Michael Hudson - The Bubble and Beyond - Fictitious capital, debt deflation and global crisis  

The Bubble and Beyond is a compendium and brief history of economic thought and why it matters not only to Americans, but to people everywhere. You will find yourself referring to it again and again as a fount of information, much of which has been out of favor for decades and/or suppressed by financial interests. Professor Hudson provides chapter and verse, names names, and explains the mistakes and outright fraud that have often been committed in the name of political ideology, by both the right and the left. You will encounter all of the heroes and miscreants of economics, industry, and politics from the Bible and Babylon to present day banksters, misguided FED policy-makers, and captains of the finance/insurance/real estate sector and the military-industrial complex. In one chapter after another, Hudson tells who did what and to whom and who wins and who loses. He amply shows why the world is in such a financial mess and what can be done about it. PROFESSOR HUDSON'S most controversial claim is that “Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.” The question he poses is whether debt non-payment will lead to worldwide foreclosures including sell-offs of public domain assets by debt-strapped local and national governments or whether the debts will be written down in line with the ability to pay, as has been done by corporations via Chapter 11 bankruptcies and reorganizations throughout a more enlightened modern economic history. In Professor Hudson's bold view, debt write-downs versus privatization and sell-offs of public domain assets are the economic issues that will dominate politics over the next generation.

Иероним К. - Не ваши бро: почему крипта и NFT — худшее, что с нами случилось

Итак, евангелисты крипты обожают рассказывать о том, насколько она безопасна, эффективна, децентрализована и лишена всех болезней современного человека. Буквально каждая из характеристик выше не имеет ничего общего с действительностью. Но на самом деле, корень проблемы заключается в несовместимости всех этих характеристик. Любая система, вообще предполагающая хоть какую-то безопасность, определяется рядом компромиссов между эффективностью (или скоростью), доступностью и самой безопасностью. Да, иногда сильные технологические скачки позволяют повысить эффективность всей системы без дополнительных издержек, но необходимость балансировать эти критерии остается всегда — потому что эта проблема не инженерная или технологическая, а архитектурная; проблема не программы, а протокола, по которому она работает

https://dtf.ru/nenanimalsia/1049137-ne-vashi-bro-pochemu-kripta-i-nft-hudshee-chto-s-nami-sluchilos

S. Leonard, D. Woodly - The Political Philosophy of Care

In Reckoning, Deva Woodly makes a case for radical Black feminist pragmatism, a philosophy «that takes lessons from many twentieth-century ideologies and forges them into a political ethic for our times»

In her forthcoming book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements, New School professor Deva Woodly makes a case for radical Black feminist pragmatism as “a new approach to politics, one that takes lessons from many twentieth-century ideologies and forges them into a political ethic for our times,” and describes care as one of its key elements. The politics of care “holds that the activity of governance in a society that hopes to be just must be oriented toward the responsibility to exercise and provide care for those most impacted by oppression and domination.” The care paradigm has become popular, she notes, after decades of eroding social supports, stagnating wages, and demands to work longer hours.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-political-philosophy-of-care

Stuart Macintyre - A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917–1933

A Proletarian Science maps the intellectual achievements of a generation of autodidact Marxists whose formation owed little to the established institutions of learning. Men like Tommy Jackson, William Paul, Tom Bell, J. T. Murphy, Will McLaine, George Harvey, Will Lawther, Noah Ablett, Noah Rees, and W. W. Craik read their way to Marxism under their own steam. The respect for intellectual self-improvement characteristic of Victorian radicalism provided a basis during the intense class struggles of early twentieth century Britain for the vigorous growth of an independent working-class apparatus of Marxist adult education. Macintyre analyses the characteristics of this autodidact tradition. On the plus side were the energy and determination displayed in the pursuit of knowledge, the voracious appetite for books, and the polymath range of intellectual curiosity. It was characteristic that J.T. Murphy’s 1917 agitational pamphlet on shop steward organization should list Lewis Morgan on Ancient History, Havelock Ellis, Walt Whitman and Ibsen among the further reading recommended to the militants. Against this Macintyre sets the over-simplification and dogmatism implicit in the project of creating a distinct and complete ‘proletarian science’, the reverential attitude to the text, the tendency to reduce Marxism to a catechism of received wisdom to be transmitted, at worst, by rote learning and tested by formal examination. The Achilles Heel of the autodidact tradition was its positivist appetite for facts, an appetite which Macintyre uses to explain the extraordinary post-war popularity of the self-important, unimaginative but tremendously well-informed J.T. Walton Newbold, one of the few middle-class intellectuals to feature in the study. Separate chapters on Historical Materialism, The Dialectic, Economics, and Class, State and Politics reveal the limitations of a Marxism that was frequently mechanical in its handling of the problems of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, and prone to conspiracy theory in its treatment of ideology and of the state. The absence of English-language editions of most of Marx’s early works, of his writings on politics, and (until 1929) of Lenin’s What is to be Done, tended to reinforce this orientation.

