fans who were excited by the prospect of having an “erudite” president in the White House, and dragged by an equivalent number of people questioning whether Buttigieg, or indeed any other human being, has actually read Ulysses. “No person on earth has ever read Ulysses,” wrote one internet commentator. “James Joyce probably gave it a quick skim.” Others rolled their eyes at Buttigieg’s affinity for “difficult” white male authors, and demanded to know if he had ever read a book by a woman.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/04/the-politics-and-pretentiousness-of-reading-james-joyce

Что такое постколониализм?

Интервью с Ашилем Мбембе.

В нем камерунский философ дает исчерпывающий обзор истоков и этапов развития постколониальной мысли и размышляет о необходимости изобретения новой политики, основанной на обнажении страдания и отказе от мести.

https://easteast.world/posts/104

Marcus Verhagen - Making Time

In Modern Times, Jacques Rancière addresses the organization of temporalities that underlies the present order of society. He suggests that some socio-economic roles have their own temporal profiles, with distinctive schedules and cadences, their own patterns of stress and release this is what he calls the ‘partition of times’. Modern Times emphasizes both the naturalized character of this organization of time and its stratification by class and occupation, determining who can do what and when. But Rancière is primarily concerned with efforts to resist the reigning partition and bring about a ‘redistribution of times’, by instituting other rhythms or re-assigning intervals to other activities. Here he is characteristically ecumenical, touching on both practical and literary resistances, and forms of redistribution both personal and collective. Cultural products are read as potentially significant interventions in the politics of time. So, for instance, Rancière sees Virginia Woolf’s critique of the plot-driven novel in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ as a revolt against the subordination of narrative to an inevitable climax or dénouement and so, by extension, a rebellion against instrumentalization as a principle of cultural and economic life. Protest movements offer another example of temporal subversion: protesters occupy time as well as space, subtracting it from work and producing time spent together.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129/articles/marcus-verhagen-making-time

John Keane - Civil Society. Old Images, New Visions

It is only a decade ago that the eighteenth-century distinction between civil society and the state seemed old-fashioned, an object of cynicism, even of outright hostility. In this important new book, John Keane shows how, in a wholly unexpected reversal of fortunes, this antiquated distinction has since become voguish among politicians, academics, journalists, business leaders, relief agencies and citizens' organizations. John Keane examines the various sources and phases of the dramatic world-wide popularization of the term. He traces its reappearance in a wide range of contexts - from China to Tunisia, from South Africa to the emerging European Union - and clarifies the conflicting grammars and vocabularies of the language of civil society. Considerable care is taken to highlight the different possible meanings of the distinction between civil society and the state. Keane also takes the reader into previously uncharted intellectual territory by demonstrating that the civil society perspective contains unharnessed potentials: that it is possible to develop bold new images of civil society that alter the ways in which we think about matters such as power, property, violence, politics, publicity and democracy. Written with style and imagination, this important book by John Keane will be of great interest to students and scholars in politics, media studies, sociology, social and political theory, and to a broader public audience interested in the central debates and political developments of our time.

Анна Тёмкина - Гендер и постколониализм

Каким образом постколониальная теория обогащает гендерную теорию? На каких проблемах останавливается критика белого феминизма? Какие отношения власти возникают при наложении расизма и сексизма?

Анна Тёмкина рассматривает связь постколониальной теории и гендерных исследований, а также критику западного феминизма второй волны и опыт не-белых женщин.

https://syg.ma/@leisan-garipova/anna-tiomkina-giendier-i-postkolonializm

Ted Benton - Natural Relations.Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice

“A major advance in work on animal rights.” Andrew Dobson

In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of “human rights.” Liberal-individualist views of human rights and advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether human or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnerable to criticisms from the left which emphasize the importance of social relationships to individual well-being. Benton’s argument supports the important assumption, underpinning the cause for human rights, that humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm. Both liberal rights theory and its socialist critique fail adequately to theorize these aspects of human vulnerability. Nevertheless, it is argued that, enriched by feminist and ecological insights, a socialist view of rights has much to offer. Lucid and wide-ranging in its argument, Natural Relations enables the outline of an ecological socialist view of rights and justice to begin to take shape.

Joy Neumeyer - Burying Homo Soveticus

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova. The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity
Oxford University Press: Oxford 2020

Imagine a creature left behind by evolution. It is obedient, passive, and dependent on others for its care. Devoid of morals, it lies in order to survive. Such is the fate of Homo Sovieticus, the personality type identified by Yuri Levada’s sociological surveys on the ‘simple Soviet man’ of the late 80s. Homo Sovieticus was expected to go extinct with Russia’s post-Soviet transition, only to receive an alarming new lease of life. Scholars and journalists such as Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa have invoked the concept to attribute the country’s current brand of authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin to the subservient mindset of its citizens.

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a political scientist at King’s College London, rejects the ‘hopelessness’ and ‘Russophobia’ of such interpretations. She calls for ‘an emotionally intelligent’ approach that is focused on ‘empathizing with the Russian population, rather than pointing to where it went wrong’. In The Red Mirror, she attempts to diagnose the Russian condition without relying on Homo Sovieticus or assuming the superiority of its imagined foil, the liberal Western subject. She proposes that polling data like Levada’s can be stripped of its Cold War-era ideological foundations and retrofitted to produce a more convincing assessment of the collective psyche. ‘You can’t step twice into the same river g TV us a classic saying’, she writes. ‘Or can you? How can we use the insights in social psychology to arrive at a less biased understanding and give credit and the blame where they are due?’

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129/articles/joy-neumeyer-burying-homo-sovieticus

James Dunkerley - The Pacification of Central America: Political Change in the Isthmus, 1987-1993

This unique guide to the politics and recent history of Central America by one of its most distinguished commentators opens with a succinct overview of pacification and democracy in the region. Dunkerley focuses on the causes and consequences of the ending of civil war in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Drawing on a wide range of local and international sources, he stresses the variety of means by which peace has been sought and achieved. He also analyses economic performance, relations with the US, refugee and human rights problems, narcotics and corruption, and the issue of war crimes. The second section of the book comprises a detailed chronology covering all key developments between 1987 and 1993. the book concludes with indispensable appendices which clearly set out statistical profiles of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua for the decade since 1982. they document US economic and military aid to Central America, the dates and results of regional elections, and provide statistics on refugees and displaced persons. The Pacification of Central America is a valuable tool of reference for anyone with an interest in the complicated and often confusing politics of the region.

Паоло Вирно, Кристина Кайндль, Спенсер Саншайн - Три текста о новом фашизме

В сборник вошли три текста, освещающие три области, в которых происходит сегодня столкновение неофашистских и леворадикальных идей. Согласно Паоло Вирно, представителю автономистского марксизма, в эпоху деградации как парламентской, так и «рабочей», «индустриальной» демократии новый фашизм ведет борьбу за колонизацию жизни вне сферы парламентаризма и за пределами «завода и офиса». Кристина Кайндль анализирует отношения неолиберализма и ультраправой политики в электоральной сфере, а историк анархизма Спенсер Саншайн – противостояние левых и неонацистов (т.н. «национал-анархистов») в области субкультуры.

An evening with a socialist defector: Victor Grossman aka Stephen Wechsler

An American journalist, writer and popular speaker, who defected to the USSR in 1952, Victor Grossman has since lived in East Germany, then the reunified Germany, chronicling life, politics and humanity.

Victor's latest book is published by Monthly Review Press and titled "A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4nl-19MCyP4