Eric Williams - Capitalism and Slavery

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Stephen R. Haynes - Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery

"A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." So reads Noah's curse on his son Ham, and all his descendants, in Genesis 9:25. Over centuries of interpretation, Ham came to be identified as the ancestor of black Africans, and Noah's curse to be seen as biblical justification for American slavery and segregation. Examining the history of the American interpretation of Noah's curse, this book begins with an overview of the prior history of the reception of this scripture and then turns to the distinctive and creative ways in which the curse was appropriated by American pro-slavery and pro-segregation interpreters.

Liza Featherstone - Socialism Has a History and a Future in New York City

The three socialists who effectively won election to New York City Council this month have achieved something many would have thought impossible just a few years ago. But they won’t be the first socialists elected to that body.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/new-york-city-hall-elections-nyc-dsa-history-socialist-party-communist-party-american-labor-party

Christian Fajardo - Mystified Alienation: A Discussion between Marx, Foucault and Federici

This article explores Karl Marx’s critique of alienation. Specifically, I will argue that the concept of alienation is essential to understand not only how capitalism reproduces itself, but also to find alternatives to a regime of capital valorisation that has become mystified. In order to develop the analytical scope of this critique, I propose to discuss it together with the Foucauldian concept of disciplinary power and with the concept of patriarchal violence that appears in Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch. These two approaches provide a basis for the statement that the Marxist critique of alienation can be complemented and radicalised with the post-structuralist position, and with the feminist critique of capitalism.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/1277/1435

Eric-John Russell - Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems
New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 272pp.

Reviewed by Carson Welch

The work of Guy Debord has often been associated in the English-speaking world with the ubiquity of some vague menace called “the spectacle,” which amounts to little more than an impenetrable mass of images that paper over the reality of social antagonism. A few recent studies have begun to remedy such misunderstandings of Debord’s central concept by restoring the complexity of its engagement with the Hegelian Marxist philosophical tradition. Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord both contributes to this restoration and offers some revisions of the studies that preceded it. But in doing so, it provides far more than a mere analysis of Hegel’s influence on Debord. Having situated Debord’s thought among a range of dialectical thinkers, Russell ultimately shows how Debord’s engagement with Hegel evinces the continuing use of the concept of “appearance” for understanding, as Russell puts it, the “phenomenality of a world that cannot be seen otherwise”

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19373_spectacular-logic-in-hegel-and-debord-why-everything-is-as-it-seems-by-eric-john-russell-reviewed-by-carson-welch/

Dossier No. 42: Defending our sovereignty: U.S. military bases in Africa and the future of African unity

For this dossier, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research physically projected images and coordinates of these hidden-away sites onto a map of Africa, visually reconstructing the apparatus of militarisation today.

Meanwhile, the pins and thread connecting these places remind us of the ‘war rooms’ of colonial domination. Together, the set of images is a visual testament to the continued ‘fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments’, as this dossier writes.

We refuse simple survival. We want to ease the pressures, to free our countryside from medieval stagnation or regression. We want to democratise our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future. We want to change the administration and reconstruct it with a different kind of civil servant. We want to get our army involved with the people in productive work and remind it constantly that, without patriotic training, a soldier is only a criminal with power. That is our political programme.

https://mronline.org/2021/07/06/dossier-no-42-defending-our-sovereignty-us-military-bases-in-africa-and-the-future-of-african-unity/

Asad Haider - Social Media’s Sad Passions

The more acceptable it is to denounce people because of their speech, the more likely it is that it will eventually happen to you.

Our political discourse focused as it is on free speech doesn’t give us a good framework for understanding trashing, because these are informal cultural and social practices rather than state repression. We won’t be able to counteract them by more loudly demanding formal legal rights we already enjoy.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/social-medias-sad-passions

Andrew Metheven - Militarism and the police: how our streets became battlefields

The militarism that sustains militarized police forces is a problem for everyone. Accepting this means that “anti-militarism” needs to be embraced far beyond the traditional “anti-war” movements, and has to become one of the cornerstones of all popular movements worldwide.

https://roarmag.org/essays/militarism-police-streets-battelfields/

Tom Hazeldine - Continuity UK

As Britain attempts to normalise from the pandemic, the country’s politics is settling into familiar grooves. The hardline Home Secretary Priti Patel has announced measures to offshore the asylum system, while Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, a former Scots Guard and aerospace contractor, celebrated the first British and American sorties to launch from the decks of the nation’s new aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, against scattered ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria – a return to maritime strike operations for the Royal Navy after a ten-year hiatus, Gaddafi’s Libya its last target.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/continuity-uk

Evan Malmgren - Escape from Electrosmog

Living free of 5G

There is no reputable evidence directly linking 5G to Covid-19. Researchers have traced their conceptual union to a general physician’s exceptionally vague statement in a Belgian newspaper. “I have not done a fact check, but it may be a link with current events,” he told the outlet, according to Wired. But the diverse range of fears owes less to any one source than the fact that they have been distributed, honed, and intermixed across a virtual expanse of interlocking paranoia networks spanning Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, and innumerable backwater forums. From outside of this amorphous filter bubble, the perceived homogeneity of various 5G suspicions makes it easy and convenient, perhaps, for the telecom industry to dismiss the lot as unfounded paranoia. Yet it would be simplistic to equate all concerns about new forms of radiofrequency radiation with QAnon-style crackpot conspiracies or anti-vaxxer rants about implanted tracking devices. The lines between ill-informed paranoia and justified skepticism are blurry, and history furnishes plenty of reasons to distrust the telecom industry, Big Pharma, Silicon Valley, and organs of federal government. A closer look at popular 5G anxieties reveals that at least some parts of the subculture have practical conclusions, tracts of solid ground to stand on, and a deeper history than mainstream fact-checkers care to admit.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/escape-from-electrosmog-malmgren

