Uday Singh Mehta - Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human experience and ways of being in the world.

Ironically, it is in the conservative Edmund Burke a severe critic of Britain's arrogant, paternalistic colonial expansion that Mehta finds an alternative and more capacious liberal vision. Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

Luciana Castellina - Discovery of the World. A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini

Luciana Castellina is one of Italy's most prominent left intellectuals and a cofounder of the newspaper il manifesto. In this coming-of-age memoir, based on her diaries, she recounts her political awakening as a teenage girl in Fascist Italy where she used to play tennis with Mussolini's daughter and the subsequent downfall of the regime. Discovery of the World is about war, anti-Semitism, anti-fascism, resistance, the belief in social justice, the craving for experience, travel, political rallies, cinema, French intellectuals and FIAT workers, international diplomacy and friendship. All this is built on an intricate web made of reason and affection, of rational questioning and ironic self-narration as well as of profound nostalgia, disappointment and discovery.

Christoph Jünke - Leo Kofler's Philosophy of Praxis: Western Marxism and Socialist Humanism With Six Essays by Leo Kofler Published in English for the First Time

Despite being a major theorist of post-war Marxism in the German-speaking world, Leo Kofler remains largely unknown outside of it. This volume introduces his work and life and presents six of Kofler’s essays in English for the first time.

Боло, ибу, зила, нуго

Отрывок из книги «Никакой власти. Теория и практика анархизма»

Парижская коммуна и Occupy Wall Street, страхи буржуазии и эксперименты с конституцией в новой книге британка Рут Кинна разбирает по косточкам историю анархизма. Публикуем фрагмент главы «Краткосрочные утопии», где описан вымышленный мир «боло-боло», одновременно похожий и непохожий на мечты князя Кропоткина.

https://gorky.media/fragments/bolo-ibu-zila-nugo/

Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America

Since the early nineteenth century, the United States has repeatedly intervened in the affairs of Latin American nations to pursue its own interests and to “protect” those countries from other imperial powers or from internal “threats.” The resentment and opposition generated by the encroachment of U.S. power has been evident in the recurrent attempts of Latin American nations to pull away from U.S. dominance and in the frequent appearance of popular discontent and unrest directed against imperialist U.S. policies. In Empire and Dissent, senior Latin Americanists explore the interplay between various dimensions of imperial power and the resulting dissent and resistance.

Several essays provide historical perspective on contemporary U.S. hemispheric relations. These include an analysis of the nature and dynamics of imperial domination, an assessment of financial relations between the United States and Latin America since the end of World War II, an account of Native American resistance to colonialism, and a consideration of the British government’s decision to abolish slavery in its colonies. Other essays focus on present-day conflicts in the Americas, highlighting various modes of domination and dissent, resistance and accommodation. Examining southern Mexico’s Zapatista movement, one contributor discusses dissent in the era of globalization. Other contributors investigate the surprisingly conventional economic policies of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; Argentina’s recovery from its massive 2001 debt default; the role of coca markets in the election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales; and the possibilities for extensive social change in Venezuela. A readers’ guide offers a timeline of key events from 1823 through 2007, along with a list of important individuals, institutions, and places.

Contributors: Daniel A. Cieza, Gregory Evans Dowd, Steve Ellner, Neil Harvey, Alan Knight, Carlos Marichal, John Richard Oldfield, Silvia Rivera, Fred Rosen, Jeffrey W. Rubin

Adrian Johnston - Capitalism’s Implants: A Hegelian Theory of Failed Revolutions

Going back to Hegel himself, there is a long-standing tendency to associate dialectics with dynamics. That is to say, Hegel’s dialectical philosophy frequently is construed as an updated, sophisticated need to reconsider this deeply-engrained intellectual habit of equating Heraclitean flux doctrine, a sort of process metaphysics constantly
foregrounding becoming, change, fluidity, movement, transformation, and the like. Indeed, for Marx, Engels, and much of the Marxist tradition, dialectics-as-dynamics is the rational revolutionary kernel of Hegelian thinking. Yet, at least at the level of socio-political philosophizing, the
past two-hundred years since the publication of Hegel’s political magnum opus, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), has made evident the the dialectical with the dynamic. If Hegelianism (as well as Marxism)
is to remain capable of reckoning with history up through the twenty-
first-century present, it must be able to account for why and how so much of the future historical progress Hegel and Marx, as children of the Enlightenment, optimistically anticipated failed to happen. One could say that real social history itself from the nineteenth century
through today has exhibited much in the way of stasis, setbacks, and
regressions unforeseen by the likes of Hegel and Marx themselves. The sorts of socio-historical progress envisioned by Hegelianism and Marxism has for a long time been, and still continues to be, stalled. This fact calls for conceptualizing a dialectics of non-dynamism, a sluggish
or stuck dialectic, so to speak. Herein, I attempt to contribute to this (re) conceptualization of historical dialectics by developing a Hegelian theory of failed revolutions precisely through an immanent-critical engagement with the full span of Hegel’s political writings from 1798 to 1831.