Antonio Negri - Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context  

This first volume in a new trilogy of books by Antonio Negri examines and develops the Italian tradition of radical Marxist thought known as operaismo or ‘autonomist Marxism’ – the tradition to which Negri himself adheres and in which he is a leading figure. The tradition of operaismo emphasizes the role of the worker in capitalism and the primacy of class struggle. Within this framework, Negri’s key contribution has been to theorize the transition from the ‘mass worker’ to the ‘social worker’ – that is, to broaden the concept of living labour and liberate it from the theoretical cages that locked it into the factory. It was only by moving beyond the ideology and political practice of the mass worker that the revolutionary character of the Marxist concept of class could be updated for our times and developed in relation to the exploitation and socialization of living labour, including networks of cognitive work, reproductive work and care work, networks which also have the potential to become the bases for new forms of resistance to capitalist exploitation. By bringing together Negri’s key contributions to the reconceptualization of the worker and class struggle, this volume demonstrates the vitality of the Marxist tradition of operaismo and its continued relevance for understanding the key social and political struggles of our time.

Edna Bonhomme - Feminism and Crisis

Women for decolonization and debt justice

In her latest book, A Decolonial Feminism, the French political scientist Françoise Vergès points out that “billions of women take care of cleaning the world every day, tirelessly.” She invites readers to consider a moment when such workers withheld their labor and stopped cleaning, taking us to Paris, where a strike among cleaners brought up questions about the racialized and gendered nature of cleaning jobs in France. According to Vergès, the cleaners’ strike of 2018 a forty-five-day grievance led by mostly ethnic minority and migrant women workers of Gare du Nord ignited a battle about the nature of work but also about the unexamined, colonial legacy of racialized labor in France.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/feminism-and-crisis-bonhomme

Tadeusz Kowalik - From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland
 
In the 1980s and 90s, renowned Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik played a leading role in the Solidarity movement, struggling alongside workers for an alternative to "really-existing socialism" that was cooperative and controlled by the workers themselves. In the ensuing two decades, "really-existing" socialism has collapsed, capitalism has been restored, and Poland is now among the most unequal countries in the world. Kowalik asks, how could this happen in a country that once had the largest and most militant labor movement in Europe?

This book takes readers inside the debates within Solidarity, academic and intellectual circles, and the Communist Party over the future of Poland and competing visions of society. Kowalik argues that the failures of the Communist Party, combined with the power of the Catholic Church and interference from the United States, subverted efforts to build a cooperative and democratic economic order in the 1990s. Instead, Poland was subjected to a harsh return to the market, resulting in the wildly unequal distribution of the nation's productive property often in the hands of former political rulers, who, along with foreign owners, constitute the new capitalist class. Kowalik aptly terms the transformation from command to market economy an epigone bourgeois revolution, and asks if a new social transformation is still possible in Poland

Joe Pateman - Africa was at the centre of Lenin’s work

Marxism, we are told, is Eurocentric and has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars and activists. Some have even denounced Marxism as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa. Vladimir Lenin is implicated in this critique. In a far-reaching study of Lenin’s ideas, Joe Pateman argues Lenin placed Africa at the centre of his analysis of imperialism and contemporary capitalism. Here, the author reflects on the key aspects of his analysis.

https://roape.net/2022/01/27/africa-was-at-the-centre-of-lenins-work/

The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy

Amazon is the most powerful corporation on the planet and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, has become the richest person in history, and one of the few people to profit from a global pandemic. Its dominance has reshaped the global economy itself: we live in the age of 'Amazon Capitalism'. 'One-click' instant consumerism and its immense variety of products has made Amazon a worldwide household name, with over 60% of US households subscribing to Amazon Prime. In turn, these subscribers are surveilled by the corporation. Amazon is also one of the world's largest logistics companies, resulting in weakened unions and lowered labor standards. The company has also become the largest provider of cloud-computing services and home surveillance systems, not to mention the ubiquitou Alexa.  With cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. The Cost of Free Shipping shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate and be primed to resist

Mitchell Abidor - The Gramsci of the Brazilian Right

Once a major influence on Jair Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho’s ambition is to establish a new right-wing, nationalist cultural hegemony in Brazil.

