Prem Shankar Jha - The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War

This groundbreaking book offers an in-depth historical perspective on the rise of capitalism, written by one of the leading scholars of the Global South. Arguing that globalisation is generally poorly understood, Jha offers a new synthesis of political and economic theory that sheds light on the consequences of rapid industrialisation worldwide. Writing from outside the usual Western perspective, the book challenges many of the usual preconceptions about the impact of globalisation. Jha argues that capitalism has developed in four major stages. With a foreword by Eric Hobsbawm, the book provides a detailed history of the rise of capitalism from its early days through the industrial revolution until today. Examining the role of the nation state, this book presents a truly unique perspective on globalisation that will be of interest to all students of economic theory and international relations.

Steven Drobny - The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money

Hedge fund managers who survived and profited through the 2008 financial crisis share their secrets

In light of the colossal losses and amidst the resulting confusion that still lingers, it is time to rethink money management in the broadest of terms. Drastic changes need to be made, and managers who actually made money during 2008 make for a logical starting place. The Invisible Hands provides investors and traders with the latest thinking from some of the best and the most successful players in money management, highlighting the specific risk and return objectives of each, and discussing the evolution of certain styles and beliefs in money management. Contains revealing interviews with top hedge fund managers who survived and prospered through the 2008 financial crisis. Reveals how hedge fund managers are seeking a new paradigm of risk management and profit making opportunities in the post-crisis world. Gives guidance on how traditional investors such as pensions, endowments, foundations and family offices should rethink how they approach asset allocation and portfolio construction. Page by page, the top macro thinkers found in this book reveal their own approaches to markets, risk, and the broader world in which we live, as well as their advice on how investors should be approaching money management in today's uncertain world.

Ian Parker - Lessons from Guattari: trajecories through Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychiatry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Kj9i5CuAr70

Jeremy Scahill - The war party

From Bush to Obama, and Trump to Biden, U.S. Militarism Is the Great Unifier

The bipartisan imperial consensus was so strong that the Democrats continued to increase Trump’s national security powers throughout his presidency.

https://theintercept.com/2021/11/21/america-militarism-foreign-policy-bush-obama-trump-biden/

The Science and Passion of Communism: Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga (1912-1965)

The Science and Passion of Communism presents the battles of the brilliant Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga in the revolutionary cycle of the post-WWI period, through his writings against reformism and war, for Soviet power and internationalism, and then against fascism, on one side, Stalinism and the degeneration of the International, on the other.

Equally important was his sharp critique of triumphant U.S. capitalism in the post-WWII period, and his original re-presentation of Marxist critique of political economy, which includes the capital-nature and capital-species relationships, and the programme of social transformations for the revolution to come.

Without any form of canonization, we can say that Bordiga’s huge workshop is a veritable goldmine, and anyone who decides to enter it will not be disappointed. He will guide you through a series of instructive, energizing and often highly topical excursions into the near and distant past, into the present that he largely foresaw, and into the future that he sketched with devouring passion.

Joana Ramiro - Everyone Should Have the Right to Disconnect From Work

Portugal has banned employers from making nonemergency contact with staff outside of working hours. The “right to disconnect” is a good idea but more protection is needed for precarious workers who aren’t on fixed schedules.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/portugal-right-to-disconnect-law-work-time

Sarah Jaffe - The Politics of Protection

In The Great Recoil, Paolo Gerbaudo argues that the left needs to speak to people’s fears and connect them to hope.

The 2008 financial meltdown and the global economic crisis that followed put thousands of cracks into what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” the idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The neoliberal era appeared to be at its end. But it staggered on; the next decade saw most Western states respond with the typical neoliberal playbook.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic has made it even easier to imagine the end of the world, and the response of those same states has been quite different. Is neoliberalism actually ending? And what comes next? Political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo explores those questions in his new book, The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic. We sat down recently to discuss the book, the class composition of the new politics, whether the left should embrace the nation, and more.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-politics-of-protection-paolo-gerbaudo

Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: essays on his later works

What does Lyotard's thought offer contemporary theory? By focusing on key concepts and themes from his later texts, such as affect, aesthetics, Andre Malraux, St Paul, nihilism, infancy, space and writing, Rereading Jean-Franсois Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works explores the impact and relevance of Lyotard's largely undiscussed late philosophical works for contemporary theoretical debates. In his works produced from 1990 until his death in 1998, Lyotard addresses a number of themes that both revisit and move beyond those from his earlier work. These include: art and aesthetics; affect; ethics and politics; modernity and the subject. Despite designating these texts as part of a 'late period', the chapters do not exclude a wider engagement with Lyotard's thought and often seek to engage in connections, resonances and developments across his many texts. Each chapter within this book places Lyotard as a figure with much to offer current theoretical debates, reasserts Lyotard as an important thinker for developments in social thought, and draws out the many links between his philosophical work and broader social questions. This is the first work in English to focus on Lyotard's later writings and will therefore be a key text to all scholars of his ideas.

