Fredrik Stiernstedt, Anne Kaun - The Prison Media Complex: Labour, Technology and Communication Infrastructures in the Prison System

Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and discusses material entanglements between prisons and private media industries via the production of media technologies, consumption of communication, and technology development in the prison sector. The article seeks to answer the question of how we can conceptualise the prison media complex (PMC) from a materialist perspective. Taking the Swedish context as a starting point, we analyse the economic and material connections that characterise the PMC in this national context. Drawing on archival data, participant observations at prison technology tradeshows and a prison sector conference, as well as freedom of information requests, we bring nuance to the picture of media and communication technologies, as technologies of freedom are also based on unfreedom and captivity.

https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/download/1270/1453

Robin Attfield - Environmental Thought: A Short History

Environmental thought has a rich and extensive history. Philosopher Robin Attfield guides readers through the key developments and debates that have defined the field from ancient times to the present. Attfield investigates ancient, medieval and early modern environmental contributions; Darwin and his successors; the debate in America involving Thoreau, Marsh, Muir and Pinchot; the foundation of the science of ecology in the Western world; and twentieth century trailblazers like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Central themes of key environmentalist works of the 1970s and 1980s are discussed, along with the major debates in environmental philosophy, including Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Attfield then turns to the current environmental emergency, encompassing the crises of climate change, air pollution and biodiversity loss, exploring contemporary intellectual responses to it. Each chapter concludes with a list of recommended readings, selected to invite readers to explore the book’s topics in greater depth.

Nigel Gibson - Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth

Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth is about how new generations are discovering their mission of humanizing the world by claiming Fanon as a thinker for our times. Why Fanon, why now? For the wretched of the earth, conditions have not improved since Fanon’s time and in some cases they have worsened. Reason and revolt are inescapable, quite simply because, as Fanon wrote, it has become ‘impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fanon’s death (in 1961), the contributors to this book address the resonances of Fanon’s thinking on movements of resistance and mass revolutionary uprisings occurring in response to repression or state violence in Algeria, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Trinidad, USA and beyond. The driving force of each chapter of this unique collection of writings is Fanonian praxis, engaging with Fanon the thinker and Fanon the revolutionary.

Леонид Томин, Александр Балаян - Москва между Пекином и Сингапуром. Политические эффекты цифровой трансформации городского управления

Цифровая инфраструктура и система «умного города» паноптизируют городское пространство, создавая инструментарий для криминализации протеста в условиях авторитарных режимов

Статья посвящена исследованию отдельных политических эффектов цифровизации городского управления в Российской Федерации. На основе концепции «надзорного капитализма» и исследований цифровой трансформации государственного управления анализируются структура и логика функционирования модели «умного города» на примере г. Москвы. На материале уличных акций протеста рассматриваются политические эффекты использования властями города цифровой инфраструктуры, в частности, системы камер с технологией распознавания лиц.

https://syg.ma/@tomin-lieonid/lieonid-tomin-alieksandr-balaian-moskva-miezhdu-piekinom-i-singhapurom-politichieskiie-effiekty-tsifrovoi-transformatsii-ghorodskogho-upravlieniia

Marcelo Hoffman - The FBI File on Foucault

Nearly a decade ago, two Brazilian researchers, Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Maria Izabel Pitanga, made a remarkable discovery. They requested materials on the French philosopher Michel Foucault from the National Archive of the Ministry of Justice in Brasília and obtained a file on him compiled by an intelligence agency established by the Brazilian dictatorship, the National Intelligence Service (SNI). The file revealed that Foucault’s participation in a protest at a student assembly in São Paulo in 1975 had become the focal point of his surveillance by the SNI. Conde and Pitanga’s discovery left me with an elementary but irrepressible curiosity: did the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States compile a file on Foucault? It did not seem outlandish to think that Foucault would have caught the attention of the FBI. He had visited the United States with great frequency in the 1970s and 1980s. Foucault had also established a reputation as a radical intellectual with a history of militant engagements at the time of his initial visits to the United States. He had thrown his support behind Marxist students in Tunisia who had revolted against the authoritarian regime of Habib Bourguiba in the late 1960s. And, in the two years between Foucault’s first visit to the United States in March 1970 and his second visit in March 1972, he had immersed himself in the activities of the Prisons Information Group (GIP), which he had founded with others to disseminate the voices of prisoners. Foucault also arrived in the United States for the first time when the FBI was still undertaking its notorious counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of clandestine operations against a wide range of groups on the left, including the Communist Party, Puerto Rican independence groups, the Socialist Workers Party, the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the student movement, and the New Left. While Foucault does not appear to have been involved in the political activities of any of these groups during his visits to the United States, he had anonymously co-authored a portion of an investigative report that the GIP published in November 1971 to counter the official narrative of the assassination of Black Panther Party member George Jackson at San Quentin prison in August 1971. Foucault’s overall profile as a radical intellectual alongside his support for Marxist students in Tunisia and prisoners in France as well as his deep involvement in a group that had produced a pamphlet on the assassination of a Black Panther Party member could have been enough to put him on the radar of the FBI.

https://viewpointmag.com/2021/11/08/the-fbi-file-on-foucault/

Роберт Бреннер и исследования капитализма в марксистской парадигме

Какое влияние оказало формирование аграрного класса при зарождении капитализма? Этот вопрос стал основным в научных дебатах 80-х г. XX века, которые позднее были названы Дебаты Бреннера.

В очередном выпуске программы «Книжная экономика» мы обсудили книгу «Экономика глобальной турбулентности. Развитые капиталистические экономики в период 1945 - 2005 г.» и роль исследований историка Роберта Бреннера для понимания генезиса современного капитализма.

