Мари Тулгоа - Откуда берутся антипрививочники

Многие французы становятся антипрививочкниками из-за рефлекса недоверия к властям. Таково мнение врача, члена профсоюза Андре Гримальди. Ведь правительство нередко озвучивает антинаучные идеи. Введение санитарных паспортов и всеобщая вакцинация, по мнению специалиста, правильные меры. Но увольнения и отказ в медицинском обслуживании на основании отсутствия прививки – произвол со стороны власти.

https://humanite-russie.ru/2021/08/31/otkuda-berutsya-antiprivivochniki/

Georg Lukács - The Destruction of Reason

Lukács shows how irrationalism was born in German feudal absolutism’s reaction to the French revolution of 1789. He studies the “irrationalist tradition” within philosophy stemming up to Hitler in the recent history of ideas. A major study of Friedrich Schelling, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and, in particular, Friedrich Nietzsche. A brilliant intellectual history of the philosophical positions and movements that in a way fermented to produce National Socialism. As a Marxist work, it doesn’t make the mistake of arguing that earlier intellectual trends inevitably culminated in Nazism but instead only claims that no philosophy is “innocent.” As he writes: “Thus the subject-matter which now presents itself to us is Germany’s path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy. That is to say, we mean to show how this concrete path is reflected in philosophy, and how philosophical formulations, as an intellectual mirroring of Germany’s concrete development towards Hitler, helped to speed up the process. That we are therefore confining ourselves to portraying the most abstract part of this development by no means implies an over-estimation of philosophy’s importance in the turbulent totality of concrete developments. But we believe it is not superfluous to add that to underestimate the philosophical driving forces would be at least as dangerous and as little in accordance with reality.”

Friedrich Pollock & Theodor W. Adorno - Group Experiment and Other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany

Beginning in 1949, Theodor W. Adorno and other members of the reconstituted Frankfurt Institute for Social Research undertook a massive empirical study of German opinion about the legacies of the Nazi past, applying and modifying techniques they had learned during their U.S. exile.

They published their results in 1955 as a research monograph, Group Experiment, edited by Friedrich Pollock. The study’s substantive results are published here for the first time in English as Guilt and Defense, a psychoanalytically informed analysis of the rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms with which post-war Germans most often denied responsibility for the Nazi past. In their editorial introduction, Jeffrey Olick and Andrew Perrin show how Adorno’’s famous 1959 essay The Meaning of Working Through the Past is comprehensible only as a conclusion to his long-standing research and as a reaction to the debate it spurred; their volume also includes a critique by the psychologist Peter R. Hoffstäter as well as Adorno’’s rejoinder.

This previously little-known debate provides important new perspectives on post-war German political culture, on the dynamics of collective memory, and on Adorno’s intellectual legacies, which have contributed more to empirical social research than has been acknowledged. A companion volume, Group Experiment, will present the first book-length English translation of the Frankfurt Group’s conceptual, methodological, and theoretical innovations in public opinion research.

Peter Hallward - Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential French philosophers of the last century. This book aims to make sense of his fundamental project in the clearest possible terms, by engaging with the central idea that informs virtually all of his work: the equation of being and creativity. It explores the various ways in which, in order to affirm an unlimited creative power, Deleuze proceeds to dissolve whatever might restrict or mediate its expression, including the organisms, objects, representations, identities, and relations that this power generates along the way. Rather than a theorist of material complexity or relational difference, Out of this World argues that Deleuze is better read as a spiritual and extra-worldly philosopher. His philosophy leaves little room for processes of social or historical transformation, and still less for political relations of conflict or solidarity. Michel Foucault famously suggested that ‘the 20th century would be known as Deleuzian’; this sympathetic but uncompromising new critique suggests that our Deleuzian century may soon be coming to a close.

Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward - Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:
- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America
- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO
- The Southern Civil Rights Movement
-The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization

The Rise of the UniverCity

An interview with Davarian L. Baldwin

As they come to resemble corporations, universities increasingly wield the kind of power and influence that were hallmarks of ruthless employers in isolated company towns. Historian Davarian Baldwin calls this ominous trend the “rise of the UniverCity.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/university-cities-urban-development-gentrification

Eugene Lunn - Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno

“At a time when modernism and Marxism are both under attack as outmoded, Eugene Lunn’s rich and detailed study of the years of their most creative interaction reminds us of the still potent energies unleashed by each. We could ask for no more reliable and judicious guide through the complicated debates generated by the struggle to define a viable Marxist aesthetics in the era of the avant-garde. Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno, four masters of the tradition of Marxist cultural theory and practice, are themselves well-served by a contemporary master of intellectual history.” (Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley)

“Unerringly intelligent and judicious, the book provides economical accounts of the careers and theories of its chosen critics, places them in historical context, and prefaces them with brief but cogent surveys of Marx’s own fragmentary aesthetics and of artistic modernism. . . . Marxism and Modernism offers a splendidly well researched and amenable study of the most fertile developments in Marxist aesthetics.” (Terry Eagleton, Journal of Modern History)

К.ф.н. Антон Бархатков начинает цикл роликов, посвященный  одной из важнейших антикоммунистических книг ХХ века – «Открытое общество и его враги» Карла Раймунда Поппера.

