«We Were Winning»: Reflections On the Alter-Globalization Movement

This is the story of the rise and fall of the alter-globalization movement, and how its legacy shapes radical struggles today.

https://vimeo.com/589748554

Amber Murrey - A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara

Thomas Sankara was one of Africa's most important anti-imperialist leaders of the late 20th Century. His declaration that fundamental socio-political change would require a 'certain amount of madness' drove the Burkinabe Revolution and resurfaced in the country's popular uprising in 2014. This book looks at Sankara's political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today. Analyses of his synthesis of Pan-Africanism and humanist Marxist politics, as well as his approach to gender, development, ecology and decolonisation offer new insights to Sankarist political philosophies. Critical evaluations of the limitations of the revolution examine his relationship with labour unions and other aspects of his leadership style. His legacy is revealed by looking at contemporary activists, artists and politicians who draw inspiration from Sankarist thought in social movement struggles today, from South Africa to Burkina Faso. In the 30th anniversary of his assassination, this book illustrates how Sankara's political praxis continues to provide lessons and hope for decolonisation struggles today.

Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter

Paulo Freire is one of the century's great thinkers on education and the politics of liberation. Known mostly for his literacy campaigns in Latin America and Africa, and for his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his thinking continues to be rediscovered by generations of teachers, scholars, community activists and cultural workers in Europe and North America. While his name is synonymous with the practice of Critical Literacy' and A Pedagogy of Liberation', his work has been appropiated in many diverse fields of discipline and site-based projects of social reform. This volume represents a pathfinding analysis of Freires work and in many cases it offers an extension of his thinking in order to make it more applicable to first world contexts. Peter McLaren and Peter Leonard have brought together a divergent group of scholars widely recognized for their contributions to critical theory and critical pedagogy. Themes addressed include Freier's relation to feminist critique, his philosophical roots and an evaluation of his ideas from postmodernist and postcolonialist perspectives. The collection will be essential reading for anyone interested in the radical sociology of education and the politics of liberation.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger - Politics: The Central Texts

This selection of key texts from Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s three-volume Politics presents an explanatory theory of society and a program for social reconstruction as a radical alternative to Marxism and social democracy.  The explanatory part of the work rejects the search for a lawlike science of society and history, and emphasizes the haphazardness and replaceability of existing social arrangements. Unger shows how such an antideterministic approach can inspire surprising explanations of past and present institutions, with the result that our sense of the possible is both broadened and refined. He then shows how we can rebuild our political, economic, and social institutions, making them more faithful to the experimental nature of democracy. The consequence is to redefine the focus for ideological debate and institutional innovation throughout the world, in developed and developing countries alike. With an introduction that locates Unger’s work in the history of politics and social theory and explores its major themes, this selection will confirm Geoffrey Hawthorn’s description of Politics as “the most powerful social theory of the second half of the twentieth century.”

Bradley Macdonald, Katherine E. Young - Critical Theory, Fascism, and Antifascism: Reflflections from a Damaged Polity

The presidency of Trump has produced an increasing sense that we are possibly moving into a period of fascism in the United States. In this essay, we wish to look closely at conditions which define this current political period by taking seriously Max Horkheimer’s plea to see the necessary relation of capitalism to protofascist potentials and fascist aspirations within our liberal democratic context. Drawing upon the work of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others, we will look more closely at the particular political economic conditions that underlie the development of our one-dimensional society, in which “totalitarian” economic-technical control, rampant consumerism, and growing indebtedness and precarity create ripe conditions for the production of destabilizing political discourses that allow fascism to flourish in language and memes, if not necessarily within concrete statist forms that proudly proclaim the end of democracy. While noting the way in which the culture industry in its repetition of jargon helps to give vitality to antidemocratic practices and protofascist potentials, we propose certain important notes toward a critical theory of antifascism that takes seriously the imbrications of fascism and capitalism duly noted by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, one that is resolutely anti-capitalist while attempting to revive the volatility and potentiality of the “democratic void” in the service of true emancipation.

https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=emancipations

Roberto Esposito - Instituting Thought: Three Paradigms of Political Ontology

This new book by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito addresses the profound crisis of contemporary politics and examines some of the philosophical approaches that have been used to try to understand and go beyond this crisis. Two approaches have been particularly influential – one indebted to the thought of Martin Heidegger, the other indebted to Gilles Deleuze. While opposed in their political thrust and orientation, both approaches remain trapped within the political ontology that has framed our conceptual language for some time.

In order to move beyond this political ontology, Esposito turns to a third approach that he characterizes as ‘instituting thought’. Indebted to the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this third approach recognizes that the road to reconstructing a productive relation between ontology and politics, one that is both realistic and innovative, lies in instituting praxis. Building on this insight, Esposito conceptualizes social being as neither univocal nor plurivocal but as cross-cut by the dual semantics of political conflict. This new book by one of the most original European philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, social and political theory and the humanities generally.

