Edemilson Paraná - Brazil Has Just Experienced Another “Lost Decade”

In Brazil’s worst decade in more than a century, unemployment, precarious and informal work, poverty, and inequality are all sharply on the rise. In a crisis stoked by a far-right government, fixing the country’s economy can only happen with a political reckoning from the Left.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/brazil-lost-decade-economy-capitalism-neoliberalism-far-right-politics/

Бенжамен Кёниг - Экологический блеф Марин Ле Пен

Что не сделаешь для завоевания электората? Вот и лидер «Национального объединения» (RN) заговорила об экологии. Тем временем ранее гуру ультраправых Жан-Мари Ле Пен называл «зелёную» тематику «религией буржуазных либерастов». Теперь же они является частью ультраправой риторики. По мнению Марин Ле Пен, настоящий эколог, в отличие от представителей «кочевых народов», ощущает связь с родной землёй и поэтому в состоянии о ней заботиться.

https://humanite-russie.ru/2021/08/29/ekologicheskiy-blef-marin-le-pen/

Asad Haider - The human mask

In Reading Capital Louis Althusser made note of an ‘obvious’ presupposition: that ‘the “actors” of history are the authors of its text, the subjects of its production.’ This strange theatre, in which ‘the stage-director has been spirited away’ and the actors have written their own roles, illustrated the ideologies of ‘humanism’ and ‘historicism’, which Althusser provoked international controversy by criticising. This controversy continues, as Kyle Baasch shows with ‘The Theatre of Economic Categories’ (RP 2.08), which has the great merit of revisiting French and German readings of Capital in the 1960s. However, despite its scope and erudition, Baasch’s argument is undermined by a surprisingly chauvinistic insistence on the superiority of German over French thought – clashing sharply with the young Karl Marx, who in a letter to Ludwig Feuerbach before he left for Paris called for a ‘Franco-German scientific alliance.’

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-human-mask

Martin Halpern - Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century

Social change advocates won a remarkable series of victories during the 20th century. This study examines both successful and unsuccessful efforts, ranging from the women's suffrage movement of the 1910s to the divisive debate between Gore and Nader supporters during the 2000 election. Halpern details the ingredients essential to shaping progressive campaigns. While left-wing activists sustained grass roots movements and worked with allies in left-center coalitions, trade unions energized by progressive activists gave the efforts institutional weight with crucial assistance from Democratic presidents committed to liberalism.

Frequently facing repression, left-wingers nevertheless managed to pass their values on to their children, who in turn sustained new sets of social movements. Leftists worked alongside other progressives to form left-center coalitions on issues such as Civil Rights and labor law reform. Influenced by liberalism, Roosevelt, Johnson, and Kennedy gave crucial assistance to the social change process. Shying away from liberalism, Carter and Clinton and Vice President Gore failed to provide comparable assistance, disappointing progressive activists and unions and leading to important setbacks. Whether the Democratic Party will once again seek to elect a president with a liberal vision to assist a revitalized labor movement, a newly energized left, and left-center coalitions in the social change process remains to be seen.

Cahiers du Cinema - Volume 4: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle

Since its foundation in 1951, the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema - perhaps, the most influential and probably the most interesting film journal ever published - has been a major source of ideas and controversy within film criticism and film-making. The fourth volume in this influential series of anthologies covers the vibrant and turbulent period from 1973 to 1978, in which the editorial make-up and policy of the journal changed radically, and issues of theory, history and politics dominated critical debate. The anthology combines essays by critics such as Pascal Bonitzer, Serge Daney and These Giraud; round-table discussions; reviews of contemporary films from Star Wars and King Kong to Padre Padrone and Jeanne Dielman; and interviews with leading theorists including Marc Ferro and Michel Foucault, presenting a rich sampler of Cahiers' provocative and indispensable contribution to debates in film and cultural politics.

Tony McKenna - The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 280 pp.

Reviewed by Fouad Mami

McKenna starts with what he labels as the founding fathers of critical theory, often introduced in philosophy manuals not only as neo-Marxists but as the anti-fascist ‘luminaries’: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Underneath their rhetoric of updating Marx’s ideas for the realities of the early-to-mid twentieth century, McKenna tracks in their approach a Nietzschean disenchantment with ordinary people. Uncontrolled consumption on the part of the masses spells a false consciousness, a situation that explains how a ‘culture industry’ is behind the infuriating reproduction of generic individuals. Without focus on the predominant mode of production, these thinkers strike at the universalist drive and logic of the enlightenment. McKenna deems that critique of universalism abstract because it refracts the egalitarian propulsion of modernity and seeks to stifle it. With the three theorists, the author finds a nostalgia for a world order where the undeserving masses knew their place in the world and acted accordingly.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19558_the-war-against-marxism-reification-and-revolution-by-tony-mckenna-reviewed-by-fouad-mami/