Carvalho attacks the alleged nexus of big money, the left, and the Jews with more subtlety. The Frankfurt School, he claims, “was not only founded by a capitalist billionaire Felix Weyl” [sic] but was “always led by people from stylish families, like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, and their kind.” This description of the birth of the Frankfurt School did not keep Carvalho from alleging, in an interview with a right-wing American website, that it was founded by the Communist International as a means of weakening Western society.

This conflation of billionaires, Jews, and left-wing thinkers is hardly a secondary feature of Carvalho’s worldview. He holds the “cultural Marxism” it represents chiefly responsible for the moral rot of Brazilian and Western society. In this respect Carvalho is not an innovator. The far right has inveighed against “cultural Marxism” for decades, leveling complaints that are now resonating in the lower depths of the global movement Carvalho represents in Brazil. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, included “cultural Marxists” among his enemies in his 1,500-page manifesto, discovered after his killing spree in 2011.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-gramsci-of-the-brazilian-right

Annette Kuhn - Women's Pictures. Feminism and Cinema

This pioneering and influential work of feminist theory has been extensively updated by the author to chart the changes in feminist film theory and practice between the eighties and the nineties. Readers, whether engaged in the making of films, the study of them, or simply the pleasure of viewing them, will appreciate the way in which the author discusses and demystifies the current methods of analysis, including semiotic and psychoanalytical approaches.

The films used as points of discussion are drawn from both mainstream and alternative cinema, institutions which are themselves examined in relation to their production, distribution and exhibition practices. The thesis proposed by Annette Kuhn is an exciting one: namely, that feminism and cinema, taken together, could provide the basis for new forms of expression, providing the opportunity for a truly feminist alternative cinema in terms of film language, of reading that language and of representing the world.

«Компенсации надо требовать непосредственно у Елизаветы II».

Два отрывка из исследования о «гражданах СССР»

Одна из самых причудливых политических субкультур современной России — «граждане СССР». Изданная центром «Сова» книга Михаила Ахметьева «Граждане без СССР» попытка дать систематическое научное описание этому явлению. «Медиазона» публикует выдержки из двух глав о повлиявших на «граждан» зарубежных движениях и об их собственных взглядах на историю и право.

https://zona.media/article/2022/01/19/ussr

Посткоммунизм, нефункциональный русский и марки Лукача

Интервью с социологом Иваном Селеньи и экономистом Петером Михайи

Патриарх венгерской социологии Иван Селеньи, в прошлом году отметивший 83-летие, уже тридцать лет изучает специфику развития стран бывшего социалистического лагеря. Не так давно он обобщил свои исследования посткоммунистического капитализма в книге, написанной в соавторстве со своим учеником, экономистом Петером Михайи (на русском выходила их первая совместная книга «Получатели ренты», в которой дана критика работы Тома Пикетти «Капитал в XXI веке»). По просьбе «Горького» с Иваном и Петером поговорил Николай Проценко: он обсудил с ними отличия венгерского посткоммунизма от китайского и российского, особенности преподавания русского языка в Венгрии 1960-х, а также сегодняшнее восприятие таких знаковых для их культуры ХХ века фигур, как экономист Янош Корнаи и философ Дьердь Лукач.

https://gorky.media/context/postkommunizm-nefunktsionalnyj-russkij-i-marki-lukacha/

Ernest Mandel - The Place of Marxism in History  

At a time when many repentant leftists are proclaiming Marxism incapable of explaining the new phenomena of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Ernest Mandel reminds us that Marxism drew from its very inception on the advances of all the social sciences and emancipation movements of its time. In a survey of the multiple sources of Marx and Engels' theory, Mandel identifies the specific contribution of the two friends in the various disciplines to which they applied themselves: philosophy, political economy, social history, revolutionary organization, self-organization of the working class, emancipation movements, and internationalism. Concluding that Marxism "constantly learns from perpetually changing reality" and that it is the conscious expression of the real movement of workers toward self-emancipation, Mandel proposes a formula which provides for a dialectical interaction between innovation and the verification of established tenets.