Renate Bridenthal - A Socialist Defector

Victor Grossman, born Stephen Wechsler in 1928 in New York City, has written his second book about his defection to East Germany in 1952. The first, Crossing the River, described his escape from the US Army to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), for fear of charges of perjury (having denied his membership in the US Communist Party) and his initiation to life as a journalist in his new home. A Socialist Defector not only continues his personal story, but also offers a unique insider’s view of real life in the GDR. It is a bittersweet, clear-eyed, but no-regrets memoir of his 38 years in the small socialist state and the years after unification with West Germany. Not uncritical in his retrospective of its evolution, hemmed in as it was by the great power politics of the Cold War, Grossman nevertheless retains his principles and ideals and respect for the degree to which the GDR was able to attain them. Humor leavens the nostalgia of his best memories.

https://monthlyreview.org/press/a-socialist-defector-grossman-reviewed-in-socialism-and-democracy/

Lenin150 (Samizdat). Revised and expanded 2nd edition, Daraja Press, 2021. 344 pp.,

Reviewed by Yağmur Ali Coşkun

April 2020 witnessed Lenin’s 150th birthday amidst the extraordinary times marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and popular revolts sweeping the face of the earth from Chile and the US, to Lebanon and Iraq. Lenin150 Samizdat, a collection of essays written and published to honor Lenin during the extraordinary year of 2020, definitely bears the stamp of both its subject’s and its contributors’ times.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19487_lenin150-samizdat-by-hjalmar-jorge-joffre-eichhorn-patrick-anderson-and-johann-salazar-eds-reviewed-by-yagmur-ali-coskun/

Yanis Varoufakis - In Defence of Ken Loach

So, it’s come to that: Ken Loach is now the target of a character assassination campaign waged by those who will stop at nothing to shield the apartheid policies of Israel. Their message to people of good conscience is simple: Unless you too want to be tainted as an antisemite, keep quiet about the crimes against humanity and the assault on human rights in the land of Palestine. They are putting the rest of us on notice: If we can do this to Ken Loach, a man who has spent his life championing the victims of oppression, racism and discrimination, imagine what we shall do to you. If you dare support the Palestinians’ human rights, we will claim that you hate the Jews.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/in-defence-of-ken-loach

Göran Therborn - Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy

Classical liberalism regarded universal suffrage as a mortal threat to property. So what explains the advent of liberal democracy, and how stable today is the marriage between representative government and the continued rule of capital? Across every continent, people think inequality is a ‘very big problem’. Even the Davos Economic Forum and the OECD say they are worried. And yet capitalist states don’t respond. How has democracy been transformed from a popular demand for social justice into a professional power game? To dispel our worsening political malaise, Göran Therborn argues, requires a ‘disruptive democracy’ of radical social movements, such as the climate strike. Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy opens with a major new essay mapping the social fractures of the present era. There is also a compact historical survey of worldwide patterns of democratization and a landmark analysis of the OECD economies, ‘The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy’, originally published in New Left Review and collected here in book form for the first time.

Historicizing Foucault: Stuart Elden on Tracing Foucault’s Ideas from Discipline and Punish to the History of Sexuality

«I think the relation between archaeology and genealogy is one such apparent discontinuity, and it’s certainly true that Foucault doesn’t really use the term genealogy until the early 1970s. His essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ is often seen as a key marker, though there are traces of this in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970, and his first course there, Lectures on the Will to Know, from 1970-71. But for me at least, I think it makes sense to see that Foucault introduced this term genealogy to capture something which he felt archaeology did not, but as a supplement, an addition, a different perspective, not a wholesale replacement. I think it’s striking that initially on using the term Foucault’s isn’t absolutely wedded to it he talks of a dynastics as a complementary approach, for example. And the genealogy he initially proposes is not of power, but of knowledge it’s a new way to rethink the questions he was exploring just a few years before. Indeed, he talks of both a dynastic of forces and a dynastic of knowledge as an approach that develops from his work on archaeology»

https://jhiblog.org/2020/04/27/historicizing-foucault-stuart-elden-on-tracing-foucaults-ideas-from-discipline-and-punish-to-the-history-of-sexuality/

Энди Мерифилд - Кафка против бюрократии

В книге «Магический марксизм. Субверсивная политика и воображение» писатель и урбанист Энди Мерифилд выступает за пересмотр марксизма, применяя к марксистскому мышлению ранее неисследованные подходы. К выходу книги вспоминаем другой труд Мерифилда — «Любитель. Искусство делать то, что любишь». В нем критике подвергаются устоявшаяся рабочая система, формализм и бюрократия. О последней и поговорим: как связан с бюрократией и самобюрократией классик модернизма Франц Кафка, расскажет отрывок из «Любителя». 

https://admarginem.ru/2021/08/15/kafka-protiv-byurokratii-otryvok-iz-lyubitelya-endi-merifilda/

Deborah Cook - Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West

Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess these resources, it examines the work of two of the twentieth century's more prominent social theorists: Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault. Although Adorno was situated squarely in the Marxist tradition that Foucault would occasionally challenge, Cook demonstrates that their critiques of our current predicament are complementary in important respects. Among other things, they converge in their focus on the historical conditions-economic in Adorno and political in Foucault-that gave rise to the racist and authoritarian tendencies that continue to blight the West. But this book will also show that as Adorno and Foucault plumb the economic and political forces that have shaped our identities, they offer remarkably similar answers to the perennial question: What is to be done?

