Rethinking Value Chains. Tackling the Challenges of Global Capitalism

Today, production processes have become fragmented with a range of activities divided among firms and workers across borders. These global value chains are being strongly promoted by international organizations, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, but social and political backlash is mounting in a growing variety of forms. This original volume brings together academics and activists from Europe to think creatively about the social and environmental imbalances of global production and how to reform the current economic system.

https://library.oapen.org/viewer/web/viewer.html?file=/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/50190/9781447359180_web.pdf?sequence=14&isAllowed=y

Progressive Neoliberalism isn't the solution. We need a radical, counter-hegemonic and anti-capitalist alliance

A conversation with Nancy Fraser

During the annual meeting of the research network “Alternatives to Capitalism” held at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 2019, Professor Nancy Fraser engaged in a vibrant discussion about one of her latest books, “Capitalism. A Conversation in Critical Theory”, co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi (Polity Press, 2018). Here is a shortened and edited extract of the conversation.

https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=emancipations

Zinzi Clemmons - The Suburban Strategy

A Democratic Party of the sprawl

In our latest issue, Zinzi Clemmons writes about the Biden campaign’s play for the suburbs, and how Pennsylvania’s Democrats abandoned marginalized communities to chase the yuppie vote.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-suburban-strategy-clemmons

Alexander Cockburn - A Colossal Wreck. A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture

Alexander Cockburn was without question one of the most influential journalists of his generation, whose writing stems from the best tradition of Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken and Tom Paine. Colossal Wreck, his final work, finished shortly before his death in July 2012, exemplifies the prodigious literary brio that made Cockburn’s name. Whether ruthlessly exposing Beltway hypocrisy, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed, Cockburn never pulled his punches and always landed a blow where it mattered. In this panoramic work, covering nearly two decades of American culture and politics, he explores subjects as varied as the sex life of Bill Clinton and the best way to cook wild turkey. He stands up for the rights of prisoners on death row and exposes the chicanery of the media and the duplicity of the political elite. As he pursues a serpentine path through the nation, he charts the fortunes of friends, famous relatives, and sworn enemies alike to hilarious effect. This is a thrilling trip through the reefs and shoals of politics and everyday life. Combining a passion for the places, the food and the people he encountered on dozens of crosscountry journeys, Cockburn reports back over seventeen years of tumultuous change among what he affectionately called the “thousand landscapes” of the United States.

A. Favell, M. Tucker-Abramson, M. Davis, A. Wallace - David Graeber and Militant Epistemologies: A Tribute

Scholars, activists and political dreamers around the world were shocked to hear of the sudden death in Venice, in September 2020, of the activist anthropologist David Graeber. From a working class Jewish background in New York, Graeber was effectively blackballed for his politics out of a career in the American Ivy League, taking refuge in London academia at Goldsmiths and then the LSE towards the end of the 2000s. At the same time, deeply involved in and moved by a variety of anti- capitalist and anti-imperialist movements of the early 21st century, he rose to prominence as the most visible thinker of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York in the autumn of 2011. He is credited with its most indelible slogan: ‘We are the 99%’. In the last two decades of his life, he produced a series of essential books in social and economic anthropology: on the anarchist foundations of anthropology, on the praxis of activism based on an ethnography of the global justice movement, on the world history of debt, and on the logic and curse of bureaucracy and meaningless employment in a neoliberal era, each informed by his adherence to a mutualist, necessarily utopian, understanding of the fundaments of human society.

https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=emancipations

Nora De La Cour - Platform Capitalists Are Turning Customers Into Managers in Disguise

From customer review platforms like Yelp and Ziosk to the ratings prompts built into gig-work apps like Uber and DoorDash, consumers are increasingly encouraged to monitor and assess workers. That’s free managerial labor for capitalists.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/platform-capitalists-gig-economy-employee-ratings-reviews-yelp-doordash-uber-lyft-management-discipline-prosumption/

Pierre Charbonnier - Affluence and Freedom: An Environmental History of Political Ideas

In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment.

The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.

Кирилл Рогов - Сверхбольшинство
для сверхпрезидентства

Успех электорального авторитаризма зависит от его способности, ограничив предложение на политическом рынке, представить сложившееся равновесие как отражение фактического спроса

Два Путина в одном рейтинге: динамика и специфика поддержки Знаменитый «рейтинг» (высокий уровень одобрения деятельности на посту президента или премьера) давно уже воспринимается как неотъемлемая часть путинского политического феномена. Аналитики и эксперты так привыкли к аномально высоким значениям рейтинга и его «тефлоновости», то есть нечувствительности к актуальным политическим обстоятельствам, что до событий декабря 2011-го практически не обращали внимания на последовательное его снижение на протяжении предвыборного года. Из социологического факта рейтинг давно уже превратился
в политический институт; в значительной степени он воспринимается как отражение путинской харизмы, некая «вещь в себе», существующая поверх и помимо политической рациональности. Между тем при внимательном рассмотрении обнаруживается, что рейтинг Путина, во-первых, был подвержен сильным колебаниям, а во-вторых, его «качество» на протяжении 2000-х годов существенно менялось.

https://carnegieendowment.org/files/PeC_59_102-125.pdf

Deepa Kumar - Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Twenty Years after 9/11

A critically acclaimed analysis of anti-Muslim racism from the 16th to the 21st centuries, in a fully revised second edition with new chapters. In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the "War on Terror." Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Kumar argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism and that Islamophobia in turn sustains empire.    