https://crisiscritique.org/volume_8-issue_2/CC_8.2_Adrian%20Johnston.pdf

Liza Featherstone - Why the Left Should Care About Men

Jacobin columnist Liza Featherstone discusses how deindustrialization and stagnant wages have affected working-class men, and how right-wing politicians and pundits like Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson have exploited this group’s downward mobility to sound the alarm over a “crisis of masculinity.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eFH6rk05r0U

Dana Frank - Honduran Dreams

First, let’s celebrate. Xiomara Castro’s resounding success in the November 28 elections was an astonishing victory for the Honduran people. Before the balloting, most assumed that the ruling National Party would once again intimidate voters, cook the books and steal the presidency, despite polling data which made clear that Castro, the center-left candidate of a united opposition, was on track to win. When the first, partial results were released that Sunday night, though, she led the ruling party candidate, Nasry Asfura, by 19 points with a 62% voter turnout. It appeared she was unstoppable, unless the military rose up and it hasn’t, yet.

By Wednesday, with over 50% of the vote counted, Asfura had conceded, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had congratulated Castro, and the current dictator, Juan Orlando Hernández, had acknowledged her victory on national TV. Could the long Honduran night have ended, and so quickly?  

Castro will be the first female president in Honduran history, with the highest vote total ever. Her landslide success was the product of twelve years of hard organizing against the regime installed by a 2009 coup. But in the face of victory, the Honduran people remain devastated after twelve years of repression and suffering, and the challenges Castro now faces are beyond daunting. Looming behind them is the empire of the United States facing the potential loss of what has been one of its most captive nations.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/honduran-dreams

Bryony Lau - Southeast Asia’s Forgotten Revolutionaries

On transnational futures that never came to pass

Revolutions are as much a question of resources and timing as they are of imagination. But official national histories, clouded by the haze of victory, tend to erase visions that went unrealized and the people who dreamed of them. The forgotten participants in the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions are the subject of several new books on Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/southeast-asias-forgotten-revolutionaries-lau

Jake Werner - China’s Market Reformers

While China is often seen as an outlier from neoliberal trends, its transformation in recent decades was not at odds with tectonic shifts in the global system of growth but an essential part of it.

In her new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, Isabella M. Weber offers a valuable corrective to such essentializing narratives. She provides a fine-grained account of the contentious economic reform debates that took place in China in the 1980s, and situates them in a larger historical and conceptual context. Unlike most of the former Soviet bloc and the former Third World, China did not suffer the debilitating effects of neoliberal shock therapy the rapid transformation of a state-led economy to one dominated by market forces and for Weber, the story of how China avoided this fate is key to what makes it different today.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/chinas-market-reformers

Eckard Bolsinger - The Autonomy of the Political: Carl Schmitt's and Lenin's Political Realism

In contrast to sociological debates about the inherently violent nature of modern politics, current political theory has little to say about the place of force, violent conflicts, and coercive power in politics. Bolsinger urges a reexamination of the political thought of Carl Schmitt and Lenin since they conceptualized the nature of politics as founded on force, domination, and conflict. Bolsinger argues that a fresh look at these two thinkers may serve as a remedy for the contemporary neglect of these hard facts of political life. Much as one might reject their views as politically dangerous or morally repulsive, political theory has to come to terms with the problems they raised and the solutions they offered.

In conceptualizing politics mainly in terms of violence, struggle, and power, Bolsinger explains that Schmitt's and Lenin's theories represent central contributions to the realist or power politics traditional in political thought. In focusing on the conceptual relations between politics and armed conflicts and between power and violence, he demonstrates how Schmitt and Lenin succeed in constructing the specificity and autonomy of the political in opposition to other spheres of social life. Bolsinger maintains that realist political theory provides a valuable frame of reference to understand the basic mechanisms of political change and order. An important resource for scholars and students involved with the foundations of politics, twentieth-century political thought, and the relation between politics and violence.

Hatim A. Rahman - Opaque algorithms are creating an invisible cage for platform workers

We live in a world run by algorithms. Nowhere is this more apparent than with platform companies, such as Facebook, Uber, Google, Amazon, and Twitter. Platforms claim that their algorithms collect and use our data to optimize our experience with breathtaking speed and efficiency.

https://marxistsociology.org/2021/12/opaque-algorithms-are-creating-an-invisible-cage-for-platform-workers/

К 30-летию ликвидации СССР Companero Re рассказывает о Перестройке. Как страну пережившую Гитлера удалось ушатать за каких-то 6 лет и почему народ не восстал.

https://youtu.be/WLXUbZPok6Q

Анна Рара-Авис - Наука между сумой и тюрьмой

Сотрудники российских вузов стремительно превращаются в прекариат, полностью зависимый от работодателя и государственного финансирования. Страх потерять работу заставляет ученых молчать и не позволяет им протестовать даже тогда, когда терпеть, казалось бы, больше невозможно.

Российские исследователи и сотрудники университетов работают в ситуации отсутствия свободы слова, в перманентном страхе, стремительно превращаясь из элиты в прекариев полностью зависимый от воли работодателей, не обеспеченный социальными гарантиями, политически неорганизованный социальный класс

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ru/nauka-mezhdu-sumoy-i-tyurmoy/