Tony Wood - Castillo’s Path

Nearly two months after Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru’s second-round runoff, the new president has only just managed to get his first cabinet appointed. The 73 to 50 vote through which the Peruvian Congress approved the ministers on 27 August came at the end of several weeks of obstruction and outcry from the opposition. This included a prolonged refusal by Keiko Fujimori, the defeated candidate, to acknowledge the result, as well as yet more of the hysterical redbaiting that had marked the presidential campaign. The turbulent weeks since the 6 June election provide a depressingly clear indication of what Castillo can expect in the months (and indeed years) ahead; yet at the same time, they also amply demonstrate the profound dysfunction that brought him to power in the first place.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/castillos-path

Виктор Кириллов - Старый новый взгляд

О книге Андрея Воронихина “Вера Николаевна Фигнер. Взгляд на женщину русских революций из XXI века”

«Ничего плохого в “историографии реабилитации” нет. За её поддержку можно поблагодарить и Андрея Воронихина, и издательство “Common place”. Популярность таких изданий намекает на переоценку отрицания социалистической традиции в постсоветской России, запрос на знание об огромном пласте отечественной истории, который после крушения коммунизма был выброшен за борт как неактуальный. Но, если сравнить книгу Воронихина с изданной ранее биографией Перовской, можно заметить, как ей не хватает непосредственности и публицистической яркости в желании “реабилитировать” личность Веры Фигнер».

https://scepsis.net/library/id_4015.html

«Где было Оно, должно стать Мы»: к этике радикального психоанализа

Фрагмент книги Иана Паркера и Давида Павон-Куэльяра «Психоанализ и революция»

В период пандемии британский психоаналитик Иан Паркер и мексиканский философ Давид Павон-Куэльяр написали манифест о проблемах современного психоанализа и его месте в политической практике освободительных движений. В представленном фрагменте книги, вышедшей на русском в издательстве «Горизонталь», авторы рассуждают об этических основах метода и необходимости примата бессознательного, понимаемого социально, над буржуазным Я, основанным на отделении субъекта от окружающих.

https://gorky.media/fragments/gde-bylo-ono-dolzhno-stat-my-k-etike-radikalnogo-psihoanaliza/

Paul M. Sweezy, Charles Bettelheim - On the Transition to Socialism (1972)

Part I of this collection comprises an exchange of views between Charles Bettelheim and myself which appeared in Monthly Review beginning in October 1968 and ending in October 1971. All but the last piece were published in French under the title Lettres sur quelques problèmes actuels du socialisme. (Paris: Maspero, 1970)

Part II contains two editorial articles from Monthly Review and the text of a lecture I delivered in Italy in the spring of 1971, which was also originally published in Monthly Review. The first of the two editorial articles, on the first fifty years of Soviet experience, appeared in November 1967 when Leo Huberman and I were editors; the second, discussing the significance of the worker uprising in Poland in December 1970, appeared in February 1971 when Harry Magdoff and I were editors, as we still are. Since the magazine’s inception the editors have had an understanding that any collection of essays by either of them may include unsigned editorial articles of appropriate subject matter. The purpose is to make material available to readers in conveniently usable form and does not indicate sole authorship. (Paul M. Sweezy)

Жак Рансьер: «Задача в том, чтобы сохранять несогласие»

Жак Рансьер, будучи мыслителем эмансипации рабочих, на протяжении всей своей жизни был крепко привязан к идее равенства – деконструировал «авторитеты» и высокомерие «знающих». Например, в «Les mots et les torts», недавно вышедшей книге диалогов Рансьера с молодым испанским философом Хавьером Бассасом, бывший ученик Альтюссера объясняет, как он всегда пытался «противопоставить идентификациям и различиям неэгалитарного мышления мир равенства без границ». В феврале 2021 года корреспонденты еженедельника Les Inrockuptibles встретились с Жаком Рансьером, чтобы узнать, как философ рассматривает период истории, когда под воздействием угрозы вируса высказывания экспертов подавляют всех остальных и принуждают прекариат к молчанию. Однако автор таких работ, как «Невежественный учитель» (1987), «Ненависть к демократии» (2005) и «Освобожденный зритель» (2008), оказывается несговорчивым собеседником и в ответ исследует настоящее, от баррикад до «мер безопасности», просвечивая его рентгеновскими лучами в поисках возможности нового политического момента

https://cineticle.com/ranciere-the-issue-is-to-manage-to-maintain-dissensus/

Barbara Ransby - Racism’s Roots and Branches

Racism in the United States is not mainly about individual bias but about divisions forged long ago by the super-exploitation and political dispossession of racialized groups

