Wolfgang Streeck - Ultra Vires

Remember the campaign, conducted by the European Commission (EC) and the EU Parliament (EP) with the help of the Court of Justice (CJEU), to teach Poland the rule of law by withholding its share in Ursula von der Leyen’s precious, the Next Generation EU (NGEU) Corona Recovery Fund? EU legalese being not by accident notoriously difficult to understand for anyone but the Court itself, hard thinking reveals that ‘rule of law’ means two things here: independence of the national judiciary from the national executive, and recognition by both of the supremacy of European over national law, including national constitutional law, whatever the European law may be, which in case of doubt is a matter for the CJEU to determine, and the CJEU alone.

Poland, according to Brussels, needs to be taught a lesson, and not just because of the government’s packing of the constitutional court with judges dear to the heart of the majority party. Both the constitutional court and the government believe in a narrow interpretation of European legal supremacy, rather than the broad one preferred by the EC, EP and CJEU. As a result, the Polish constitutional court is likely to find certain, but not all, legal commands emerging from Brussels to be ultra vires, transgressing the limits of European jurisdiction, thereby violating not only Polish law but also the European Treaties to the extent that EU member countries have in the Treaties ceded only some but not all legal powers to the Union.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/ultra-vires

Johanna Bockman - Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism

The worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free-market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists, Markets in the Name of Socialism reveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain about democracy, socialism, and markets. These discussions led to the transformations of 1989 and, unintentionally, the rise of neoliberalism. This book takes a truly transnational look at economists' professional outlook over 100 years across the capitalist West and the socialist East. Clearly translating complicated economic ideas and neoliberal theories, it presents a significant reinterpretation of Cold War history, the fall of communism, and the rise of today's dominant economic ideology.

Brian S. Roper - The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation

The concept of democracy has become tarnished in recent years, as governments become disconnected from voters and pursue unpopular policies. And yet the ideal of democracy continues to inspire movements around the world, such as the Arab Spring. Brian Roper refreshes our understanding of democracy using a Marxist theoretical framework. He traces the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the emergence of liberal representative and socialist participatory democracy in Europe and North America, through to the global spread of democracy during the past century. Roper argues that democracy cannot be understood separately from underlying processes of exploitation and class struggle. He offers an engaging Marxist critique of representative democracy, and raises the possibility of alternative democratic forms. The History of Democracy will be of interest to students and scholars of history and politics and all those concerned about the past, present and future of democracy.

W. F. Haug - Vorschule zur Philosophie der Praxis. Argument/InkriT, Hamburg, 2021.

Reviewed by Vesa Oittinen

Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Professor Emeritus at Freie Universität in Berlin, is internationally known above all as the publisher of the journal Das Argument, which emerged in 1959 from the anti-nuclear peace movement but soon developed into a forum for high-level theoretical Marxist discussion. In 1994, Haug started with his collaborators a further important publication project, the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus. The dictionary is currently up to letter M, with nine hitherto published volumes, and has had 900 collaborators worldwide and a translation in Chinese has been started. Such extensive publication activity would not have been possible without treating its subject matter with a certain degree of pluralism, and Haug has, unsurprisingly, defended the idea that the theoretical heritage of Marxism has an irreducibly polyphonic character.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19857_vorschule-zur-philosophie-der-praxis-by-w-f-haug-reviewed-by-vesa-oittinen/

Fred Halliday, Maxine Molyneux - The Ethiopian Revolution

The Ethiopian revolution has been the most momentous upheaval yet seen in twentieth-century Africa. Overthrowing the dynasty of Haile Selassie, which traced its origins to Solomon and Sheba, the revolution has unleashed a far-reaching transformation within Ethiopia and an international conflict that has made Ethiopia one of the flashpoints of the New Cold War. Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux have twice visited Ethiopia and have interviewed, there and abroad, the widest range of participants government officials and underground civilian opponents, Eritrean and Somali guerrillas, diplomats of east and west, representatives of Arab and African states. After an introductory chapter in which they analyse the theoretical problems posed by the Ethiopian revolution, they survey both the development of a post-revolutionary regime within the country and the many conflicts that have rent the Horn of Africa in its wake. They pay special attention to the social changes introduced by the military government, the clashes between civilian and army factions, and the underlying causes of the war in Eritrea. Critical of both the regime and its opponents, Halliday and Molyneux provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date study of this epochal chapter in modern African history, one which, they argue, may prefigure the pattern of social and political conflict elsewhere in the third world over coming decades.

