The Refusal of Work in Guattari and Negri's “Communists Like Us”

On this episode, the gang takes a look at Antonio Negri’s and Felix Guattari’s 1985 cowritten essay, “Communists Like US”. Guattari and Negri take a look at the state of socialist governmentality and examine the causes of the failure of the worker movement in Italy in the late seventies. The outlook seems bleak, but in these developments Negri and Guattari identify various communist potentialities in various opposition movements. Through a new pluralist approach, one that affirms singularities and seeks newer registers of solidarity, they see a promising future. This episode also explores the various schisms, some of which manifest in the discussion itself, that exist within the autonomist movements themselves. Whether you want to affirm the multitude or spread anarchy, this episode has something for you.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XM8w6jOUU4k

Артем Ефимов - Окончательная постановка хазарского вопроса

К 60‑летию «открытия Хазарии»

Ровно 60 лет назад, в начале 1962 года, вышла из печати книга Михаила Артамонова «История хазар». Четыре с половиной года спустя последовало «Открытие Хазарии» Льва Гумилева. Заглавие было с двойным смыслом: не только научное открытие, но и открытие темы, прежде закрытой по политическим причинам.

25 декабря 1951 года в «Правде» вышла заметка «Об одной ошибочной концепции», в которой Артамонова прямо обвиняли в «неправильной оценке исторической роли Хазарского каганата»: в «непонятном любовании хазарской культурой», в преувеличении значения хазар в мировой, и в первую очередь в русской истории, в преуменьшении зла, которое хазары причинили славянам. «Нашим предкам, — провозглашала „Правда” на седьмой год после Победы, не раз пришлось с оружием в руках защищать родную землю от набегов степных орд. Древняя Русь разгромила Хазарский каганат, освободила от его засилья исконные славянские земли и вызволила из-под хазарского ига вятичей и другие славянские племена». И наконец: «В идеализации хазарской культуры приходится видеть явный пережиток порочных взглядов буржуазных историков, принижавших самобытное развитие русского народа».

Заметка недвусмысленно вписывалась в тогдашнюю кампанию по ликвидации академического вольнодумства: «философская дискуссия» 1947-го, «павловская сессия» и статья Сталина «Марксизм и вопросы языкознания» 1950-го, антикибернетическая кампания начала 1950-х и проч. В 1949-м декан истфака ЛГУ Владимир Мавродин в публичной лекции яростно обличал «норманскую теорию» по всей вероятности, не из научных соображений, а из политических: он по должности не мог не иметь связей с фигурантами «ленинградского дела». Помогло: от деканства его отстранили, из партии исключили, но хоть не посадили.

Общее направление кампании было «патриотическое»: все русское — хорошо, все иностранное — плохо (это огрубление, конечно, но не сильное). Особенно плохо для историков утверждать, что Древняя Русь сформировалось под каким бы то ни было внешним влиянием: норманским, хазарским или любым другим. Славяне — коренной народ Восточной Европы, и они исключительно своим умом дошли и до государственности, и до высокой культуры.

https://gorky.media/context/okonchatelnaya-postanovka-hazarskogo-voprosa/

Warren Montag - Materialism, Matter and Materiality in the Work of Althusser

Over a decade ago, a number of philosophers declared that the time of what they called “the linguistic turn,” that is, a philosophical orientation to language as the sole medium through which reality could be apprehended, had come to an end, having foundered on its own contradictions. In its place, they proposed a turn to objects or things, that is, that to which we were previously told we could gain access only through language or consciousness, insofar as they reflected or represented reality from a position outside of it. Thus, they established the materiality of objects, but at the expense of a dematerialization of language. One of the principal targets of the new materialism was the concept of ideology, to them a realm of ideas, not things. In his famous essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” published in 1970, Althusser preempted the arguments of the new materialism by asserting that ideology does not consist of ideas but exists in the materiality of apparatuses, practices and rituals. Just as importantly, discourse too possessed a materiality and a reality which was the necessary condition of its functions, including the production of meaning.

https://sintesis.uai.cl/index.php/intusfilosofia/article/download/357/328

Nikolai Karpatsky - Kazakhstan’s Unrest

Unlike Kyrgyzstan, which has experienced three revolutions since 2005, and Tajikistan, which suffered a bloody civil war from 1992-1997, Kazakhstan has been one of the most stable and wealthy Central Asian republics. From the dissolution of the USSR up until 2019, the country was ruled by President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former First Secretary of the Kazakhstan branch of the Soviet Communist Party. Externally, Nazarbayev established amicable relations with the United States, European Union, Turkey and China, while also maintaining strong ties to Russia and other former Soviet Republics. Domestically, he built a muscular form of neoliberalism based on fire-sale privatizations – selling over 20,000 state-owned enterprises during his first five years in office, many of them to foreign multinationals.

