Bernard Stiegler  - States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century

In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions.

New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein's critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the 'shock doctrine'. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent 'state of shock' has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities.

Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.

Daniel Finn - The Tributary

Trotskyism has always been a movement of the margins, and not just in the sense that its organizations have usually remained in the shadow of the labour movement’s big battalions. In the few cases where Trotskyist parties have come to play a significant role, it has often been at some remove from the regional power centres: Bolivia rather than Brazil, Sri Lanka rather than India. It is fitting, perhaps, that Ireland should be the last stronghold of European Trotskyism.

At the turn of the century, it seemed as if Trotskyist organizations might fill the political space vacated by the official, pro-Soviet communist parties. In France, the two main Trotskyist parties teamed up for the 1999 European election and sent five deputies to Strasbourg. They ran separately in the 2002 presidential contest for a combined vote share of 10% – more than the French Communist Party and the Greens put together. In Britain, Trotskyists were at the heart of every left-wing electoral initiative that sought to challenge New Labour, as well as the movement against the Iraq war.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-tributary

Mark Bould, China Miéville - Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction

Science fiction and socialism have always had a close relationship. Many science fiction novelists and filmmakers have used the genre to examine explicit or implicit Marxist concerns. Red Planets is an accessible and lively account, which makes an ideal introduction to anyone interested in the politics of science fiction. The volume covers a rich variety of examples from Weimar cinema to mainstream Hollywood films, and novelists from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Disch to Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken MacLeod, and Charles Stross. Contributors include Matthew Beaumont, William J. Burling, Carl Freedman, Darren Jorgensen, Rob Latham, Iris Luppa, Andrew Milner, John Rieder, Steven Shaviro, Sherryl Vint, and Phillip Wegner.

Луис Альберто Регада - Pegasus, кровь и песок в Мексике

В знаменитом шпионском скандале Pegasus жертвой слежки оказался как президент Франции, так и президент Мексики. Поэтому Андрес Мануэль Лопес Обрадор пообещал рассекретить ранее закрытые архивы спецслужб.

Шпионаж за оппозиционерами, коррупция, грубейшие нарушения прав человека… Нет, это не о Федеральном управлении безопасности (DFS), которое преследовало в течение 40 лет ХХ в. политических оппозиционеров (в том числе левых) Институционально-революционной партии в Мексике. Ресь идёт о спецслужбах Энрике Пенья Ньето, мексиканского президента с 2012 по 2018 гг. Мексика оказалась в центре скандала, связанного с международным разоблачением проекта Pegasus. Напомним, что речь идёт о шпионаже за смартфонами с помешаю продукта, разработанного израильской компанией по разработкам в области кибербезопасности NSO Group.

https://humanite-russie.ru/2021/08/04/pegasus-krov-i-pesok-v-meksike/

Richard Drake - Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition

One of the most controversial questions in Italy today concerns the origins of the political terror that ravaged the country from 1969 to 1984, when the Red Brigades, a Marxist revolutionary organization, intimidated, maimed, and murdered on a wide scale. In this timely study of the ways in which an ideology of terror becomes rooted in society, Richard Drake explains the historical character of the revolutionary tradition to which so many ordinary Italians professed allegiance, examining its origins and internal tensions, the men who shaped it, and its impact and legacy in Italy. He illuminates the defining figures who grounded the revolutionary tradition, including Carlo Cafiero, Antonio Labriola, Benito Mussolini, and Antonio Gramsci, and explores the connections between the social disasters of Italy, particularly in the south, and the country's intellectual politics; the brand of "anarchist communism" that surfaced; and the role of violence in the ideology. Though arising from a legitimate sense of moral outrage at desperate conditions, the ideology failed to find the political institutions and ethical values that would end inequalities created by capitalism. In a chilling coda, Drake recounts the recent murders of the economists Massimo D'Antona and Marco Biagi by the new Red Brigades, whose Internet justification for the killings is steeped in the Marxist revolutionary tradition.