Racism and white supremacy, like everything else, have a history. As ideological frameworks, they have evolved and morphed over time. But we often lose sight of the origins of racism in what is now the United States. In British North American colonies in the 1600s, before the American revolution, settler elites began to differentiate white indentured servants from enslaved people descended from Africa. A subjugated class of workers became essential to the economic system that grew around the Southern plantation.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/racisms-roots-and-branches

Peter Hill - Raymond Williams Was a Socialist Visionary

Raymond Williams would not have claimed to have found all the answers. But we should remember him as one of the most thoughtful socialist writers of the 20th century.

Williams’s rethinking of the socialist project was set against the backdrop of the 1970s and ’80s, a period that saw the slow fragmentation of the postwar social-democratic compact, in a long crisis of the global capitalist and carbon economy. Much-demonized by later conservative commentators as an era of chaos and trade union dictatorship, the ’70s in Britain now seem, in retrospect, to disclose possibilities of creative socialist alternatives. This was a period of major working-class militancy, growing feminist and anti-racist politics, and burgeoning countercultures as well as the first stirrings of the modern environmental movement.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/raymond-williams-socialism-ecosocialism-materialism-marxism-theory

Неолиберализм с кыргызским лицом

Почему Кыргызстан бедная страна уже 30 лет?

30 лет назад вместе с падением красного флага с башен московского кремля, Кыргызстан получил независимость. Сегодня спустя 30 лет, мы наконец-то имеем полное право оглянуться назад и посмотреть, что же мы получили вместе с независимостью? Страна, которая участвовала в создании космических кораблей, сегодня семимильными шагами стремится занять своё место в ряду стран третьего мира.

Как это произошло? Был ли виноват в этом злой волшебник или же все это было заранее прописано в божественных скрижалях?
Естественно нет, наша страна стала «всего лишь» ещё одной жертвой неумолимого капиталистического развития. В этом видео, мы хотим показать что привело нас к такому состоянию и предложить альтернативу сложившейся системе.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR3PoAL_XFhAE3P-C05NvimwU_FDcr-9QwNV7SvY1oPi9GA1Y45J5i5M4sM&v=lS7wC9GaxxQ&feature=youtu.be

Phil O’Brien - A Century of Raymond Williams

Welsh socialist writer Raymond Williams was born 100 years ago today. His work expressed a radical democratic vision of society and maintained that rigorous critique was a tool of liberation.

Williams first read Marx and Engels as a 16-year-old, picking up a copy of The Communist Manifesto from the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo, on his way home to Wales from a League of Nations Youth Conference in Geneva. He would go on to read Capital as a student at Cambridge and embark on a complex engagement with ‘received Marxist criticism’. Challenging the orthodoxies of what he dismissed in his 1958 breakthrough book Culture and Society as formulaic, weak understandings of the base and superstructure model, Williams worked through his frustrated attachments to Marx to develop his own enduring contribution to Marxist cultural theory: cultural materialism. This came in 1977 with Marxism and Literature and was the product of a process dating back to his final years as a student reading English.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/08/a-century-of-raymond-williams

Matt Huber - Lifestyle Environmentalism Won't Win Workers

Matt Huber argues that any successful program to counter climate change must be rooted in a working class constituency.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v_kXw_Qd9LA

Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s (1960–1968): New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood

In the turbulent sixties, the provocative French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma was at its most influential and controversial. The first successes of the New Wave by major Cahiers contributors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol focused international attention on the revitalization of French cinema and its relation to film criticism; and in the early 1960s the journal’s laudatory critiques of popular American movies were attaining the greatest notoriety.

As the lively articles, interviews, and polemical discussions in this volume reveal, the 1960s saw the beginnings of significant new directions in filmmaking and film criticism changes in which the New Wave itself was a major factor. The auteur theory that the journal had championed in the 1950s began to be rethought and revalued. At the same time, along with a reassessment of American film, Cahiers began to embrace new, often oppositional forms of cinema and criticism, culminating in the political and aesthetic radicalism of the ensuing decade.

The selections, translated under the supervision of the British Film Institute, are annotated by Jim Hillier, and context is provided in his general introduction and part introductions. For an understanding of the important changes that took place in cinema and film criticism in the 1960s and beyond, this book is essential reading.