Walter D. Mignolo - The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

Henry Heller - The Capitalist University The Transformations of Higher Education in the United States, 1945-2016

This work surveys the history of American higher education from the early Cold War through the revolts of the 1960s and on to the age of postmodernism, neoliberal economics and academic capitalism. Over the course of this period it demonstrates that the humanities and social science disciplines have largely served as handmaids to American liberalism, capitalism and imperialism. Universities today have become battlegrounds in the struggle between those who seek to subordinate learning completely to capital and those who aspire to liberate knowledge from the shackles of commodified capitalism.

Bashir Abu-Manneh - Who Owns Frantz Fanon’s Legacy?

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth captures the revolutionary possibilities of decolonization. Yet the book has been marred by a misreading that ignores Fanon’s socialism and class analysis, and turns the great thinker into a prophet of violence.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/postcolonialism-socialism-wretched-earth-class-violence

Marina Prentoulis - Left Populism in Europe: Lessons from Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos

This book evaluates the transformational process of left populism across grassroots, national and European levels and asks what we can do to harness the power of broad-based, popular left politics. While the right is using populist rhetoric to great effect, the left's attempts have been much less successful. Syriza in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in Britain have both failed to introduce socialism in their countries, while Podemos has had better fortune in Spain and is now in government with the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. Bringing a wealth of experience in political organising, Marina Prentoulis argues that left populism is a political logic that brings together isolated demands against a common enemy. She looks at how egalitarian pluralism could transform economic and political institutions in a radical, democratic direction. But each party does this differently, and the key to understanding where to go from here lies in a serious analysis of the roots of each movement's base, the forms of party organisation, and the particular national contexts. This book is a clear and holistic approach to left populism that will inform anyone wanting to understand and move forward positively in a bleak time for the left in Europe.

Кто в российском руководстве хочет войны с Украиной? Почти никто, но платить за нее будут все

Ситуация на границе России и Украины была одной из главных тем переговоров Владимир Путина и Джо Байдена 7 декабря. Общение президентов России и США состоялось на фоне заявлений о том, что Россия планирует военное вторжение: в последний месяц все чаще пишут об очередном наращивании российских военных сил на границах с Украиной. Россия это отрицает.

Что будет, если Россия начнет войну с Украиной? Рассуждают ведущие еженедельного политического шоу «Медузы» Константин Гаазе и Андрей Перцев. Их прогнозы пугающие: если Россия начнет боевые действия, нас ждут изоляция, упадок экономики и политическая система, как в Туркмении.

Таймкоды:
00:16 «Это конец всему живому в Российской Федерации»
03:04 Что будет, если Россия вторгнется на Украину
06:00 Кому в руководстве России нужна война
10:12 «Кажется, пресс-служба МИДа — филиал Russia Today»
15:47 Армейского лобби в российской политике нет
20:41 Выгода ФСБ от противостояния с Украиной
24:15 Статья Суркова — воевать с Украиной или нет
30:00 «У русского человека есть право на смерть»
31:57 Россиян не интересует обострение на границе
38:42 Рейтинг Путина в случае войны взлетит?
47:37 Почему в регионах не любят приезжих из Донбасса
51:53 Жесткие последствия вторжения на Украину для России

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H5K8zcQ6vkg

Achille Mbembe - Critique of Black Reason

In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness from the Atlantic slave trade to the present to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

«Капитал» кратко 10: Постоянный и переменный капитал

К.ф.н. Антон Бархатков рассказывает о проводимом Марксом в 6-й главе «Капитала» различении понятий постоянного и переменного капитала.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gv7wZGTMi4E

A Party Fighting for Socialism Has to Put Workers Front and Center

An interview with Raoul Hedebouw

Polling at 20 percent, the Workers’ Party of Belgium is the fastest-growing force on the European left. Newly elected leader Raoul Hedebouw tells Jacobin how his comrades built an explicitly Marxist party with mass appeal.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/workers-party-of-belgium-ptb-raoul-hedebouw-interview/

Philippe Bourrinet - The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–68): ‘Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin!’ - ‘All Workers Must Think for Themselves!’

The Dutch-German Communist Left, represented by the German KAPD-AAUD, the Dutch KAPN and the Bulgarian Communist Workers Party, separated from the Comintern (1921) on questions like electoralism, trade-unionism, united fronts, the one-party state and anti-proletarian violence. It attracted the ire of Lenin, who wrote his Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder against the Linkskommunismus, while Herman Gorter wrote a famous response in his pamphlet Reply to Lenin. The present ,volume provides the most substantial history to date of this tendency in the twentieth-century Communist movement. It covers how the Communist left, with the KAPD-AAU, denounced 'party communism' and 'state capitalism' in Russia; how the German left survived after 1933 in the shape of the Dutch GIK and Paul Mattick’s councils movement in the USA; and also how the Dutch Communistenbond Spartacus continued to fight after 1942 for the world power of the workers councils, as theorised by Pannekoek in his book Workers’ Councils (1946).

John Feffer - Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response

'John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London' - Mike Davis In a post-Trump world, the right is still very much in power. Significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule. Today’s autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers. But religious, economic, social and environmental differences aside, there is one thing that unites them - their hatred of the liberal, globalised world. This unity is their strength, and through control of government, civil society and the digital world they are working together across borders to stamp out the left. In comparison, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands - Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and Uruguay. So far they have been on the defensive, campaigning on local issues in their own countries. This narrow focus underestimates the resilience and global connectivity of the right. In this book, John Feffer speaks to the world’s leading activists to show how international leftist campaigns must come together if they are to combat the rising tide of the right. A global Green New Deal, progressive trans-European movements, grassroots campaigning on international issues with new and improved language and storytelling are all needed if we are to pull the planet back from the edge of catastrophe. This book is both a warning and an inspiration to activists terrified by the strengthening wall of far-right power.

Макс Хоркхаймер - Авторитаризм и семья сегодня

В данной статье Макс Хоркхаймер критикует капиталистическую трансформацию семьи и исчезновение из нее сильных эмоциональных составляющих, что приводит к безусловной рационализации семейных отношений, что, в свою очередь, влечет за собой фрустрацию индивида в семье и растворение во внешних авторитарных структурах. В результате Хоркхаймер приходит к выводу о том, что единственный способ сохранить целостность и единство общества - это возвращение истинных семейных отношений и грамотное сохранение оных. Прочтение будет весьма полезным для интересующихся социальной философией, социальной психологией, социологией семьи, социологией личности.

Augmented Exploitation: Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work

Artificial Intelligence is a seemingly neutral technology, but it is increasingly used to manage workforces and make decisions to hire and fire employees. Its proliferation in the workplace gives the impression of a fairer, more efficient system of management. A machine can't discriminate, after all. Augmented Exploitation explores the reality of the impact of AI on workers' lives. While the consensus is that AI is a completely new way of managing a workplace, the authors show that, on the contrary, AI is used as most technologies are used under capitalism: as a smokescreen that hides the deep exploitation of workers. Going beyond platform work and the gig economy, the authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that have been developed to utilise innovative ways to collect data about workers and consumers, as well as to keep wages and worker representation under control. They also show that workers are not taking this lying down, providing case studies of new and exciting form of resistance that are springing up across the globe.