Марксизм и критическая теория (Marxism and critical theory)

2021-05-19 17:39:53 Pandora's Box, E4: Goodbye Mrs. Ant

This part focuses on attitudes to nature and tells the story of the insecticide DDT, which was first seen as a savior to humankind in the 1940s, only to be claimed as a part of the destruction of the entire ecosystem in the late 60s. It also outlines how the sciences of entomology and ecology were transformed by political and economic pressures.

The episode appears to be named after the 1959 film Goodbye, Mrs. Ant. Clips from the 1958 horror movie Earth vs. the Spider and the 1941 grasshopper cartoon Hoppity Goes to Town are also featured.

Insects were a huge problem in the United States and they often ruined entire crops. Emerging in the 1940s DDT and other insecticides seemed to be the solution. As more insecticides were invented, the science of entomology changed focus from insect classification, to primarily testing new insecticides and exterminating insects rather than cataloging them. But as early as 1946-48 entomologists began to notice that insecticides were having a negative impact on other animals, particularly birds.

Chemical companies portrayed the battle against insects as a struggle for existence and their promotional films from the 1950s invoke Charles Darwin. Darwin biographer James Moore notes how the battlefield and life and death aspects of Darwin's theories were emphasised to suit the Cold War years. Scientists believed that they were seizing power from evolution and redirecting it by controlling the environment.

In 1962 biologist Rachel Carson released the book Silent Spring, which was the first serious attack on pesticides and outlined their harmful side effects. It caused a public outcry but had no immediate effect on the use of pesticides. Entomologist Gordon Edwards retells how he made speeches critical of Carson's book. He eats some DDT on camera to show how he'd demonstrate its safety during these talks.

The spraying of DDT in the growing suburbs brought the side effects to the attention of the wealthy and articulate middle classes. Victor Yannacone, a suburbanite and lawyer, helped found the Environmental Defense Fund with the aim to legally challenge the use of pesticides. They argued that the chemicals were becoming more poisonous as they spread, as evidenced by the disappearance of the Peregrine Falcon.

In 1968 they got a hearing on DDT in Madison, Wisconsin. It became headline news, with both sides claiming that everything America stood for was at stake. Biologist Thomas Jukes is shown singing a pro-DDT parody on America the Beautiful he sent to Time magazine at the time of the trial. Hugh Iltis describes how in 1969 a scientist testified at the hearing about how DDT appears in breast milk and accumulate in the fat tissue of babies. This got massive media attention.

Where once chemicals were seen as good, now they were bad. In the late 60s ecology was a marginal science. But Yannacone used ecology as a scientific basis to challenge the DDT defenders' idea of evolution. Similar to how the science of entomology had been changed in the 1950s, ecology was transformed by the social and political pressures of the early 70s. Ecologists became the guardians of the human relationship to nature.



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2021-05-19 16:01:35 Fighting For Their Own Servitude

From Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise to Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, one of the most fundamental and most disturbing questions of politics has been: why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation? The strange thing isn't that some people steal or occasionally go on strike, but that hungry people don't always steal, and workers aren't always on strike. This question has always had to address the existence of something like the "far right": from monarchist tyranny to fascism to "democratic" authoritarianism. Today as the left debates the utility of the word "fascism," the staying power of Trumpism, the meaning of right-wing populism, join us for an open-ended discussion on what it means for people to fight for their own servitude.

Jason Read, Robyn Marasco, Warren Montag, Asad Haider



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2021-05-19 14:21:00 Тодд Мэй - Анархизм от Фуко к Рансьеру

Как правило, между анархизмом и современной французской философской мыслью естественного родства никто не усматривает. Из ключевых мыслителей современной французской философии, обращавшихся к политическим проблемам — Жак Деррида, Жиль Делёз, Жан-Франсуа Лиотар, Мишель Фуко, Ален Бадью, Жак Рансьер, никто явно не придерживался анархистской традиции. Из них разве что Рансьер использовал иногда этот термин в том же примерно смысле, в каком его использует большинство анархистов. Имеет место активный диалог этих мыслителями с марксистской традицией, и часто этот диалог включает в себя различные виды модификации марксистской мысли. Однако, учитывая искажения, сделанные с целью привести Маркса в соответствие с современным мышлением, можно было бы задаться вопросом: может, для них было бы лучше просто отыскать новую традицию для включения в неё своей мысли?

https://syg.ma/@riedaktsiia-akrateia/todd-mei-anarkhizm-ot-fuko-k-ransieru Открыть/Комментировать

2021-05-19 11:36:12 Sidney J. Lemelle, Robin D.G. Kelley - Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora

This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its “New World” descendants. Combining literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics, Imagining Home offers a fresh and creative approach to the history of Pan-Africanism and diasporic movements. A critical part of the book’s overall project is an examination of the legal, educational and political institutions and structures of domination over Africa and the African diaspora. Class and gender are placed at center stage alongside race in the exploration of how the discourses and practices of Pan-Africanism have been shaped.