С днём взятия Бастилии!
К.ф.н. Антон Бархатков рассказывает о жизни и идеях Гракха Бабёфа – социалиста-утописта, участника Великой французской революции и организатора «Заговора равных».

https://youtu.be/7ywBvZos0cM

Alfie Hancox - Lieutenants of imperialism: social democracy’s imperialist soul

Alfie Hancox writes how the apparently progressive post-war government in the UK which delivered unprecedented social security simultaneously undermined progressive political futures in the Global South national liberation movements for land and resource sovereignty were thwarted. Hancox reveals Labour’s Aneurin Bevan’s role in deepening British imperialism.

https://roape.net/2021/07/15/lieutenants-of-imperialism-social-democracys-imperialist-soul/

Joshua Sperber - On Understanding Capitalism

With the 10th anniversary of Occupy approaching, left organizations have still not entirely escaped the movement’s shadow, which can be seen in Hadas Thier’s A People’s Guide to Capitalism. Thier aims to elucidate Karl Marx’s Capital (volumes one through three), and, conveying the exceptional relevance and power of Marx’s thought with clear and engaging prose, she often succeeds. She begins by denaturalizing capitalism’s historic origins in primitive accumulation (“dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx put it) and guides the reader through discussions of the labor theory of value, the origins and function of money and profit, and the mechanisms of capital accumulation and crisis, before concluding with a discussion of credit and finance.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-understanding-capitalism/

Velislava Hillman, Ioanna Noula, Ben Wagner - Big Tech Firms Can’t Be Trusted to Decide Children’s Futures

The rise of online learning during the pandemic has accelerated the already rapid growth of the educational technology sector. But the Silicon Valley firms taking over the classroom remain far too unaccountable and they’re massively extending the automated processes that unfairly decide children’s futures.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/big-tech-children-future-covid-pandemic-education-privacy-data

Eric Blanc - Rethinking the Russian Revolution from Across the Empire

The Russian Revolution was far less Russian than has often been assumed. By examining the imperial borderlands’ numerous socialist parties, my new book Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) (Brill, 2021) challenges long-held assumptions about revolutionary Russia and the dynamics of political struggle in autocratic and parliamentary conditions.

Beyond rediscovering the lost history of the Tsarist empire’s non-Russian Marxists, my study addresses the following puzzle: Why did revolutionary processes and outcomes diverge so dramatically across time (between 1905 and 1917) and space (between the different regions of imperial Russia)? I point to two significant causal mechanisms driving these divergences: regime type and party articulation.

https://marxistsociology.org/2021/07/rethinking-the-russian-revolution-from-across-the-empire/

Fascism, fanaticism and neoliberalism

Critical theorist Alberto Toscano joins Am Johal in conversation about his work and writings, as he joins SFU as a visiting faculty member with the Digital Democracies Institute in SFU’s School of Communication.

In this episode, they discuss Alberto’s writing on the philosophy of fanaticism, and conflicting discourse and counter-histories around the figure of the fanatic, which historically takes many forms, from abolitionist leaders to peasant revolutionaries. Alberto and Am also dive into global and historical trends of authoritarianism, racial capitalism and the notion of ‘late fascism.’ Alberto speaks to expanding our concept of fascism, to recognize iterations outside of what could be thought of as European fascism. They also talk about neoliberal tendencies in post-secondary administration, and the workings of mechanisms that maintain or fortify power structures within institutions. 

https://www.sfu.ca/sfuwoodwards/community-engagement/Below-the-Radar/episodes/episodes1/ep129-alberto-toscano.html

Wolfgang Streeck - Critical Encounters: Democracy, Capitalism, Ideas. Verso, 2020.

Reviewed by James Hodgson

I confess that I tried to follow Streeck’s advice, but I was defeated by the book’s structure. Critical Encounters is not a linear book, and, as Streeck himself recognises, one can read the chapters in any order. Although the reviews are organised into sections under three general themes capitalism, democracy and ideas these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, as all the books under discussion are concerned with political economy in the broadest sense: the interaction between spheres of politics and economics and how one comes to dominate the other. In particular, they are concerned with the transformations of the European economies over the past several decades, including the rise of financial capitalism, the advent of the European monetary union, the implementation of so-called ‘austerity’ fiscal policies in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007/8, and the decline of traditional modes of worker organisation and party representation. The authors with whom Streeck engages tackle these issues in terms of history (Joshua Freeman, Quinn Slobodian), politics (Yanis Varoufakis, Peter Mair), economics (Martin Sandbu, Mark Blyth) and philosophy (Perry Anderson, Jürgen Habermas). Of course, these categories are far from mutually exclusive, and many of the authors range over diverse terrain. The only book reviewed by Streeck which stands apart from the rest is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which nevertheless offers a fascinating insight into Streeck’s own discipline of social science and reflections on how processes of institutional change may be analogous to those of complex biological organisms. The result is that the reader of Critical Encounters comes away armed with an enormous list for future reading. The collection ends with a series of ‘Letters from Europe’, published in the online Spanish journal El Salto between December 2019 and May 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic was sweeping across Europe.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19382_critical-encounters-democracy-capitalism-ideas-by-wolfgang-streeck-reviewed-by-james-hodgson/