Н. Проценко - Как передовая экономическая статистика помогла Гитлеру разрушить Германию

Рецензия на книгу Адама Туза «Статистика и германское государство»

Первая большая книга историка экономики Адама Туза, прославившегося благодаря бестселлеру «Цена разрушения. Создание и гибель нацистской экономики», посвящена становлению немецкой экономической статистики на вид довольно специальной, но на самом деле гораздо более широкой теме: именно в этой работе автор в общих чертах сформулировал проверенные им впоследствии гипотезы о причинах несостоятельности экономики Третьего рейха. Предвоенная германская статистика была едва ли не самой передовой в мире, однако, поставленная на службу нацистскому государству, она не только оказалась малоэффективной, но и способствовала его бесславному краху.

https://gorky.media/reviews/kak-peredovaya-ekonomicheskaya-statistika-pomogla-gitleru-razrushit-germaniyu/

Ристо Исомяки - Мясо, молоко и климат. Почему нам абсолютно необходимо сократить потребление продуктов животного происхождения

«Мясо, молоко и климат» — первая из книг Исомяки, переведенных на русский язык. В ней автор подробно рассматривает различные неучтенные источники выбросов парниковых газов, связанные с животноводством, и настаивает, что необходимо провести больше научных исследований по каждому из этих источников. Опираясь на труды ученых, автор говорит, что официальные данные об уроне, который наносит промышленное животноводство окружающей среде, в том числе данные ООН, сильно занижены.

Книга предоставлена издательством «Антропоцен»

Сайт издательства: https://anthropocene.press/

Телеграм-канал издательства https://t.me/anthropocene_press

Roberto Finelli - Marx, Spinoza and the New Technologies

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the nature of the ideology that is developing from new
information technologies. The basic thesis is that there is a confusion between the accumulation and mathematical processing of “information” on the one hand and “knowledge” on the other. While knowledge, it is argued, is always based on the world of life, as a set of problems that arise from the materialistic, biological, emotional reproduction of a living human body, information represents the most abstract and formal version of it, which can be accumulated and calculated, but whose true meaning always depends on the meaning and reproductive intention of an organic-human life. Those who think of information as knowledge without a foundation in a materialistic and non-linguistic sense, fall into the ideology of conceiving the world as a massive information process and, consequently, of conceiving the human mind as a calculating machinic structure similar to the way a computer works. In this perspective, the essay, taking up the fundamental intuitions expressed by Gramsci in Americanism and Fordism, analyzes the origin of the term “Technology” in Marx's Capital, its distinction of meaning from the term “Technique” and the likely influence exercised in this field on the Marx’s thought from German Technologie, as a fundamental teaching discipline of the 18th century German Cameralism.

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1197&context=gramsci

Кирилл Рогов - Российский авторитаризм:  типология, механизмы, эволюция

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P4cI0Uk5Pfw

Emmanuel Gerard, Bruce Kuklick - Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba

Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century. When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September, secretly aided by the UN, toppled Lumumba’s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa’s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks. More than fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba’s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American bear responsibility for this crime.

Miguel La Serna - The Shining Path’s Abimael Guzmán Helped Keep Peru in the Past

Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path, has died at the age of 86. With his passing and the rise of a new left-wing government, Peru finally has the chance to move forward.

From 1980 until his 1992 arrest, Guzmán headed a vicious guerrilla campaign to topple the Peruvian state and replace it with a Communist government built in his image. Of course, a guerrilla army fighting for a more just society was nothing new in Latin America in the 1980s. Throughout the region, young leftists took up arms against oppressive dictatorships and US imperialism. What distinguished Shining Path from these other groups was its extreme penchant for violence.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/the-shining-paths-abimael-guzman-helped-keep-peru-in-the-past

Salvatore Cingari - The term “populism” in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

The article opens by underlining that Laclau’s juxtaposition of Gramsci and populism is in part analogous
to the operation carried out some decades ago by Alberto Asor Rosa and Rosario Romeo, although their evaluation was contrary to that of Laclau. We then attempt to demonstrate the limits of these interpretations, through a reconstruction of the national-popular theme in Gramsci: the correct interpretation of this category goes back not to the romantic imaginary of the Volkstum but to a development linked to the most enlightened circles of Russian culture. The national-popular thus alludes to a historically and nationally determined dimension, albeit one capable of universalization. This is confirmation of the non-“populist” nature of Gramsci’s argument. In his view, folklore has to be not idealized, but studied seriously, with the aim of superseding it in a paradigm that fuses together spontaneity and leadership, popular and high culture. As corroboration of this thesis we look at the ways in which the word “populism” is actually used in the Notebooks. The conclusion is that Gramsci, following Lenin’s example, referred “populism” to politico-cultural and literary phenomenologies unable to emancipate the people while, at the same time, he argued that it was necessary to understand and develop in a truly democratic perspective the social needs that populism expresses. This thesis is of great current relevance for those who believe that the social necessities lying behind the current “populist moment” must be understood in order to develop a higher “popular” perspective.

https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1198&context=gramsci

Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the Heart

This book represents some of the last writings by Paulo Freire, who has been acclaimed one of the most important educators of the twentieth century. Pedagogy of the Heart is filled with Freire's reminiscences of his early life and meditations "under my mango tree" These meditations include discussions of solitude and community, the limit of the Right, neoliberals and progressives, lessons from exile, the Lefts and the Right, dialogism, and faith and hope. Many of these subjects will be familiar to those who have read Freire before. For those coming to Freire for the first time, Pedagogy of the Heart will open new doors to the interrelations of education and political struggle. Further enhancing the text are substantive notes by Ana Maria Aranjo Freire.