However, the uneven distribution of resources in this oil-rich nation has occasionally elicited popular resistance. In 2011, oil workers in Zhanaozen in southwest Kazakhstan went on strike for higher pay and better working conditions. After seven months, the strike was crushed when police killed at least fifteen workers and wounded and arrested hundreds more. (Soon after, Tony Blair began advising Nazarbayev on how to launder his reputation in the wake of the massacre – receiving approximately £8 million for his services). Protests erupted again in 2016, when dozens were arrested in demonstrations against planned changes to the land code, which would have allowed foreign citizens to rent land of agricultural importance for up to 25 years. This time, the government was forced to halt the reforms and the ministers of energy and agriculture offered their resignations.  

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/kazakhstans-unrest

Роза Муссауи - В деревне нет времени циклиться на себе

Почему в депрессивных регионах Франции голосуют за ультраправых? Кто из современных политиков говорит "на одном языке с народом"? Есть ли у левых перспективы завоевать симпатии "жёлтых жилетов"? Десятилетнее исследование социолога Бенуа Кокара даёт пищу для размышлений над этими вопросами.

https://humanite-russie.ru/2022/01/21/v-derevne-net-vremeni-tsiklitsya-na-sebe/

Sohale Andrus Mortazavi - Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme

Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble. It’s worse than that: it’s a full-on fraud.

Ponzi schemes of this scale typically target other financial firms, banks, elite institutions, and other wealthy investors. Cryptocurrency, by comparison, is the people’s Ponzi. Cryptocurrency exchanges with user-friendly interfaces, as well as financial services companies like Square and PayPal, allow retail investors with few assets and little financial literacy to buy cryptocurrency on their smartphones

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cryptocurrency-scam-blockchain-bitcoin-economy-decentralization

Race Is a Bad Proxy for Class

Jen Pan analyzes how liberals continue to practice "racecraft" in their fight against Covid-19 and other social crises. Using race as a catchall proxy for exploitation, poverty, joblessness, and inequality obscures the true causes of unequal social outcomes, and thus leads to inadequate solutions.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x3_ObrOm7Z8

Paul Allen Miller - Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth

In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life.

This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth.

Александр Финиарель - Учение Локка всесильно, потому что оно верно!

Как авторы книги «Циничные теории» предлагают бороться с Новой этикой

В прошлом году издательство Individuum опубликовало русский перевод американского бестселлера «Циничные теории». Авторы книги Хелен Плакроуз и Джеймс Линдси утверждают, что нашли корень всех бед современного активизма. Все дело в постмодернизме — критической философии, которая отрицает объективную истину и считает, что раса и гендер — это социальные конструкты.

https://doxajournal.ru/cynical_theories/

Antonio Gramsci and Subaltern Social Groups

Jordan T. Camp speaks with political theorist Marcus Green about Antonio Gramsci, Subaltern Social Groups (Columbia University Press, 2021), the volume he co-edited with the late Joseph Buttigieg.

Conjuncture is a monthly web series and podcast curated and co-produced by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton for the Trinity Social Justice Initiative. It features interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and public intellectuals. Taking its title from Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall’s conceptualization, it highlights intellectual work engaged in struggles over the meaning and memory of particular historical moments. Amidst a global crisis of hegemony, this web series curates conversations about the burning questions of the conjuncture.

Marcus E. Green teaches Political Science at Pasadena City College and serves as secretary of the International Gramsci Society. He is the editor of Rethinking Gramsci (2011), and co-editor (with Joseph A. Buttigieg) of Antonio Gramsci’s Subaltern Social Groups: A Critical Edition of Prison Notebooks 25, published by Columbia University Press in 2021.

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

Laura Tanenbaum - With The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan Wants to Revitalize Feminism

Amia Srinivasan’s new essay collection, The Right to Sex, is less a manifesto than an attempt to think through the concerns of contemporary feminism. Where the book succeeds, it offers the intellectual heft to power a reinvigorated movement to transform the world.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/amia-srinivasan-the-right-to-sex-book-review/

William S. Lewis - Concrete Critical Theory: Althusser's Marxism  

Departing from Althusserian premises, this book rigorously develops a critical theoretic method focused on the analysis of particular, concrete situations of unfreedom and defends it as the correct one for effective socio-political analysis and transformation. Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated, oppressed, or exploited. Moreover, without relying on a general notion of human emancipation, concrete critical theory can suggest political means for the alleviation of these conditions. Because it puts Althusser’s ideas in dialogue with contemporary social science and philosophy, the book as a whole makes contributions to Althusser studies, to Anglo-American political philosophy, and to current debates in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Michele Barrett - Women's Oppression Today

Women's Oppression Today is a classic text in the debate about Marxism and feminism, exploring how gender, sexuality and the "family-household system" operate in relation to contemporary capitalism. In this updated edition, Michèle Barrett surveys the social and intellectual changes that have taken place since the book's original publication, and looks back at the political climate in which the book was written. In a major new essay, she defends the central arguments of the book, at the same time addressing the way such an engagement would play out differently today, over thirty years later. A foreword by Kathi Weeks examines the importance of approaching all feminist theories as events whose repercussions stretch beyond the circumstances of their creation.

Fredric Jameson - The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism’s prominent friends and foes.

Priyamvada Gopal - Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent  

How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire  

Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.