Behind the News with Doug Henwood

Nancy MacLean, author of this paper, on how Milton Friedman’s war on public education fit nicely with Southern massive resistance to desegregation

Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist, on how we can live with rising seas and heavier rains

Cultural Marxism, Debunked

Professors Jeremy Cohan and Benjamin Serby explain the bizarre right-wing preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" and why conservatives lose their minds over the Frankfurt School.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hN6wSwQ7qUU

Коррупция в России. Перцев и Гаазе обсуждают, как она изменилась за 20 лет

3 октября журналисты опубликовали новые сведения об офшорах политиков и знаменитостей. «Архив Пандоры» включает в себя 12 миллионов документов. Их изучали больше 600 журналистов из 117 стран мира. Среди россиян упоминаются: гендиректор «Первого канала» Константин Эрнст, глава администрации президента Антон Вайно, семья руководителя «Ростеха» Сергея Чемезова, а также Светлана Кривоногих — знакомая президента Владимира Путина.
У Кривоногих нашли квартиру в Монако за 3,6 миллиона евро, а у тещи Чемезова Людмилы Рукавишниковой — яхту и виллу в Испании на 22 миллиарда рублей. Пресс-секретарь президента РФ Дмитрий Песков традиционно заявил, что в Кремле «не увидели никаких скрытых богатств ближайшего окружения Путина». Данные о коррупции среди российской элиты, похоже, никого уже не удивляют. Можно ли все-таки искоренить коррупцию в России? Обсуждают ведущие политического подкаста «Перцев и Гаазе».

Содержание:
00:46 Поговорим о коррупции в России
03:54 Что нового мы узнали из «Архива Пандоры»
04:43 Это происки западных спецслужб?
06:44 О чем этот выпуск
10:21 Коррупция бывает полезной?
13:17 Как власть «победила» коррупцию
16:45 Взяточничество в России искоренили?
23:55 Почему в России плохо строят мосты
30:23 Как коррупцию используют для решения социальных проблем
38:33 Как разбогатели чиновники
42:21 Почему Сечин играет честнее, чем Чемезов
46:45 «Самый шоколад с точки зрения коррупции»
52:44 Почему сейчас не лучшее время для коррупционных схем
59:10 Набрал денег, а куда их деть?
1:07:45 Как новой власти решать проблему коррупции
01:09:04 Итоги выпуска

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bqcf2gaIwIg

Cal Winslow - Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919

On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this with without police and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. Chances are you’ve never heard of it. In Radical Seattle, Cal Winslow explains why. Winslow describes how Seattle’s General Strike was actually the high point in a long process of early twentieth century socialist and working-class organization, when everyday people built a viable political infrastructure that seemed, to governments and corporate bosses, radical even “Bolshevik.” Drawing from original research, Winslow depicts a process that, in struggle, fused the celebrated itinerants of the West with the workers of a modern industrial city. But this book is not only an account of the heady days of February 1919; it is also about the making of a class capable of launching one of America’s most gripping strikes what E.P. Thompson once referred to as "the long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the common people." Reading this book might increase the chance that something like this could happen again possibly in the place where you live.

Nancy MacLean - How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education

This paper traces the origins of today’s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the “school choice” enterprise for libertarians was not then and is not now to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources. Based on extensive original archival research, this paper shows how Friedman’s case for vouchers to promote “educational freedom” buttressed the case of Southern advocates of the policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. His approach supported by many other Mont Pelerin Society members and leading libertarians of the day taught white supremacists a more sophisticated, and for more than a decade, court-proof way to preserve Jim Crow. All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.

Интересуетесь международными отношениями и глобальными трендами?

👉Тогда Вас заинтересует канал аналитического портала International Studies @interstudies, где ежедневно публикуются: аналитические материалы, статьи, книги и подборки новостей.

Публикации канала будут полезны всем интересующимся международными отношениями, особенно молодым ученым, которые найдут здесь множество качественных материалов для будущих исследований.

Loren Balhorn - Die Linke’s Defeat Is a Dire Warning for the Left

In September's German election, the socialist Die Linke party slumped to under 5 percent support. If the Left is to recover, it needs to show that it's still on the side of disenfranchised working-class voters.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/die-linke-germany-elections-labor-populism-antiestablishment/

