Gary Y. Okihiro - Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation

In 1968 the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College demanded the creation of a Third World studies program to counter the existing curricula that ignored issues of power notably, imperialism and oppression. The administration responded by institutionalizing an ethnic studies program; Third World studies was over before it began. Detailing the field's genesis and premature death, Gary Y. Okihiro presents an intellectual history of ethnic studies and Third World studies and shows where they converged and departed by identifying some of their core ideas, concepts, methods, and theories. In so doing, he establishes the contours of a unified field of study Third World studies that pursues a decolonial politics by examining the human condition broadly, especially in regard to oppression, and critically analyzing the locations and articulations of power as manifested in the social formation. Okihiro's framing of Third World studies moves away from ethnic studies' liberalism and its U.S.-centrism to emphasize the need for complex thinking and political action in the drive for self-determination.

James Oakes - The Left Case Against the 1619 Project

Historian James Oakes explains how the 1619 Project misconstrues the relationship between slavery and capitalism and what the left can learn from the mass politics of the antislavery movement.

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

Daniel Neofetou - Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War

Since the 1970s, it has been argued that Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in an attempt to culturally match and reinforce its newfound economic and military dominance. The account of Abstract Expressionism developed by the American critic Clement Greenberg is often identified as central to these efforts. However, this book rereads Greenberg's account through Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to contend that Greenberg's criticism in fact testifies to how Abstract Expressionism opposes the ends to which it was deployed. With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.

Mark Poster  - The Mode of Information

When we make phone calls and use computers, electronic devices mediate how we communicate. In each instance, we exchange symbols and information just as we have since humans began speaking and writing. What, then besides economy of space and time differentiates electronic communications from ordinary speech and writing? The difference, Mark Poster argues, is the profound effect electronic mediation exerts on the very way we perceive ourselves and reality. To help decode the linguistic dimensions of our multiple forms of social interaction, he plays upon Marx's theory of the mode of production the shift to late capitalism has a parallel in the shift from the mode of production to that of information. Enlisting poststructuralist theory, he links four modes of communication with four poststructuralists: TV ads with Baudrillard, data bases with Foucault, electronic writing with Derrida, and computer science with Lyotard. Mode of Information points the way to a poststructuralist strategy for writing history, a framework well suited to unearthing structures of domination and the means to their disruption.

Frederic Lordon - In search of luxurious communism

The communist idea would have little chance of succeeding if it was concerned only with needs and reductions. We also need to remember that the goal of politics is to improve life. Certainly, a ‘salary for life’ (offering protection against the uncertainties of life and material distress), the sovereignty of associated producers (abolishing relations of pure subordination) and the right to leisure time (as part of disarming the productivity imperative) are all gains that would make life incomparably better than under capitalism.

But perhaps more should be said to remove the negative associations with which abandoning capitalism, and the word ‘communism’ itself, have been saddled collective housing, a diet of potatoes and sausages, grey cars, grey coffee grinders, grey clothes, grey walls, grey cities.

https://mondediplo.com/outside-in/luxury-communism

Georgi Derluguian - The Antarctic Connection

This short New Year memoir meshes theorizations of two very different subject areas: geopolitics and interaction rituals. The genre, however, also calls for a dose of merry nonsense, which very much includes all sociological jargon. Yet, as-we-all-know-who-theorized-it, rituals must be performed and emotions generated even at the scale of world-systems theory.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-antarctic-connection

Duncan Bell - Reordering the world: essays on liberalism and empire.

Reordering the World is a penetrating account of the complexity and contradictions found in liberal visions of empire. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century Britain at the time the largest empire in history and a key incubator of liberal political thought Duncan Bell sheds new light on some of the most important themes in modern imperial ideology.

The book ranges widely across Victorian intellectual life and beyond. The opening essays explore the nature of liberalism, varieties of imperial ideology, the uses and abuses of ancient history, the imaginative functions of the monarchy, and fantasies of Anglo-Saxon global domination. They are followed by illuminating studies of prominent thinkers, including J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Herbert Spencer, and J. R. Seeley. While insisting that liberal attitudes to empire were multiple and varied, Bell emphasizes the liberal fascination with settler colonialism. It was in the settler empire that many liberal imperialists found the place of their political dreams.

Peter Miller, Nikolas Rose - Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life

The literature on governmentality has had a major impact across the social sciences over the past decade, and much of this has drawn upon the pioneering work by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. This volume will bring together key papers from their work for the first time, including those that set out the basic frameworks, concepts and ethos of this approach to the analysis of political power and the state, and others that analyse specific domains of the conduct of conduct, from marketing to accountancy, and from the psychological management of organizations to the government of economic life. Bringing together empirical papers on the government of economic, social and personal life, the volume demonstrates clearly the importance of analysing these as conjoint phenomena rather than separate domains, and questions some cherished boundaries between disciplines and topic areas. Linking programmes and strategies for the administration of these different domains with the formation of subjectivities and the transformation of ethics, the papers cast a new light on some of the leading issues in contemporary social science modernity, democracy, reflexivity and individualisation. This volume will be indispensable for all those, from whatever discipline in the social sciences, who have an interest in the concepts and methods necessary for critical empirical analysis of power relations in our present.

Is Peaceful Protest enough? In conversation with Andreas Malm

ndreas Malm joins Bristol Transformed organiser, Momentum NCG member and Labour for a Green New Deal activist Shona Jemphrey in Bristol at the Malcolm X Centre, the birthplace of Extinction Rebellion. They discuss COP26, the new phase of the climate struggle and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qhnlj2F6RLk

James Oakes - What the 1619 Project Got Wrong

The 1619 Project claims to reveal the unknown history of slavery and racism in the United States, when in fact these topics have been the subject of intense scholarly investigation for decades. What distinguishes the project is the ideological bias that leads its editors to erase the history of antislavery and distort the history of slavery.

https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/12/what-the-1619-project-got-wrong

Michael Roberts -The Long Depression: Marxism and the Global Crisis of Capitalism

Setting out from an unapologetic Marxist perspective, The Long Depression argues that the global economy remains in the throes of a depression. Making the case that the profitability of capital is too low, and the debt built up before the Great Recession too high, leading radical economist Michael Roberts persuasively presents his case that this depression will persist until the profitability of capital is restored through yet another slump.

Massimo Modonesi - The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action

In this important contribution to political theory, Massimo Modonesi develops the thesis that a Marxist theory of political action can be developed from the notion of antagonism, defined as a distinctive feature of struggle and of the political experience of insubordination. The author argues this central idea with close reference to the concept of class struggle. He advances a theoretical proposal based on the triad subalternity-antagonism-autonomy, as well as the uneven and combined character of the processes of political subjectification. At the center of this triad, the concept of antagonism stands out as a logical principle and the core of a Marxist theory of political action. At the same time, subalternism reappears frequently, as the counter-pole of antagonistic activation and autonomous practices, and as the root of what Antonio Gramsci calls 'passive revolutions'.