Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living (Socialist Register 2021)

As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population and the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic.

Gerald Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century

August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century” from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607.

During this prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and allowed England to co-opt not only religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout Europe, thus forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront rambunctious Indigenes and Africans. In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and its revolting spawn that became the United States of America.

Rodrigo Nunes - Pedagogy of the Occupied

How can Paulo Freire, who would have turned 100 this week, help us think the limits that Occupy encountered ten years ago?

Most people remember Freire as someone who had a political lesson to teach about pedagogy. If education is treated as the transmission of a set of contents, he warned, it does not truly emancipate, but rather reproduces a division between those who know and those who do not. Liberation supposes the capacity to think the world afresh, and an education that does not awaken that capacity cannot be called liberating.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5158-pedagogy-of-the-occupied

Michael Heinrich - How to Read Marx's Capital: Commentary & Explanations on the Beginning Chapters

With the recent revival of Karl Marx's theory, a general interest in reading Capital has also increased. But Capital Marx’s foundational nineteenth-century work on political economy is by no means considered an easily understood text. Central concepts, such as abstract labor, the value-form, or the fetishism of commodities, can seem opaque to us as first-time readers, and the prospect of comprehending Marx’s thought can be truly daunting. Until, that is, we pick up Michael Heinrich’s How to Read Marx's Capital.

Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work (Volume I: 1818-1841)

For over a century, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism has been a crucial resource for social movements. Now, recent economic crises have made it imperative for us to comprehend and actualize Marx’s ideas. But without a knowledge of Karl Marx’s life as he lived it, neither Marx nor his works can be fully understood. There are more than twenty-five comprehensive biographies of Marx, but none of them consider his life and work in equal, corresponding measure. This biography, planned for three volumes, aims to include what most biographies have reduced to mere background: the contemporary conflicts, struggles, and disputes that engaged Marx at the time of his writings, alongside his complex relationships with a varied assortment of friends and opponents.

This first volume will deal extensively with Marx’s youth in Trier and his studies in Bonn and Berlin. It will also examine the function of poetry in his intellectual development and his first occupation with Hegelian philosophy and with the so-called “young Hegelians” in his 1841 Dissertation. Already during this period, there were crises as well as breaks in Marx’s intellectual development that prompted Marx to give up projects and re-conceptualize his critical enterprise. This volume is the beginning of an astoundingly dimensional look at Karl Marx a study of a complex life and body of work through the neglected issues, events, and people that helped comprise both. It is destined to become a classic.

Лора Рэм - Блеф о социально ответственном бизнесе

Время от времени возникает одна и та же мысль: надо бы выдрессировать волка таким образом, чтобы он вёл себя, как пастушья собака. Несмотря на повторяющиеся неудачи, надежда всякий раз возрождается. И при этом предлагаются новые, ещё более эффективные методики. Очередной пример тому предложение создать «предприятия с особой миссией», где, как ожидается, должны сойти на нет противоречия в трудовых отношениях. А между акционерами, владельцами бизнеса и наёмными работниками воцарятся социальное единство и мир.

«Вы на наших глазах свергли с пьедестала статую Милтона Фридмана!» 26 июня 2020 года у Эммануэля Фабера появился повод для гордости. Участники общего собрания акционеров Danone более чем 99% голосов высказались за присвоение компании статуса «предприятия с особой миссией». Этот статус был обозначен в 2019 году Законом о поддержке развития и преобразования предприятий. Это первый случай подобного рода для французской компании, чьи акции котируются на бирже. А также обидный щелчок по носу американскому экономисту, почитаемому либеральными бизнесменами.

https://ru.mondediplo.com/2021/07/article812.html

Seth Donnelly - The Lie of Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and Exploitation

This book deconstructs the assumption that global poverty has fallen dramatically, and lays bare the spurious methods of poverty measurement and data on which the dominant prosperity narrative depends. Here is carefully researched documentation that global poverty and the inequalities and misery that flourish within it-remains massive, afflicting the majority of the world's population. Donnelly goes further to analyze just how global poverty, rather than being reduced, is actually reproduced by the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale. Just as the global, environmental catastrophe cannot be resolved within capitalism, rooted as it is in contemporary mechanisms of exploitation and plunder, neither can human poverty be effectively eliminated by neoliberal "advances.