Dylan Riley - Notes on the Curriculum

Sociology is apparently in the process of de-colonizing itself. A strong point of the project is the recognition that sociology emerged during the age of imperialism and that this gave the field a cosmopolitan and comparative ambition lost after the Parsonian synthesis which was both grand, and a bit boring. The weakness of the decolonizers lies in their deadening approach to ideas. For the enthusiasts of this project, such as the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell for example, the elevation of Durkheim and Weber (then joined at a later period by Marx) to the status of classics is the result of translations, edited volumes and curricula. In the past, per Connell, there were different figures such as Spencer, Comte and Martineau. In the future there might be new ones. Undoubtedly there is considerable truth in all this, but what the decolonizers never get around to is the analysis of ideas. Why is this? It is connected to a cluster of epistemological and ontological assumptions shared across sociology from the most ardent exponents of post-colonialism to hardcore positivists. It could be called the dogma of the shapeless flux. Its picture of intellectual history is something like this. There exists a massive body of texts of more or less equal quality. Some of these texts are arbitrarily elevated to the status of must-reads because their study serves some latent function for sociology such as reinforcing professional pride and presumably also the interests of the white middle-class men who embody it. Occasionally the time comes to shake up the texts; this is an especially urgent task in the current period because of the need to diversify in demographic terms the voices in the curriculum. Without falling into a lazy traditionalism, it should be obvious that this set of protocols for understanding the history of sociology is guaranteed to produce nothing but cynicism, both concerning the previous canon, and concerning whatever new candidates are forthcoming. What it forgets is that the first step in an analysis is the critique and reconstruction of the ideas. Whatever one might say about Parson’s Structure of Social Action at least he got this starting point right. The decolonizers, in contrast, are producing nothing more than more or less extensive annotated bibliographies.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/notes-on-the-curriculum

Shaun Richman - Tell the Bosses We're Coming

Lengthening hours, lessening pay, no parental leave, scant job security. Never have so many workers needed so much support. Yet the very labor unions that could garner us protections and help us speak up for ourselves are growing weaker every day. In an age of rampant inequality, of increasing social protest and strikes and when a majority of workers say they want to be union members why does union density continue to decline? Shaun Richman offers some answers in his book, Tell the Bosses We're Coming. It's time to bring unions back from the edge of institutional annihilation, says Richman. But that is no simple proposition. Richman explains how important it is that this book is published now, because the next few years offer a rare opportunity to undo the great damage wrought on labor by decades of corporate union-busting, if only union activists raise our ambitions. Based on deft historical research and legal analysis, as well as his own

Paul Patton - Deleuzian concepts: philosophy, colonization, politics

These essays provide important interpretations and analyze critical developments of the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. They situate his thought in the contemporary intellectual landscape by comparing him with contemporaries such as Derrida, Rorty, and Rawls and show how elements of his philosophy may be usefully applied to key contemporary issues including colonization and decolonization, the nature of liberal democracy, and the concepts and critical utopian aspirations of political philosophy. Patton discusses Deleuze's notion of philosophy as the creation of concepts and shows how this may be helpful in understanding the nature of political concepts such as rights, justice, and democracy. Rather than merely commenting on or explaining Deleuze's thought, Patton offers a series of attempts to think with Deleuzian concepts in relation to other philosophers and other problems.

Cam Scott - Below the Barricades: On Infrastructure, Self-Determination, and Defense

From the earliest incursions of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the large-scale resource extractive developments of the present day, the history of Canada is fully commensurate with Indigenous struggle against capital accumulation and colonial dispossession a heist, wrote Secwépemc leader Arthur Manuel, amounting to “in simple acreage, the biggest land theft in the history of mankind.”

This sweeping reterritorialization was not accomplished at once, but by a range of violent and coercive means over centuries, culminating in the creation of the Canadian state; which at the end of the nineteenth century marked a significant advancement in the imperialist partition of the globe, opening almost ten million square kilometres of land to settlement and speculation. 

https://viewpointmag.com/2021/10/11/below-the-barricades-on-infrastructure-self-determination-and-defense/

Брюно Одан - Квартиросъёмщики против акул недвижимости

Референдум, которого добились жители Берлина, с предложением национализировать самые крупные компании недвижимости проводился одновременно с выборами в Бундестаг. Более миллиона человек проголосовали за экспроприацию жилья, скупленного инвестиционным фондом BlackRock и другими биржевыми гигантами. Остаётся ждать, прислушается ли новое правительство ко мнению берлинцев. Министр жилищного строительства Берлина Себастьян Шеель объясняет, что происходит в этом секторе экономики.

https://humanite-russie.ru/2021/10/12/kvartirosyomschiki-protiv-akul-nedvizhimosti/

Jean-Luc Mélenchon - It’s Time to End the Dictatorship of Short-Termism

Writing in Jacobin, French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon argues that we need long-term planning, not market-based incentives, to fight climate change.

Let me reassure my readers: here I’m not going to enter into a meditation on the nature of time, after what I already wrote on that from a political standpoint in my book L’Ère du peuple. I will only cite the general idea: time is a property of the social universe in which it unfolds. There are, then, dominated times and dominant times. In this way of thinking, ecological planning is a reconquering of long time, which we wrest from the dictatorship of short-termism that governs the capitalist society of our present era. I spoke of “collective ownership of long time” through ecological planning. I set this in counter-position to the private ownership of time that exists when the short-termist rhythms of the market and of “just-in-time” market society impose themselves on each of us. Having said that much, I’ll now turn to the challenges that this way of seeing things is itself facing in the current era of uncertainty.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/jean-luc-melenchon-france-insoumise-political-philosophy-climate-change-short-termism-long-time/

Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin - The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800

Two distinguished historians examine the impact of the world's most influential information technology.

The emergence of the book was not merely an event of world historical importance, but the dawn of modernity. In this much praised work, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, with the study of consciousness itself to root the development of printing in the changing social relations and ideological struggles of Western Europe. Now that the printed page may become a thing of the past, The Coming of the Book is more pertinent than ever.