This book, now brought up to the end of the Trump presidency, offers a clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take different forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing. What Kumar calls the "matrix of anti-Muslim racism" charts how various institutions the media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university, the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere--produce and circulate Islamophobia. Anti-Muslim racism not only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority countries who are the targets of the endless War on Terror, but for Muslims and those who "look Muslim" in the West as well.

Борис Гройс - Образ Ленина

Борис Гройс анализирует влияние Владимира Ленина и его постепенно сложившегося художественного образа на советскую и мировую культуру и искусство. Для этого он описывает то, как и насколько успешно советские деятели искусства пытались сделать Ленина вечно живым, что общего у революционера и художника, и почему коммунизм ещё вернётся.

https://syg.ma/@sygma/boris-grois-obraz-lienina

John D. Caputo - Foucault and the Critique of Institutions  

The issue of the institution is not addressed systematically anywhere in the literature on Foucault, although it is everywhere to be found in Foucault's writings. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions not only interprets the work of Foucault but also applies it to the question of the institution. Foucault is a master at analyzing the web of social relations ("power") that effectively shape ("normalize") the modern individual. While these social relations are smaller and finer than institutions, institutions are, by Foucault's account, saturated with such relations. This study is the first sustained account to follow up the implications of Foucault's provocative theses about power for the analysis of institutions. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions offers a set of preliminary essays that raise basic questions about the theoretical character of Foucault's thought and then several groups of other essays that go on to take up the practical issues raised by his work. Joseph Margolis and Jitendra Mohanty address one of the most complex problems posed by Foucault's texts: his status as a philosopher. Mark Poster explores the problem of the "self" in Foucault, while Judith Butler focuses her searching investigation of the self on its gendered nature. Joseph Rouse examines the functioning of the natural sciences within the institutional setting of the university and the academic profession, while Chuck Dyke and Mary Schmelzer present vigorous critiques of the normalizing power of the university. Robert Moore and Mark Yount offer original studies of the implications of Foucault's work for the workplace, labor law, and affirmative action. Finally, John Caputo studies Foucault's famous history of madness and raises the question of the possibility of exercising a "healing" and not merely a "normalizing" power in the mental hospital and the church.

Sean Gaston - Jacques Derrida and the Challenge of History

This important new book argues that Jacques Derrida’s work can be treated as the basis for a distinctive historiography. The possibility of seeing Derrida not as a philosopher of language but as a philosopher of history has become more apparent with the recent publication of Derrida’s 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. We now know that the problem of history was at the heart of Derrida’s writing in the mid-1960s, prior to the publication of his best-known work, Of Grammatology (1967). Arguing that Derrida's scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s on historicism, historicity and the problem of history can be treated as the basis for a philosophy of history, Sean Gaston focuses on Derrida's work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and his relentless questioning of context, memory and narrative as the delineation of a deconstructive historiography. The book raises a challenge for historians to think about both deconstruction and historiography, arguing that contemporary philosophy can provide a basis for thinking about history in the name of a deconstructive historiography that is not incompatible with rigorous historical scholarship.

Charles Glass - Syria Burning. A Short History of a Catastrophe

What are the origins of the Syrian crisis, and why did no one do anything to stop it? Since the upsurge of the Arab Spring in 2011, the Syrian civil war has claimed in excess of 200,000 lives, with an estimated 8 million Syrians, more than a third of the country’s population, forced to flee their homes. Militant Sunni groups, such as ISIS, have taken control of large swathes of the nation. The impact of this catastrophe is now being felt on the streets of Europe and the United States. Veteran Middle East expert Charles Glass combines reportage, analysis, and history to provide an accessible overview of the origins and permutations defining the conflict. He also gives a powerful argument for why the West has failed to get to grips with the consequences of the crisis.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi - Twenty Years after Genoa

During the following decades, on several occasions, I came to blame myself for my refusal to enlist in armed struggle in the streets against capital and the state. One such moment of guilt was in July 2001, during the days of Genoa, when the police brutalized a huge demonstration protesting the G8 summit, murdered a student anarchist named Carlo Giuliani, and tortured hundreds of people all so that they could protect Bush, Berlusconi, and Putin, who met to talk power in the luxurious Palazzo Ducale.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/413375/twenty-years-after-genoa/