Kathleen Lynch - Care and Capitalism

The logics and ethics of neoliberal capitalism dominate public discourses and politics in the early twenty-first century. They morally endorse and institutionalize forms of competitive self-interest that jettison social justice values, and are deeply antithetical to love, care and solidarity. But capitalism is neither invincible nor inevitable. While people are self-interested, they are not purely self-interested: they are bound affectively and morally to others, even to unknown others. The cares, loves and solidarity relationships within which people are engaged give them direction and purpose in their daily lives. They constitute cultural residuals of hope that stand ready to move humanity beyond a narrow capitalism-centric set of values. In this instructive and inspiring book, Kathleen Lynch sets out to reclaim the language of love, care and solidarity both intellectually and politically and to place it at the heart of contemporary discourse. Her goal is to help unseat capital at the gravitational centre of meaning-making and value, thereby helping to create logics and ethical priorities for politics that are led by care, love and solidarity.

Marcello Tarì - There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, Common Notions, 2021. 240 pp

Reviewed by Chrys Papaioannou

Italian intellectual Marcelo Tarì is a relatively little-known figure on the Anglophone left, both in academic and activist circles. There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, Tarì’s first book to be translated into English, is perhaps not likely to change the author’s standing, even though the publication formulates an intellectually coherent, anti-programmatic response to the perennially urgent, programmatic question: ‘What is to be done?’. Written from the standpoint of an intellectual who remains committed to the political project of insurrectionary communism, Tarì’s monograph-cum-manifesto will no doubt rouse readers who take textual pleasure in the insurgent lyricism of militant collectives such as The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun and Colectivo Situaciones. Tarì, himself the translator of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection into Italian, might perhaps be less compelling an agitateur and more saturnine in disposition than his ultra-left French and Argentine comrades. Still, Tarì’s attentive reading of Benjaminian chronopolitics alongside his skilful attempt to build on Giorgio Agamben’s earlier sketches on destituent power [potenza], make the present volume one that deserves a wide and varied audience.

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19865_there-is-no-unhappy-revolution-the-communism-of-destitution-by-marcello-tari-reviewed-by-chrys-papaioannou/

Jeremy Gilbert - Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism

Common Ground explores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics. The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

Jon Stewart - Hegel's Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution

The remarkable lectures that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s generated an exciting intellectual atmosphere which lasted for decades. From the 1830s, many students flocked to Berlin to study with people who had studied with Hegel, and both his original students, such as Feuerbach and Bauer, and later arrivals including Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, and Marx, evolved into leading nineteenth-century thinkers. Jon Stewart's panoramic study of Hegel's deep influence upon the nineteenth century in turn reveals what that century contributed to the wider history of philosophy. It shows how Hegel's notions of 'alienation' and 'recognition' became the central motifs for the era's thinking; how these concepts spilled over into other fields like religion, politics, literature, and drama; and how they created a cultural phenomenon so rich and pervasive that it can truly be called 'Hegel's century.' This book is required reading for historians of ideas as well as of philosophy.

Óscar García Agustín - Left-Wing Populism: The Politics of the People

In the aftermath of the economic crisis, left-wing parties and leaders began to consider themselves populists or were labelled as such in media and public discourse. This trend can be witnessed in instances such as Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, France Insoumise in France, DiEM25 at the European level and even Corbyinism in the UK. However, the problem still remains as to how we define left-wing populism in contemporary Europe as well as the main characteristics.
This book conceptualizes left-wing populism as a combination of the populist impetus of expanding representation, through the appeal to "the people" against "the elites" and the agenda of the left to promote equality and social justice. This study undertakes an in-depth exploration into the concepts of sovereignty, class identity and "the people".

Moreover, this book also discusses the institutional dimension of left-wing populism, in dialogue with republicanism and the international sphere, reflected in the debate between sovereignism and transnationalism. The result is an open conceptualization of left-wing populism in which populist parties acquire a hybrid form and incorporate different traditions and influences such as socialism, populism and republicanism in order to reach a social majority and expand democracy. This recent phenomenon of left-wing populism has showed potential to re-define the left-project, but also demonstrates its shortcomings regarding the scope of the political change and its capacity to make politics in a different manner, by and for the people. This invaluable text will prove an essential read for those in the fields of political theory and contemporary political studies.

James Muldoon - Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

Web3 is touted as the next generation of the internet, promising to break the grip of giants like Google and Facebook. But far from empowering ordinary users, its token-based model threatens to commodify our online lives even further.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism/

The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza

Since its publication in 1677, Spinoza's Ethics has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and scientists alike. It is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and contested works of Western philosophy. Written in an austere, geometrical fashion, the work teaches us how we should live, ending with an ethics in which the only thing good in itself is understanding. Spinoza argues that only that which hinders us from understanding is bad and shows that those endowed with a human mind should devote themselves, as much as they can, to a contemplative life. This Companion volume provides a detailed, accessible exposition of the Ethics. Written by an internationally known team of scholars, it is the first anthology to treat the whole of the Ethics and is written in an accessible style.