Amadeo Bordiga - Dialogue With Stalin

madeo Bordiga (1899-1970) was an Italian Marxist theoretician, who played a major role in the ideological development of the post-1917 Socialist revolution. He is well known as one of the last Comintern members to criticize Stalin to his face and live to tell the tale, most notably referred to as "the gravedigger of the revolution" during a 1926 party conference. In Dialogue with Stalin, Bordiga carefully dissects the economic state of the USSR under Stalin, and lays forward the capitalist nature of the USSR.

Frigga Haug - Thirteen theses of Marxism-Feminism

In the face of the deep crises of capitalism, with all the safety valves unscrewed so that each crisis is merely an intensification of the previous one; with crises increasingly affecting the everyday lives and living conditions making planning more precarious for an increasing number of women left alone with a double burden to carry, I sent out a call to the Marxists among the feminists whom I had known from the movement of the 1970s, from meetings, trips, visiting professorships, to jointly deliberate the situation. To our minds, it was high time also for the Marxist-Feminist forces to meet on the global level, just as capitalism and the crises it produced had become global; in short, it was time for a Marxist-Feminist International.

https://mronline.org/2021/11/15/thirteen-theses-of-marxism-feminism-2/

Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists

Twenty-four economists discuss how they promote egalitarianism, democracy and ecological sanity through research, activism, and policy engagement.

Economics and the Left presents interviews with twenty-four leading progressive economists. All of these practitioners of the “dismal science” are dedicated to both interpreting the world and changing it for the better. The result is a combustible brew of ideas and reflections on major historical events, including the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the global economy.

Interviewed are: Michael Ash, Nelson Henrique Barbosa Filho, James K. Boyce, Ha-Joon Chang, Jane D’Arista, Diane Elson, Gerald Epstein, Nancy Folbre, James K. Galbraith, Teresa Ghilarducci, Jayati Ghosh, Ilene Grabel, Costas Lapavitsas, Zhongjin Li, William Milberg, Léonce Ndikumana, Ozlem Onaran, Robert Pollin, Malcolm Sawyer, Juliet Schor, Anwar Shaikh, William Spriggs, Fiona Tregenna and Thomas Weisskopf.

Amadeo Bordiga - The Fundamentals for a Marxist Orientation: and Other Writings on Marxist Theory

Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) was the founder of the Communist Party of Italy, and was one of the leading voices against the Stalinist hegemony of the 20th century left. Bordiga saw the Soviet Union as "state capitalist," and sought to rebuild a "true" Leninism as the basis for a revolutionary party. The Fundamentals for a Marxist Orientation, and Other Writings on Marxist Theory are the essential pieces of Bordiga's writing that demonstrate his strain of Marxism.

Geoff Mann - In the Long Run We Are All Dead. Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution

A groundbreaking debunking of moderate attempts to resolve financial crises

In the ruins of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, self-proclaimed progressives the world over clamoured to resurrect the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. The crisis seemed to expose the disaster of small-state, free-market liberalization and deregulation. Keynesian political economy, in contrast, could put the state back at the heart of the economy and arm it with the knowledge needed to rescue us. But what it was supposed to rescue us from was not so clear. Was it the end of capitalism or the end of the world? For Keynesianism, the answer is both. Keynesians are not and never have been out to save capitalism, but rather to save civilization from itself. It is political economy, they promise, for the world in which we actually live: a world in which prices are “sticky,” information is “asymmetrical,” and uncertainty inescapable. In this world, things will definitely not take care of themselves in the long run. Poverty is ineradicable, markets fail, and revolutions lead to tyranny. Keynesianism is thus modern liberalism’s most persuasive internal critique, meeting two centuries of crisis with a proposal for capital without capitalism and revolution without revolutionaries. If our current crises have renewed Keynesianism for so many, it is less because the present is worth saving, than because the future seems out of control. In that situation, Keynesianism is a perfect fit: a faith for the faithless.