Малинкин А. Н. К истории отечественной социологии 1920 1930-х гг.: советский марксизм vs «социология знания»

В 1920-е годы марксизм, став государственной идеологией Советской России, вышел на лидирующие позиции среди политических идеологий Европы по своему влиянию на умы и сердца людей. Учение К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса получило различные интерпретации, среди которых в академической среде наибольшее признание снискала себе «социология знания» в трактовке М. Шелера и К. Мангейма. Она возникла в Германии в середине 1920-х гг. как результат критики марксистской «теории идеологии», «экономистской» ограниченности материалистического видения человека, истории, общества. В СССР «социология знания» была истолкована как самая рафинированная попытка преодоления марксизма. В статье подвергаются сравнительному и критическому анализу сущностные характеристики марксизма и «социологии знания» в трактовке К. Мангейма. Анализируется первая реакция советских марксистов-социологов на «социологию знания». В свете этой реакции она предстала как «социал-фашизм». Рассматриваются особенности бытования учения К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса в СССР в 1920–1930-е гг. «Исторический материализм» квалифицируется как социологическая методология подозрения, а практики ее применения большевиками — как формы дискриминации и преследований в обществе по социально-классовой и социально-групповой принадлежности.

https://www.jour.fnisc.ru/index.php/socjour/article/view/8428/8265

К.ф.н. Антон Бархатков рассказывает об идеях японской неомарксистской школы Уно Кодзо (1897-1977), из которой вышли такие известные современные экономисты, как Томас Сэкинэ, Макото Ито и Роберт Олбриттон.

https://youtu.be/onHNqnFJ1Nw

Jonathan Beecher - Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848

The revolution of 1848 has been described as the revolution of the intellectuals. In France, the revolution galvanised the energies of major romantic writers and intellectuals. This book follows nine writers through the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath: Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Marie d'Agoult, Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, and Gustave Flaubert. Conveying a sense of the experience of 1848 as these writers lived it, this fresh and engaging study captures the sense of possibility at a time when it was not yet clear that the Second French Republic had no future. By looking closely at key texts in which each writer attempted to understand, judge, criticise, or intervene in the revolution, Jonathan Beecher shows how each endeavoured to answer the question posed explicitly by Tocqueville: Why, within the space of two generations, did democratic revolutions twice culminate in the dictatorship of a Napoleon?

David Leopold - The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing

The Young Karl Marx is an innovative and important study of Marx's early writings. These writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but they also present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works. An erudite yet accessible discussion of Marx's influences and targets frames the author's critical engagement with Marx's account of the emergence, character, and (future) replacement of the modern state. This combination of historical and analytical approaches results in a sympathetic, but not uncritical, exploration of such fundamental themes as alienation, citizenship, community, anti-semitism, and utopianism.

The Young Karl Marx is a scholarly and original work which provides a radical and persuasive reinterpretation of Marx's complex and often misunderstood views of German philosophy, modern politics, and human flourishing. Karl Marx's early writings provide the fascinating spectacle of a powerful and imaginative intellect wrestling with complex and significant issues, but present formidable interpretative obstacles to modern readers. David Leopold shows how an understanding of their intellectual and cultural context can illuminate the political dimension of these works.

Does War Make States?: Investigations of Charles Tilly's Historical Sociology

Arising from renewed engagement with Charles Tilly's canonical work on the relationship between war and state formation, this volume situates Tilly's work in a broader theoretical landscape and brings it into contemporary debates on state formation theory. Starting with Tilly's famous dictum 'war made the state, and the state made war', the book takes his claim further, examining it from a philosophical, theoretical and conceptual view, and asking whether it is applicable to non-European regions such as the Middle East, South America and China. The authors question Tilly's narrow view of the causal relationship between warfare and state-making, and use a positive yet critical approach to suggest alternative ways to explain how the state is formed. Readers will gain a comprehensive view of the most recent developments in the literature on state formation, as well as a more nuanced view of Charles Tilly's work.

Josh Gabert-Doyon - The Tyranny of the Task

Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Phil Jones. Verso, 144 pages.

The “microwork” that makes AI run is just piecework with a digital makeover

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-tyranny-of-the-task-gabert-doyon

Chris Maisano - There's No Easy Way Out of Our Political System

Chris Maisano discusses what the Left can do to break the vicious cycle of political inequality in the US and work to safeguard and even expand democratic rights.  

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0BnOxd8ylQ

Maurizio Lazzarato - Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism

The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has earned international acclaim for his analysis of contemporary capitalism, in particular his influential concept of immaterial labor and his perceptive writings on debt. In Videophilosophy, he reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. First written in French and published in Italian and later revised but never published in full, this book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato’s thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential.

Drawing on Bergson, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, and the film theory and practice of Dziga Vertov, Lazzarato constructs a new philosophy of media that ties political economy to the politics of aesthetics. Through his concept of “machines that crystallize time,” he argues that the proliferation of digital technologies over the past half-century marks the transition to a new mode of capitalist production characterized by unprecedented forms of subjection. This new era of the commodification of the self, Lazzarato declares, demands novel types of political action that challenge the commercialization and exploitation of time. This crucial text by an essential contemporary thinker offers vital new perspectives on aesthetics, politics, and media and critical theory.

The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory

Critical Theory constitutes one of the major intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, and is centrally important for philosophy, political theory, aesthetics and theory of art, the study of modern European literatures and music, the history of ideas, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies. In this volume an international team of distinguished contributors examines the major figures in Critical Theory, including Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as lesser known but important thinkers such as Pollock and Neumann. The volume surveys the shared philosophical concerns that have given impetus to Critical Theory throughout its history, while at the same time showing the diversity among its proponents that contributes so much to its richness as a philosophical school. The result is an illuminating overview of the entire history of Critical Theory in the twentieth century, an examination of its central conceptual concerns, and an in-depth discussion of its future prospects.

Ugo Palheta - Fighting French Fascism Means More Than “Anyone but Éric Zemmour”

Fascist TV pundit Éric Zemmour has announced his bid for the French presidency. His advance is part of a rising tide of Islamophobia and authoritarianism pushing France toward the far right

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/french-fascism-elections-zemmour-presidency-islamophobia-le-pen/

Yanis Varoufakis & Slavoj Zizek

Yanis Varoufakis is a top economist who was at the forefront of international media attention as Minister of Finance in the Syriza government in Greece. Today, he leads the left-wing pan-European political movement DIEM. The conversation with Varoufakis, led by Slavoj Žižek, will be far from a polite exchange of opinions by two like minded colleagues. It will address the issues faced by today’s Left.

Did the Syriza government stand any chance of surviving without capitulating under the pressure by the European Union? What are the real potentials of the radical left today? How has global capitalism changed due to the pandemic? Will capitalism manage to cope with the ecological crisis?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ODuleYZwbs

The Cambridge Companion to Adorno

The great German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As an accomplished musician, Adorno originally focused on the theory of culture and art. He later turned to the problem of the self-defeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. A distinguished roster of Adorno specialists explores the full range of his contributions to philosophy, history, music theory, aesthetics and sociology in this collection of essays.

Maurizio Lazzarato - Experimental Politics: Work, Welfare, and Creativity in the Neoliberal Age

In Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. This is the first book of Lazzarato's in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as “immaterial labor.” The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right.

Lazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (“reform”) of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming: in Foucault's words, a “floating population” in “security societies.” Lazzarato argues further that parallel to economic impoverishment, neoliberalism has produced an impoverishment of subjectivity a reduction in existential intensity. A substantial introduction by Jeremy Gilbert situates Lazzarato's analysis in a broader context.