Гость программы - российский экономист, доктор экономических наук, директор научной школы РЭУ «Экономическая теория», профессор Руслан Солтанович Дзарасов.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ut4rtMCOj2k

Neil Faulkner - A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals

This magisterial analysis of human history from 'Lucy', the first hominid, to the current Great Recession - combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process. Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes liberation or barbarism - were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events. At the beginning of the 21st century with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, since we created our past, we can also create a better future.

Robert Ovetz - Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle : Strategies, Tactics, Objectives

Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers'struggle is being reborn from below. By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers'inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers'inquiries, from call centre workers to teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers'organisations. In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers'movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.

Витторио Морфино - Чесать марксистскую традицию против шерсти

Автор статьи разрабатывает концепцию множественной темпоральности как инструмент переосмысления марксистской традиции. Эта концепция эксплицитно не была сформулирована самим Марксом, однако, по убеждению автора, мы можем найти ее подспудное присутствие в тех работах Маркса, где линейная и стадиальная модель исторического развития обнаруживает свою неадекватность. Автор демонстрирует следы этой концепции в «Критике гегелевской философии права», где Маркс рассуждает о современности немецкой философии и об анахроничности германского государства. Автор показывает возрастающее влияние этой концепции в серии работ, начиная с «Манифеста коммунистической партии» и заканчивая «Восемнадцатым брюмера Луи Бонапарта». Однако наиболее заметное ее присутствие он находит в двух поздних текстах Маркса, посвященных феномену русской сельской общины. Маркс отмечает беспрецедентный исторический характер последней: будучи продуктом докапиталистических социальных отношений, она тем не менее современна капитализму и потому не столько тормозит его развитие в России, сколько содержит в себе тот тип коллективного труда и коллективной собственности, который представляет собой альтернативу ему. Будущая революция, по мысли Маркса, если она произойдет в «надлежащее время», должна обеспечить свободное развитие сельской общины и превосходство русского общества над теми странами, в которых господствует капитализм. Автор анализирует работы тех последователей Маркса, которые уже осознанно используют в своих работах понятие и фигуры множественной темпоральности. Речь идет об Эрнесте Блохе, Антонио Грамши и Луи Альтюссере. В заключение подчеркивается, что смысл концепции множественной темпоральности состоит не в том, чтобы опровергнуть идею непрерывного хода истории, но, скорее, в том, чтобы осознать его сложный и контингентный характер.

http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/logos/2021_04/7.pdf

Joanne J. Meyerowitz - A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit

A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.

When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging "women in development" movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit--with its tiny loans--as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution. Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.

Max Haiven - Our Age of Uprisings: We Are a World Remaking Itself

The global pandemic unfolds amidst a world of uprisings. Some have seen huge numbers gather in the streets and become ungovernable, including the victorious farmer’s strike in India, the efforts to expropriate the landlords in Berlin, the mass refusal of anti-Black police violence in the US, and the mobilizations against the neoliberal regime in Chile.

Elsewhere, in Chiapas, Kerala, Rojava and an archipelago of smaller “zones to defend,” the uprisings take more sustained forms as people reinvent or reclaim life in common. Indigenous people around the world are refusing to allow their lands and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of extractive capitalism. The great global struggle against capitalism’s climate apocalypse is escalating.

https://roarmag.org/magazine/our-age-of-uprisings/

Итоги 2021 года: карантин Путина навсегда, система сломалась, оппозиция разгромлена

2021 год в России запомнится крупными политическими событиями. В январе политик Алексей Навальный вернулся в Россию из Германии. Его сразу же задержали, а в начале февраля отправили в колонию. Его структуры признали в России экстремистскими и запретили.
В апреле «Медузу» объявили «иностранным агентом». С тех пор реестр Минюста пополнили десятки независимых СМИ, журналистов, правозащитников и активистов. В сентября в России прошли выборы в Госдуму. По их итогам «Единая Россия» набрала чуть меньше 50% голосов, но все равно получила большинство в парламенте; в Думу прошли новые партии. Ведущие политического шоу «Медузы» Константин Гаазе и Андрей Перцев анализируют все эти события и подводят итоги года.

Содержание:
00:16 «У него есть острое желание иметь в своих руках государственную власть»
03:39 О чем говорим сегодня
04:56 Главные политические итоги года
09:13 «Чистый сектор навсегда»
11:15 Как попасть к президенту Владимиру Путину на встречу
12:31 Что сломалось в системе во время ковида
14:52 Причины произвола
17:20 С чем связана изоляция Путина
19:30 О гонке сценариев на 2024 год
21:51 Как именно изменилась система российской власти
22:57 «Любой глава государства оторван от граждан»
27:34 О чем у Путина нет представления
29:12 Путин — политтехнологический конструкт?
30:25 Как изменилась риторика президента, и почему это важно
33:43 Что такое антитранзит власти

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h-Dmkr8ybJQ

Rene Rojas - Tomorrow, the Chilean Left Has to Do More Than Stop the Far Right

Despite the Right’s surprisingly strong showing in Chile’s first-round elections, socialist Gabriel Boric is still favored to win the presidency tomorrow. But the Left needs to be laser focused on a broad working-class agenda to fully roll back neoliberalism.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/chilean-presidential-election-neoliberalism-boric-kast-first-round-analysis/

Bill Dunn - Global political economy: a Marxist critique

Bill Dunn provides an original and enlightening explanation of the state of the world economy. He covers all the main aspects of global political economy explaining the theories behind production, trade, finance and relations between rich and poor countries. He also tackles the question of the origin of capitalism, a debate that always proves popular among students and academics. Dunn also includes a critique of alternative perspectives, showing that Marxism still provides the best analytical tools for understanding the global economy.