Marta Harnecker, José Bartolome - Planning from Below: A Decentralized Participatory Planning Proposal

In this book, Marta Harnecker, with Spanish economist José Bartolomé, shares some of her wisdom on how communities everywhere can gain empowerment. For, when impoverished people became involved in the planning process, they no longer feel like beggars demanding solutions from the state; they become the creators of their own destiny. Set out in two parts; this book first demonstrates the importance of community participants working outside a hierarchy, to allow as much decentralization as possible. The second part of the book centers on the methodology of this process: the various tasks taken on by participants and how, in planning processes over years, they are carried out.

Bernard D’Mello - India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History

Although the 1967 revolutionary armed peasant uprising in Naxalbari, at the foot of the Indian Himalayas, was brutally crushed, the insurgency gained new life elsewhere in India. In fact, this revolt has turned out to be the world’s longest-running “people’s war,” and Naxalbari has come to stand for the road to revolution in India. What has gone into the making of this protracted Maoist resistance? Bernard D’Mello’s fascinating narrative answers this question by tracing the circumstances that gave rise to India’s “1968”decade of revolutionary humanism and those that led to the triumph of the “1989” era of appallingly unequal growth condoned by Hindutva-nationalism, the Indian variant of Nazism.

Will what remain of India’s continuing “1968” bring twenty-first-century “New Democracy” to the collective agenda? Or will the ongoing regression of “1989” lead the way to full-blown semi-fascism and sub-imperialism? India after Naxalbari is far more than a simple history of the ongoing Naxalite/Maoist resistance; it is a deeply passionate and informed work that not only captures the essence of modern Indian history but also tries to comprehend the present in the context of that history  so that the oppressed can exercise their power to influence its shape and outcome.

Когда в России отключат YouTube? И почему теперь враги и коммунисты, и либералы

28 сентября YouTube заблокировал канал немецкой редакции Russia Today. После этого главный редактор RT Маргарита Симоньян призвала запретить в России Deutsche Welle и другие немецкие СМИ, а также применить санкции к самому видеохостингу. Роскомнадзор пригрозил YouTube блокировкой или крупными штрафами, если ограничения не будут сняты. Также среди значимых политических событий недели: арест преподавателя Шанинки Б. Кагарлицкого и административные меры против участников акции протеста КПРФ, федеральный розыск бывшей замминистра просвещения М. Раковой, а также признание «иностранными агентами» 22 человек лично. YouTube реально могут заблокировать? Почему Кремлю не нравятся ни коммунисты, ни либералы? Почему ужесточились преследования? Кто теперь может стать «иноагентом»? Обсуждаем в новом эпизоде политического шоу «Перцев и Гаазе».

Содержание:
00:47 Что обсуждают Перцев и Гаазе сегодня
09:40 Реклама
10:20 Путин недоволен результатами выборов?
14:29 Ютьюб реально заблокируют?
19:41 Что Путин знает о ютьюбе
25:47 В чем проблема с блокировкой ютьюба в России
32:45 О чем нельзя говорить с иностранцами
35:27 Кто в России покровитель либералов?
37:01 Что означают аресты топ-менеджеров Сбербанка
40:52 Преследования либерального лагеря продолжатся?
45:32 Как давят на коммунистов после выборов
51:31 О независимых и сильных кандидатах в КПРФ
56:59 Кого в России теперь могут признать «иноагентом»?
1:00:00 Выросли ли личные риски для ведущих подкаста?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sI9cn7jmtFA

Ursula Huws - Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age

For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It’s a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.

В завершающем выпуске цикла роликов, посвященных антикоммунистической книге сэра Карла Раймунда Поппера «Открытое общество и его враги», к.ф.н. Антон Бархатков расскажет о критике Поппером идей главного теоретика историцизма – великого и ужасного Карла Маркса.

https://youtu.be/y7K3aCpDhak