Марксизм и критическая теория (Marxism and critical theory)

2021-06-22 16:12:54 Matthew Shen Goodman - The Power Seeker

Andrew Yang’s Asian American nonpolitics

A miraculous font of earned media, Yang is known, one should stress, and known such that a mentally unwell man assaulting a photographer at one of his campaign photo-ops in February paused upon seeing the candidate to give hail: “Yang For New York!” Though quickly pacified that day, he would later attack an elderly Asian person, Yang claimed during one of these interminable mayoral forums, this time held under the auspices of the Asian American Federation. That such a person could publicly endorse Yang seems revealing of the current Asian American moment, marked as it is by rudimentary salutations and sudden ambushes. Here I’ll point to my middle name to clarify membership in a demographic only now breaching American public life, if you were to go by the past few years of op-eds and news stories, not to mention our self-declarations. Rather suddenly, we are winning Oscars and climbing bestseller lists and growing faster than any other group of eligible voters nationwide. All this, having been so voiceless before, so inchoate now! “Amid Awakening, Asian Americans Are Still Taking Shape as a Political Force,” runs a recent Times headline; “We’re not taught to speak out,” goes a similar piece in the Guardian. You get the idea.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-power-seeker-shen-goodman Открыть/Комментировать

2021-06-22 14:23:07 Всё из-за Путина. Почему не сбылся прогноз о том, что «Единую Россию» в Госдуму поведет Медведев?

В новом эпизоде подкаста «Что случилось» говорим с ведущими субботнего выпуска специальным корреспондентом «Медузы» Андреем Перцевым и политическим обозревателем Константином Гаазе:

— Почему прогнозы политологов (и собственные прогнозы Перцева с Гаазе!) насчет Медведева не сбылись?
— Как Путин нарушил правила, по которым живет российская система власти?
— И как личные интересы президента вступили в противоречие с интересами им же построенного режима?



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2021-06-22 12:14:23 Tony Wood - Retrocession in Ecuador

Thea Riofrancos - Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
Duke University Press: 2020

The results of Ecuador’s presidential elections this year represented an unmistakable setback for the Latin American left. After years of reverses for the Pink Tide, a few recent developments notably the election of Alberto Fernández in Argentina in 2019, the Chilean upsurge of 2019–20 and the return of the mas to power in Bolivia in 2020 suggested that the region’s rightward momentum could be stalled. On 7 February 2021, Ecuador seemed poised to confirm this trend, as Andrés Arauz, a 36-year-old economist and former minister in Rafael Correa’s government, finished comfortably ahead in the first round of voting. Yet when the second round was held on 11 April, it was Arauz’s opponent, the centre-right banker Guillermo Lasso, who emerged victorious with 52 per cent of the vote to Arauz’s 48. After four years during which Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, steadily dismantled the social gains made under his predecessor, the chance to shift the country leftward once more was lost.

A full reckoning of the reasons for this defeat would have to take account of many factors. But central to any discussion must be the role played by years of increasingly bitter contention between two components of the Ecuadorean left: on the one hand, the correísta currents seeking to advance the redistributive priorities of the ‘Citizen’s Revolution’, set in motion after Correa came to power in 2006; on the other, a coalition of predominantly indigenous movements, grouped around the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (conaie) and the political party Pachakutik, calling for a shift away from an economic model that remained overly dependent on the extraction of natural resources.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129/articles/tony-wood-retrocession-in-ecuador Открыть/Комментировать

2021-06-22 07:21:35 Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow

The latest episode of Know Your Enemy is a deep-dive into Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about the Straussian political philosopher Allan Bloom, who achieved late-in-life wealth and fame after publishing his controversial best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-unraveling-allan-bloom-and-saul-bellow Открыть/Комментировать

2021-06-21 19:16:44 Perry Anderson - Timpanaro among the Anglo Saxons

The reception of a thinker outside his own culture is always unpredictable, often paradoxical. The case of Sebastiano Timpanaro is not untypical. In his own writings, there are plainly two principal cultures of reference outside Italy German and French. Germany: homeland of classical philology, of historical materialism, and of psychoanalysis that is, of the objects of his great books on Lachmann, Marx-Engels and Freud. France: homeland of Enlightenment materialism, and (antithetically) of 20th century structuralism. So: Diderot and Holbach object of some of his deepest allegiances; Saussure-Lévi-Strauss-Lacan-Althusser of his most devastating attacks. Beyond such landmarks, Timpanaro had a fairly wide knowledge of both intellectual landscapes. Many other figures from each country populate his writings: from Schlegel, Bopp, Gödel, Meringer, Korsch, Brecht on one side, to Laplace, Boutroux, Zola, Martinet, Sève on the other.

By comparison, Timpanaro had scarcely any points of direct contact with English culture. The only real exceptions lay in the technical field of philology itself: Housman, Dodds, Lloyd-Jones, Kenney. Beyond this specialized area, he had little traffic with English culture as such. The situation was not quite the same with Anglophone culture in a wider sense, since there were a number of American scholars of linguistics Bloomfield, Sapir and Chomsky with whose writing he was acquainted. But overall, there is no question about the distribution of his external attention. The Franco-German axis dominates massively.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129/articles/perry-anderson-timpanaro-among-the-anglo-saxons Открыть/Комментировать

2021-06-21 17:28:49 An evening with a socialist defector: Victor Grossman aka Stephen Wechsler

An American journalist, writer and popular speaker, who defected to the USSR in 1952, Victor Grossman has since lived in East Germany, then the reunified Germany, chronicling life, politics and humanity.

Victor's latest book is published by Monthly Review Press and titled "A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee"



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2021-06-21 14:27:58 Паоло Вирно, Кристина Кайндль, Спенсер Саншайн - Три текста о новом фашизме

В сборник вошли три текста, освещающие три области, в которых происходит сегодня столкновение неофашистских и леворадикальных идей. Согласно Паоло Вирно, представителю автономистского марксизма, в эпоху деградации как парламентской, так и «рабочей», «индустриальной» демократии новый фашизм ведет борьбу за колонизацию жизни вне сферы парламентаризма и за пределами «завода и офиса». Кристина Кайндль анализирует отношения неолиберализма и ультраправой политики в электоральной сфере, а историк анархизма Спенсер Саншайн – противостояние левых и неонацистов (т.н. «национал-анархистов») в области субкультуры. Открыть/Комментировать

2021-06-21 12:15:04 James Dunkerley - The Pacification of Central America: Political Change in the Isthmus, 1987-1993

This unique guide to the politics and recent history of Central America by one of its most distinguished commentators opens with a succinct overview of pacification and democracy in the region. Dunkerley focuses on the causes and consequences of the ending of civil war in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Drawing on a wide range of local and international sources, he stresses the variety of means by which peace has been sought and achieved. He also analyses economic performance, relations with the US, refugee and human rights problems, narcotics and corruption, and the issue of war crimes. The second section of the book comprises a detailed chronology covering all key developments between 1987 and 1993. the book concludes with indispensable appendices which clearly set out statistical profiles of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua for the decade since 1982. they document US economic and military aid to Central America, the dates and results of regional elections, and provide statistics on refugees and displaced persons. The Pacification of Central America is a valuable tool of reference for anyone with an interest in the complicated and often confusing politics of the region. Открыть/Комментировать