В первом выпуске речь пойдет о том, что Поппер понимает под «закрытым» и «открытым обществом», откуда берутся тоталитарные режимы, и какие советы давал австрийский философ молодому российскому государству, чтобы встать на путь развития западных демократий.

https://youtu.be/RvtTApmppOc

Wolfgang Streeck - Will it Be Enough?

Will ‘Europe’, or the ‘European project’ as embodied by the EU, survive Merkel? In the Realpolitik of Brussels, this translates into whether Germany will continue to fulfil its obligations as the EU’s hidden hegemon after her departure, meaning first of all whether it will continue to pay. This it can do in a variety of ways, many of which are designed to be maximally obscure: by letting its net contributions to the EU budget rise; by allowing the European Central Bank to engage sub rosa in state financing, in contravention of the Treaties; by agreeing to underwrite the Corona ‘recovery fund’, also outside the Treaties; by allowing that debt to be serviced by more debt in the future, letting the €750 billion, sold as a one-of-a-kind emergency measure, turn into a ‘historic breakthrough’ toward a ‘supranational fiscal capacity’ à la française – while, in order to keep interest rates low, intimating to the markets that if the worst came to the worst, Germany would be on-hand to offer ‘European solidarity’.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/will-it-be-enough

Gregory Laynor - Stanley Aronowitz Made Time for Anyone Who Wanted to Think Beyond Capitalism

Stanley Aronowitz, who died last month at age 88, brought people together for critical, imaginative thinking not limited to narrow topics or narrow approaches. You didn’t have to be credentialed or famous to get his attention you just had to want a better world.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/stanley-aronowitz-anti-capitalism-jefferson-school-union-education-obituary

Theodor W. Adorno - In Search of Wagner

Richard Wagner’s works are among the most controversial in the history of European music because of their powerful aesthetic qualities and, in wider political terms, because of their eventual assimilation into the official culture of the Third Reich. This concise synoptic account by the most brilliant exponent of Frankfurt School Marxism subtly interweaves these artistic and ideological qualities. It provides deft musicological analyses of Wagner’s scores and of his compositional techniques, orchestration and staging methods, quoting copiously from the music dramas themselves. At the same time it offers incisive reflections on Wagner’s social character and the ideological impulses of his artistic activity.

Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe’s most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner’s oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword by Slavoj Žižek situates Adorno’s reflections within present debates over Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the moral status of his work, proving why this book remains one of the most important character studies of the twentieth century.

Branka Magas - The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-Up 1980-1992

The year 1992, scheduled to be a milestone on the road to European unity, saw Sarajevo and other European cities bombarded slowly to pieces and their inhabitants starved before the TV eyes of the world. It saw two million Bosnian Muslims threatened with Europe’s first genocide since the Second World War; most of them already driven from their homes by massacre, rape and terror. It saw Bosnia’s legal, multi-ethnic government treated as a mere “warring party” and pressed to surrender by Western governments eager for peace at any price. And it also saw a liberal and left opinion in the West unable to offer any explanation for the continuing war beyond variations on the racist notion of an innate propensity for violence among the peoples of Yugoslavia, or indiscriminate lamentations about the evils of nationalism.

Combining political analysis, reportage, polemic and personal reflection, this book provides the first inside account and analysis of the tragic path leading to Yugoslavia’s break-up. Against the background of events as they occurred since Tito’s death in 1980, it tracks the process whereby an equitable settlement between the country’s constituent nations was destroyed by an increasingly virulent Great-Serb nationalism, bent on recentralizing the country under its own hegemony. The book is written not by a passive spectator but by a participant with a firm grasp of Yugoslavia’s history, which accounts for the breadth of its content. As the decade it covers draws to a close, Branka Magaš’s initial cautious optimism changes to a growing intimation of impending tragedy, and finally to outrage at the slaughter visited upon Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbian army, with the tolerance or complicity of Western chancelleries. The Destruction of Yugoslavia represents a unique documentary testimony to Yugoslavia’s regression towards disintegration, war, and the horrors of “ethnic cleansing;” a testimony which is frighteningly accurate.