Эшли Доусон - Вымирание: радикальная история

Сегодня в новостях регулярно появляются сообщения об угрозе вымирания, нависшей над такими крупными животными, как носороги и панды, но катастрофа распространяется и на более «скромные» виды — жуков, летучих мышей, бабочек. В настоящее время Земля ежедневно теряет около ста видов животных и растений. В книге «Вымирание: радикальная история» Эшли Доусон утверждает, что нынешнее вымирание видов следствие глобальной атаки капитализма на общее достояние: воздух, воду, растения и животных, которое традиционно считалось наследием всего человечества. Дискуссия о вымирании невозможна в отрыве от критики существующей экономической системы. Чтобы понять вымирание, нам необходимо преодолеть барьеры между наукой, защитой окружающей среды и радикальной политикой. «Вымирание: радикальная история» блестяще справляется с этой задачей.

Эшли Доусон — профессор постколониальных исследований в Городском университете Нью-Йорка (CUNY), работает в области экологической гуманности и пост-колониальной экокритики, автор книг «Народная энергетика» (OR Books, 2020) и «Города на грани» (Verso, 2017). Он также основал Лабораторию климатического действия, занятую изучением и поддержкой низовых климатических инициатив в Нью-Йорке, и участвует в городской кампании за национализацию энергетики Public Power.

David Graeber - Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Yet faced with this prospect, the knee-jerk reaction is often to cling to what exists because they simply can t imagine an alternative that wouldn t be even more oppressive and destructive. The political imagination seems to have reached an impasse. Or has it? In this collection of essays David Graeber explores a wide-ranging set of topics including political strategy, global trade, debt, imagination, violence, aesthetics, alienation, and creativity. Written in the wake of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected places. At a moment when the old assumption about politics and power have been irrefutably broken the only real choice is to begin again: to create a new language, a new common sense, about what people basically are and what it is reasonable for them to expect from the world, and from each other. In this volume Graeber draws from the realms of politics, art, and the imagination to start this conversation and to suggest that that the task might not be nearly so daunting as we d be given to imagine.

Roger Lancaster - Why Socialists Shouldn’t Dismiss Crime

Roger Lancaster discusses the recent spike in violent crime and how the left can take the issue seriously without greasing the wheels for a new moral panic.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zhuYYArKLh4

Marxism and America: New appraisals

In Marxism and America, an accomplished group of scholars reconsiders the relationship of the United States to the theoretical tradition derived from Karl Marx. In brand new essays that cover the period from the nineteenth century, when Marx wrote for American newspapers, to the present, when a millennial socialism has emerged inspired by the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders, the contributors take up topics ranging from memory of the Civil War to feminist debates over sexuality and pornography. Along the way, they clarify the relationship of race and democracy, the promise and perils of the American political tradition and the prospects for class politics today. Marxism and America sheds new light on old questions, helping to explain why socialism has been so difficult to establish in the United States even as it has exerted a notable influence in American thought.

Aashish Mehta, Christopher Newfield - A Socialist Alternative to Human Capital Theory?

HCT, which appealed to conservatives and liberals alike, had become the master paradigm of the “information society” and the “knowledge economy” by the early 1960s. Forerunners of the theory had drawn the interest of some 19th-century economic thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall (who identified what he called “personal capital”), and crucial postwar contributions came from a set of Chicago School economists: Milton Friedman, Theodore W. Schultz, Jacob Mincer, and, most insistently, Gary Becker.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-socialist-alternative-to-human-capital-theory/

Денис Волков - Демобилизация и поляризация: парламентские выборы в зеркале опросов общественного мнения

Избирательная кампания 2021 года проходила в условиях затяжного роста общественного недовольства и снижения рейтингов «Единой России». Интерес россиян к кампании находился на минимальном уровне, а власти делали ставку на привлечение административно зависимого электората и старших поколений. Опросы дают основание полагать, что в случае участия в выборах условная партия Навального могла бы преодолеть пятипроцентный барьер и пройти в парламент. Итоги выборов продемонстрировали существенные изменения в электоратах основных партий: электорат ЕР «постарел», а электорат КПРФ, напротив, оказался гораздо более молодым и образованным. В то время как ЛДПР утрачивает признаки «партии простеста», именно КПРФ стала главным фокусом протестного голосования. Обсуждения в фокус-группах демонстрируют, что идет активный поиск новых лидеров – «народных заступников», своего рода упрощенной и более «народной» версии Алексея Навального. В оценках результатов выборов проявилась возросшая поляризация общественного мнения: по сравнению с прошлыми выборами доля положительных оценок остается постоянной, но доля негативных оценок возросла.

https://liberal.ru/lm-ekspertiza/demobilizacziya-i-polyarizacziya-parlamentskie-vybory-v-zerkale-oprosov-obshhestvennogo-mneniya

Varieties of Marxism

The essays included in this volume are based on papers delivered at the International Symposium on Varieties of Marxism, held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation on June 16-19,1974, and dedicated to the memory of George Lichtheim. When the idea of such a symposium was first raised, the organizers planned to have George Lichtheim as one of the main speakers at the event. In our last and brief meeting in London, I suggested this to him and Lichtheim gave his consent to attend the symposium, though at that time no date was yet fixed. His tragic death a few months later left a gap not only in the program of the symposium but in Marxist studies generally; it was felt that perhaps one way of paying tribute to his contribution to the study of a subject so near to his mind would be to name the symposium in his memory and devote an introductory paper to an attempt at an intellectual portrait of George Lichtheim as an historian of ideas. The volume as published includes all papers delivered at the symposium, with the exception of the papers of J. L. Talmon (Jerusalem) on 'Marxism and Nationalism' and Gajo Petrovic (Zagreb) on 'Yugoslav Marxism'. Appended is also a short obituary written by me on Lichtheim for the journal Political Science published by the American Political Science Association.