Other issues raised include the myriad ways in which grassroots religious and cultural movements informed Pan-Africanist political organizations; the role of African, African-American and Caribbean intellectuals in the formation of Pan-African thought including W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Adelaide Casely Hayford; the historical, ideological and institutional connections between African-Americans and South Africans; and the problems and prospects of Pan-Africanism as an emancipatory strategy for black people throughout the Atlantic. Открыть/Комментировать

2021-05-19 08:07:41 Роман Тиса - Фанон и освобождение человека

Алжирский революционер Фанон известен, прежде всего, как теоретик революционного насилия или даже как популяризатор его терапевтических свойств. Хотя такое толкование его теоретического наследия не лишено оснований и в его защиту можно привести немало цитат из фаноновских текстов, оно свидетельствует скорее о поверхностном прочтении его произведений и непонимании его личности; неспособности понять обстоятельства, в которых формировались его взгляды. Фанон был страстным, но рациональным мыслителем — вполне в духе Маркса. Рассматривая то же самое насилие, он стремился вписать его в более широкий контекст, в котором оно могло быть поставлено на службу политическим, социальным и психологическим целям. Он анализировал мир, чтобы объяснить его; объяснял, чтобы изменить

http://rev-cult.ru/fanon/ Открыть/Комментировать

2021-05-18 20:37:50 Павел Магута - Униформа мысли: как форма стирает самость человека, лишает сострадания и чувства вины

После подавления зимних протестов 2021-го к российским силовикам прицепилась кличка «космонавты» — в оцеплениях стояли упакованные в броню костюма и герметичные шлемы безымянные солдаты без опознавательных знаков. В это же время во Франции гражданам запретили публиковать имена и другие данные жандармов. Мировая политика стремится к тотальной безопасности сотрудников правоохранительных органов: униформа обезличивает отдельного полицейского, поэтому ответственность за насилие несут не индивиды, а вся структура внутренних войск. В то же время, идентификация и называние же каждого силовика, применяющего грубую силу к протестующим, возвращает эту ответственность субъекту, сняв её с коллектива.

Философ и художник Павел Магута исследует феномен униформы и то, как она позволяет человеку чувствовать себя частью глобального единства: возможны ли всеобщая безопасность и коллективная вина, как человеческая психика воспринимает единство формы, почему общество движется в сторону проектов, об опасности которых предупреждал Мишель Фуко, системе, где послушание становится автоматическим, а люди колёсиками машины, как под маской трансформируется человеческое «Я», почему «Проект „Разгром“» из романа Паланика становится реальным, и как полицейские избивают людей от их же имени.

https://discours.io/articles/social/pavel-maguta-uniform-of-thoughts Открыть/Комментировать

2021-05-18 16:54:25 Noah Kulwin - Narrative Napalm

Malcolm Gladwell’s apologia for American butchery

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown and Company, 256 pages.

According to Gladwell himself, his latest book is “designed to be heard (as well as read),” which depending on one’s interpretation is either savvy marketing or a pre-emptive defense of the extreme cringe on the page, peppered with asides like “That is so Air Force” or “And this is my favorite part.” The Bomber Mafia is adapted from a few episodes of Gladwell’s chart-topping podcast, Revisionist History, and the book is relatively slim, with a large typeface that while certainly more accessible to the sextegenarian-and-up titan-of-industry types with whom Gladwell loves to consort helps to give the impression that the book is meatier stuff than it really is. Form imitating substance.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/narrative-napalm-kulwin Открыть/Комментировать

2021-05-18 14:06:10 Barbara Harlow - After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing

In recent years, three of the main sites of liberation struggle in the world Palestine, El Salvador, and South Africa appear to have been transformed into arenas of negotiation and peace processes. Talk of revolution, violence, and state repression has been replaced by the promise or its lack of truth commissions, reconciliation, amnesties. Barbara Harlow, in this powerful and passionate study, examines this change through the prism of political assassination. Ghassan Kanafani, Roque Dalton, and Ruth First, all of whom laboured on behalf of social revolutions they did not see, are case studies in her exploration of the intricate relations between politically engaged imaginative writing and participation in revolutionary struggle. The stories of their lives and deaths illustrate the causes and circumstances of political assassination and provoke reflection on the wave of self-questioning currently engaging the PLO, the FMLN, and the ANC. In a moving consideration of the complex tensions that motivate and condition political writing, After Lives explores the costs and gains that accrue to writers who put their works and their lives on the line. Открыть/Комментировать