"Другая Европа" Ф.Боккара, И. Димиколи, Д. Дюран
В контексте книги поговорили немного о том, кто в ЕС принимает решение, есть ли возможность что-то изменить, нужен ли евро, есть ли европейская солидарность и нужно ли что-то со всем этим делать?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULGSge9WDHk

Tom Patterson - Karl Marx, Anthropologist

After being widely rejected in the late 20th century the work of Karl Marx is now being reassessed by many theorists and activists. Karl Marx, Anthropologist explores how this most influential of modern thinkers is still highly relevant for Anthropology today. Marx was profoundly influenced by critical Enlightenment thought. He believed that humans were social individuals that simultaneously satisfied and forged their needs in the contexts of historically particular social relations and created cultures. Marx continually refined the empirical, philosophical, and practical dimensions of his anthropology throughout his lifetime. Assessing key concepts, from the differences between class-based and classless societies to the roles of exploitation, alienation and domination in the making of social individuals, Karl Marx, Anthropologist is an essential guide to Marx's anthropological thought for the 21st century.

Glenn Houlihan - The Legacy of the Crushed 1981 PATCO Strike

Forty years ago today, 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike. President Ronald Reagan would soon crush that strike leading to devastating consequences for organized labor and all workers that we’re still dealing with today.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/reagan-patco-1981-strike-legacy-air-traffic-controllers-union-public-sector-strikebreaking/

Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin - Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions

This study discusses the legacy of the Communists in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from the 1930s through the 1950s. How did the Communists win and hold power in the CIO unions, and what did they do with it once they had it? Did they subordinate the needs of workers to those of the Soviet regime? Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin find that Communists were more egalitarian and most progressive on class, race and gender issues. They were also leading fighters in exemplary workplace struggles to enlarge the freedom and enhance the human dignity of America's workers.

Bob Carter - Defending Marx and Braverman: taking back the labour process in theory and practice

Writing his 1974 book Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, US Marxist and political economist Harry Braverman noted that Karl Marx had demonstrated that processes of production are constantly transformed by the driving force of capital accumulation. These transformations manifest themselves in the changes in the application of science and technology to production and their effect on labour processes in each branch of industry, as well as in the redistribution of labour among occupations and industries.

Marx’s analysis contrasted with the dominant industrial and sociological views of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw changes in work and occupations as largely benign. According to these, automation would remove heavy and tedious labour. Increasing demand for educational qualifications supposedly reflected the growth of skilled labour and white-collar occupations. New personnel policies seemed to reflect concern for workers’ wellbeing. More widely, academic sociology and conservative political ideologies saw the growth of white-collar workers as increasing the weight of the middle class, thereby reducing the viability of socialism. This belief was reflected by variants of socialist thought that saw revolutionary agency as moving from the working class in the most advanced industrial economies to the Global South, the peasantry and dispossessed.

http://isj.org.uk/marx-and-braverman/

Tiqqun - Introduction to civil war

Activists explore the possibility that a new practice of communism may emerge from the end of society as we know it.

Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion from Introduction to Civil War Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides these were all one word in the Greek - stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms absolute, liberal, welfare has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.

Американская платформа платит во Франции смехотворный налог. А всё потому, что может декларировать лишь часть доходов, получаемых во Франции.

David Gordon - Resurrecting Marx: Analytical Marxists on Exploitation, Freedom and Justice

The last two decades have seen Marxism's academic renascence. In fields as diverse as law, literary criticism, history, and philosophy, Marxism once again captivates no small number of scholars. In part, this reassessment is driven by the efforts of a group of philosophers and economists to reconstruct Marx from the ground up on a more rigorous basis. The work of these "Analytical Marxists" who include G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer is given a sustained examination and critique in David Gordon's Resurrecting Marx.

The charge of the Analytical Marxists that capitalism is inherently exploitative and unjust is the primary subject of Gordon's book. Gordon takes issue with that contention; he argues that the Analytical Marxists' withering criticism of classical Marxism is essentially correct, but that they fail to replace it with a superior theoretical edifice. Gordon also analyzes the Analytical Marxists' reformulation of the Marxian notion of exploitation, the implications of their rejection of the labor theory of value, their differences over what rights people have, and their arguments for the compatibility of markets with socialism.