Why Messaging Still Matters for Politics

Nando Vila discusses a new Jacobin/YouGov new study on working-class voters’ preferences and explains why progressives need to take political messaging seriously if they want to build and maintain a working-class base.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_d4AZkjD-50

Yair Kaldor - Reframing Financialization: Bringing Class Struggle Back In

The growing size and importance of financial markets, institutions, and activities often labeled as “financialization” is one of the key economic developments of recent decades. The rise of finance coincides with a long period of increasing income inequality across advanced economies, evident in rising GINI coefficients, a decline in the labor share of national incomes, and growing disparities between top corporate managers and the average workers. In recent years economic sociologists and political economists have devoted much-needed attention to the relationship between these developments and provided increasing evidence of a strong statistical association between indicators of financialization and income inequality at different levels of analysis.

Although this emerging literature recognizes that it is labor that ends up paying the price of financialization through stagnant wages and increased job insecurity, workers themselves remain conspicuously silent in existing accounts. Rather than the struggle between labor and capital, these studies focus mainly on the conflict between managers and shareholders or the subordination of production to finance. As a result, the impact of financialization on income inequality appears at most as an unintended consequence or unfortunate side-effect, and it remains unclear where workers were when all of this was taking place.

https://economicsociology.org/2021/11/20/reframing-financialization-bringing-class-struggle-back-in/

Annette Lavers - Roland Barthes, Structuralism and After

This study of one of the major structuralists and the first proponent of semiology will prove indispensable to anyone wanting to understand recent French theory. Lavers gives an overview of French thought during the past forty years  from existentialism and post-war Marxism to structuralism and post-structuralism debates showing the influences on Barthes as well as how his work relates to that of other contemporary theorists. Examinging Barthes's books and essays chronologically, Lavers stresses the continuity of his aims while recording the shifts in his views as he met the challenges of a changing theoretical milieu

Система власти в России сломалась. Как будет устроен новый режим?

Власть в России держится на правилах взаимоотношений внутри элиты. Но за последние полтора года эта система сломалась, уверены ведущие подкаста «Перцев и Гаазе». Элиты стали объединяться вокруг новых негласных лидеров: мэра Москвы Сергея Собянина или главы правительства Михаила Мишустина.
В регионах тоже стали меньше считаться с правилами системы. Например, в Татарстане депутаты Госсовета в конце октября проголосовали против законопроекта, по которому руководители всех российских регионов должны называться одинаково. Чем ответит Кремль? Из каких осколков может сформироваться новый режим?

Содержание:
04:55 Что такое система
06:20 Какие моменты были критическими для системы
08:12 Какие были поводы для слома системы
08:40 Что происходит в Татарстане? И чем опасна эта ситуация
17:01 Как система ломается в Госдуме
21:42 Как изменился федерализм в России
26:18 Как Якутия стала проблемным регионом
29:48 Что требует народ Якутии
33:18 Об идентичности русских в национальных республиках
37:31 Почему система сломалась
41:23 Об отношении Москвы с Грозным
44:01 Что такое фракталы системы
46:46 Группа Мишустина — фрактал?
47:00 Почему Москва Собянина — фрактал?
53:40 Есть ли группа Трутнева?
57:34 Почему Ротенберги и Шойгу не фракталы?
58:27 Как Ковальчуки смогли образовать фрактал?
1:03:11 Перцев мечтает о будущем системы
1:04:57 Почему стали появляться фракталы системы
1:09:19 В России начался транзит власти?
1:11:03 Прогнозы Гаазе о будущем режима
1:15:01 Что почитать о Римской империи

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mX98k1GOOxY

Антон Бархатков - Марксистско-ленинская теория отражения

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByBxWn1jSqg

Donald Cohen, Allen Mikaelian - Destroying Democracy Is Central to the Privatization of Public Goods

The obsession with privatization isn’t just about turning public goods into profit generators for a small handful of wealthy people. It’s also about trampling on democracy.

Today conservatives refer to the New Deal, something created by American workers and the officials they elected in landslide after landslide, as a form of tyranny. They want to drive a wedge between the idea of an active government and its very real links to citizenship, democracy, responsibility, and freedom. But the rise of an active government came about because of expanding awareness of freedom and through ever larger groups of people taking part in democracy

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/democracy-privatization-of-everything-cohen-mikaelian-excerpt/

Eric Hobsbawm - Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays

«This is a highly readable, lucid and well-written book from which any student of contemporary revolutions can derive a great deal of profit» New Statesman


«This is an unusually rewarding book; almost every item bears witness to Professor Hobsbawm's sharp intelligence and felicitous style» Times Literary Supplement