Аарон Бенанав - Мир без работы?

Современный дискурс автоматизации является ответом на реальную глобальную тенденцию: в мире слишком мало рабочих мест для слишком большого количества людей. Но он игнорирует настоящие источники этой тенденции: деиндустриализацию, снижение инвестиций и сверхбогатые элиты, стоящие на пути постдефицитного общества.

Интернет, смартфоны и социальные сети изменили то, как мы взаимодействуем друг с другом и с миром вокруг нас. Что бы произошло, если бы эти цифровые технологии сошли с экрана и еще больше интегрировались в физический мир?

https://syg.ma/@mikhail-fedorchenko/aaron-bienanav-mir-biez-raboty

Michel-Rolph Trouillot - Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism

In the euphoria that followed the departure of Haiti's hated dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, most Haitian and foreign analysts treated the regimes of the two Duvaliers, father and son, as a historical nightmare created by the malevolent minds of the leaders and their supporters. Yet the crisis, economic and political, that faces this small Caribbean nation did not begin with the dictatorship, and is far from being solved, despite its departure from the scene. In this fascinating study, Haitian-born Michel-Rolph Trouillot examines the mechanisms through which the Duvaliers ruthlessly won and then held onto power for twenty-nine years. Trouillot's theoretical discussion focuses on the contradictory nature of the peripheral state, analyzing its relative autonomy as a manifestation of the growing disjuncture between state and nation. He discusses in detail two key characteristics of such regimes: the need for a rhetoric of "national unity" coupled with unbridled violence. At the same time, he traces the current crisis from its roots in the nineteenth-century marginalization of the peasantry through the U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934 and into the present. He ends with a discussion of the post-Duvalier period, which, far from seeing the restoration of civilian-led democracy, has been a period of increasing violence and economic decline.

Александр Никулин - Народники и власть: террор и воля

Рецензия: Михаил Гефтер. Антология народничества (СПб.: Нестор-История, 2020).

В целом Антология представляет собой сложную и обширную композицию из более чем двухсот фрагментов самых разнообразных исторических документов: писем и дневников, программ и манифестов, исповедей и завещаний, фельетонов и хроник, протоколов и заявлений, воспоминаний и размышлений о становлении и развитии идеологии народничества через реконструкцию драмы борьбы народников-революционеров с царской властью, воплотившейся в цепи террористических устрашений с обеих сторон, завершившихся убийством царя Александра II.
Попытаемся дать краткий реферативный обзор структуры и содержания Антологии, состоящей из пролога, девяти глав и эпилога.

https://sociologica.hse.ru/data/2021/09/29/1474797284/SocOboz_20_3_339-348_Nikulin.pdf

Michael Heinrich - An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital

Heinrich's modern interpretation of Capital is now available to English-speaking readers for the first time. It has gone through nine editions in Germany, is the standard work for Marxist study groups, and is used widely in German universities. The author systematically covers all three volumes of Capital and explains all the basic aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism in a way that is clear and concise. He provides background information on the intellectual and political milieu in which Marx worked, and looks at crucial issues beyond the scope of Capital, such as class struggle, the relationship between capital and the state, accusations of historical determinism, and Marx's understanding of communism. Uniquely, Heinrich emphasizes the monetary character of Marx's work, in addition to the traditional emphasis on the labor theory of value, this highlighting the relevance of Capital to the age of financial explosions and implosions.

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark - The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

in the 19th century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism’s plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth. Instead we must maintain it for future generations and the innumerable, diverse inhabitants of the planet as part of a process of sustainable human development.

Анна Ямпольская - Жан-Люк Нанси, мыслитель сообщества

Французский философ Жан-Люк Нанси скончался 23 августа 2021 года в возрасте 81 года. Один из наиболее влиятельных последователей Деррида, Нанси остался в истории в первую очередь как мыслитель сообщества.

Нанси родился в 1940 году в Бордо, в семье военного инженера. Детство он провел в Баден-Бадене, но позже семья вернулась во Францию, в Бержерак. Нанси рос в католической среде, участвовал в молодежных христианских организациях, и хотя позже отошел от католичества, он навсегда остался чуток к вопросам религии и теологии. Выпускник Сорбонны, Нанси в 1964 году уезжает в Страсбург, где за исключением краткого периода преподавания в Кольмаре остается до конца жизни. В Страсбурге Нанси встречает Филиппа Лаку-Лабарта, с которым у него возникает плодотворное сотрудничество. Хотя его научным руководителем был Поль Рикёр (диссертация по Канту, 1973), а впоследствии Жерар Гранель (вторая диссертация, по Хайдеггеру, 1987), Нанси обычно рассматривают как ученика и наиболее яркого последователя Жака Деррида, сумевшего применить его идеи к области социальной философии и политики. Славу Нанси принесла книга «Непроизводимое сообщество», вышедшая в 1990 году. Следующим важным этапом стала книга «Бытие единичное множественное» (1996), в которой Нанси, переосмысляя хайдеггеровское понятие «бытия-с» (Mitsein), предлагает свой проект социальной онтологии. В этих двух сравнительно небольших работах Нанси сформулировал тезисы о теории сообщества, которые с тех пор стали неотъемлемой частью современного интеллектуального ландшафта.

https://sociologica.hse.ru/data/2021/09/29/1474797140/SocOboz_20_3_349-352_Yampolskaya.pdf

Antonio Santucci - Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.” The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.