Matthew Beaumont - The Walker. On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City

A literary history of walking from Dickens to Žižek

There is no such thing as a false step. Every time we walk we are going somewhere. Especially if we are going nowhere. Moving around the modern city is not a way of getting from A to B, but of understanding who and where we are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont retraces episodes in the history of the walker since the mid-nineteenth century. From Dickens’s insomniac night rambles to restless excursions through the faceless monuments of today’s neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of self-discovery and self-escape, of disappearances and secret subversions. Pacing stride for stride alongside literary amblers and thinkers such as Edgar Allan Poe, André Breton, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. Through these writings, Beaumont asks: Can you get lost in a crowd? What are the consequences of using your smartphone in the street? What differentiates the nocturnal metropolis from the city of daylight? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? And can we save the city or ourselves by taking to the pavement?

Тони Кроули - Оруэлл и Уильямс: язык и социализм

Джордж Оруэлл и Реймонд Уильямс были центральными фигурами британских левых в XX веке, их карьеры иногда пересекались (эссе Оруэлла «Писатели и Левиафан» (1948) было опубликовано в журнале «Политика и литература», одним из редакторов которого был Уильямс). Критичное отношение Уильямса к творчеству Оруэлла нашло свое отражение во все более враждебных замечаниях в книгах «Культура и общество» (1958), «Оруэлл» (1971) и «Политика и литература» (1979). Однако в этом эссе я не буду разбирать отдельные критические высказывания Уильямса об Оруэлле. Скорее я постараюсь рассказать об их подходах к языку, который оба автора считали ключом для понимания социальной и политической жизни и потому важным для социалистов.

http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/NZ/2021_137/2.pdf

Owen Hatherley - Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism

How to make a fairer, more just city

From the grandiose histories of monumental state building projects to the minutiae of street signs and corner cafés, from the rebuilding of capital cities to the provision of the humble public toilet, Clean Living under Difficult Circumstances argues for the city as a socialist project. This essay collection spans a period from immediately before the 2008 financial crash to the year of the pandemic. Against the business-as-usual responses to both crises, Owen Hatherley outlines a vision of the city as both a venue for political debate and dispute as well as a space of everyday experience, one that we shape as much as it shapes us. Incorporated here are the genres of memoir, history, music and film criticism, as well as portraits of figures who have inspired new ways of looking at cities, such as the architect Zaha Hadid, the activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs, and thinkers such as Mark Fisher and Adam Curtis. Throughout these pieces, Hatherley argues that the only way out of our difficult circumstances is to imagine and try to construct a better modernity.

ДИТ: Министерство слежения

В Москве за разработку системы слежения отвечает департамент информационных технологий (ДИТ). В его ведении находится вся городская система видеонаблюдения, распознавание лиц (и связанные с ним утечки данных) и даже скандально известное в пандемию приложение «Социальный мониторинг».

Партнёр «Роскомсвободы» — общественная организация Коллективное действие подготовил подробный материал о столичном ДИТ.

Как технологии слежки внедрялись в столице, под чьим руководством и почему для самих москвичей это практически полный отказ от конфиденциальности

https://bancam.ru/dit-ministerstvo-slezheniya

Alex N. Press - Gig Companies Are Bringing the Disastrous Prop 22 to a State Near You

The gig companies, fresh from their Prop 22 victory in California, are seeking to repeat their success in Massachusetts, pushing a ballot measure that would strip app-based drivers of existing labor protections like the minimum wage.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/gig-tech-companies-rideshare-ride-hail-uber-lyft-prop-22-contractor-employee-worker-protections-massachusetts-bill/

Tariq Ali - Debacle in Afghanistan

The fall of Kabul to the Taliban on 15 August 2021 is a major political and ideological defeat for the American Empire. The crowded helicopters carrying US Embassy staff to Kabul airport were startlingly reminiscent of the scenes in Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City in April 1975. The speed with which Taliban forces stormed the country was astonishing; their strategic acumen remarkable. A week-long offensive ended triumphantly in Kabul. The 300,000-strong Afghan army crumbled. Many refused to fight. In fact, thousands of them went over to the Taliban, who immediately demanded the unconditional surrender of the puppet government. President Ashraf Ghani, a favourite of the US media, fled the country and sought refuge in Oman. The flag of the revived Emirate is now fluttering over his Presidential palace. In some respects, the closest analogy is not Saigon but nineteenth-century Sudan, when the forces of the Mahdi swept into Khartoum and martyred General Gordon. William Morris celebrated the Mahdi’s victory as a setback for the British Empire. Yet while the Sudanese insurgents killed an entire garrison, Kabul changed hands with little bloodshed. The Taliban did not even attempt to take the US embassy, let alone target American personnel.  
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/debacle-in-afghanistan

Ян Гэн - Апология Маркса

Как и любое философское, экономическое и политическое учение, марксизм подвергался искажениям и критике, получал регулярные вызовы и отвечал на них. Идеи Маркса становились ответом на внутренние противоречия эпохи и отражением ее особенностей.  В книге «Апология Маркса: новое прочтение марксизма» изложена современная трактовка основных положений марксизма: практической деятельности, законов развития общества, исторической необходимости, положений о сущем и теорий познания.