Amazon’s Last Mile

Amazon, the multinational corporation from Seattle, is on its way to becoming a digital superpower. One of the strategic areas in which Amazon is aggressively increasing its market power is logistics. It has entered the ocean freight business and operates its own cargo airline, which is now the world’s fourth-largest. The coronavirus crisis, which for Amazon was not a crisis but rather the biggest shopping boom of all time, has seen the retail colossus gain ground at an accelerated rate.

Since around 2017, the corporation has been developing its own logistics system for the “last mile”, the final step of the delivery process from a delivery station to the customer. Huge “fulfilment centres” are supplemented by an ever-more densely woven network of sorting centres and delivery stations. Amazon is not just elbowing traditional parcel delivery services out of the market with these developments it is actively driving job insecurity in an industry that is already under huge competitive pressure. Since the beginning, “Amazon Logistics” has used a network of dependent subcontractors for its operation. In addition, the company is experimenting with a gig workforce model called “Amazon Flex”.

Amazon did not invent the subcontractor system in parcel delivery logistics. But it combines the commercial advantages of this kind of outsourcing with digital monitoring, algorithmic control, and artificial intelligence in a way that is only possible for a gigantic tech corporation.

This model creates a structural situation of increased competition, where subcontractors inevitably try to pass on the pressure to their employees. A recent case study from Germany shows how this leads to systematic violations of labour rights: excessive working hours, a lowering of the legal minimum wage, shifting liability risks onto employees, and so on.

https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/images/EnglishWS/AmazonLastMile/RLS_Amazons_last_mile_DIN-A-4_20211007_Print.pdf

Marc Becker - Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory

José Carlos Mariátegui, the Peruvian political theorist of the 1920s, was instrumental in developing an indigenous Latin American revolutionary Marxist theory. He rejected a rigid, orthodox interpretation of Marxism and applied his own creative elements, which he believed could move a society to revolutionary action without the society having to depend upon more traditional economic factors. His interpretation of Peruvian history had a profound effect upon subsequent social movements throughout Latin America.

This volume reviews the essential elements of Mariátegui's thought and important influences on his intellectual development. It demonstrates the role he played in defining a Latin american identity, the nature of his intellectual contribution to the development of indigenous revolutionary movements in Latin America, and the inflluence he had on successful revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua. An understanding of Mariátegui's thought is fundamental to understanding the nature of revolutionary changes in Latin America.

Leilo Basso - A Heterodox Marxist and His Century: Lelio Basso Selected Writings

Lelio Basso was a major thinker and political leader of Italian socialism; his writings translated for the first time provide highly original contributions on anti-fascist struggles, and a rethinking of Marxism centred on Rosa Luxemburg, Italys radical politics and internationalism.

John Marciano - The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

On May 25, 2012, President Obama announced that the United States would spend the next thirteen years through November 11, 2025 – commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War, and the American soldiers, “more than 58,000 patriots,” who died in Vietnam. The fact that at least 2.1 million Vietnamese soldiers, parents, grandparents, children also died in that war will be largely unknown and entirely uncommemorated. And U.S. history barely stops to record the millions of Vietnamese who lived on after being displaced, tortured, maimed, raped, or born with birth defects, the result of devastating chemicals wreaked on the land by the U.S. military. The reason for this appalling disconnect of consciousness lies in an unremitting public relations campaign waged by top American politicians, military leaders, business people, and scholars who have spent the last sixty years justifying the U.S. presence in Vietnam. It is a campaign of patriotic conceit superbly chronicled by John Marciano in The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?

A devastating follow-up to Marciano’s 1979 classic Teaching the Vietnam War (written with William L. Griffen), Marciano’s book seeks not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the “Noble Cause principle,” the notion that America is “chosen by God” to bring democracy to the world. Marciano writes of the Noble Cause being invoked unsparingly by presidents from Jimmy Carter, in his observation that, regarding Vietnam, “the destruction was mutual,” to Barack Obama, who continues the flow of romantic media propaganda: “The United States of America will remain the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known”

The result is critical writing and teaching at its best. This book will find a home in classrooms where teachers seek to do more than repeat the trite glorifications of U.S. empire. It will provide students everywhere with insights that can prepare them to change the world.

William K. Tabb - The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis

Classic study of the fiscal crisis that gripped New York City and much of urban America in the 1970s.