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Standalone interesting political articles thread

Globalisation has been a disaster - Brexit gives us a chance to resist it

Not a bad article from Novara here, quite interesting. Props to Bastani for consistently pushing a critical angle on the EU, even if half their stuff is na na identity politics and Ash Sarka gobbing off about xyz (maybe unfair she is clearly talented). There is a video of the author here debating the annoying Zoe Williams of the Guardian and Another Europe is Possible.

My main concerns are in this viewing Globalisation as several different things or kinds - it is only one thing, with different faces. And in viewing it as reaching its peak, failing, crumbling etc... cant see any evidence for this whatsoever. Not that it matters as the whole debate is too jingoiatic and wordy anyway!

With China dominating Asia and Africa and capital stronger than ever, I also worry about the academic nature of the argument. Being right and smart and well read won't stop capital. How does Oxford PPE and MSC Grace Blakely suggest we can develop powerful participatory groups and institutions which react against capital flight and the bankrupting and destruction of a Britain that doesnt play ball.

Obviously no one person can answer this but I think this is the big unanswered question with Brexit if it assumes a more confrontational form with the EU and neoliberal institutions. How are 'we' going to reign in the City of London corporation etc and create new well paid jobs across Britain, move away from a market model for housing transport healthcare etc.
 
There has been celebrations recently due to the recent censorship of Alex Jones and other right wing nut-jobs. However , it appears that the nut-jobs along with Russia are being used as the justification for corporate censoring of left-wing groups .

A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism
A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism | Democracy Now!


Former FBI agent says tech companies must “silence” sources of “rebellion”
Former FBI agent says tech companies must “silence” sources of “rebellion”

Activists push back on Facebook’s decision to remove a DC protest event
Activists push back on Facebook’s decision to remove a DC protest event

A review of Siva Vaidhyanathan`s book on the subject. He is from Charlotsville university !
Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan – review
 
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The #Resistance Has a New Grift, and Liberals Are the Perfect Mark


We have already begun to move on. Among other harsh critics of the president to emerge from the fluorescent hallways of our three-letter agencies is John Brennan, a stone-cold supporter of unregulated killing and torture abroad, who does not like the cut of Trump’s jib. He did the rounds, saying Trump is unfit for office, whatever that can mean for an office that’s held such paragons of dignity as Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and James Buchanan, to name a few among a grab bag of fools, slaveholders, Indian killers, nonentities and straight crooks.

Brennan is a man who lied to Congress and the public by claiming that America’s drones have never, ever killed a civilian. Only bad guys, you can be sure! But that will be forgotten because Donald Trump stripped him of his security clearance, which will make it incrementally harder for Brennan to convert his retirement into a sinecure fooling various northern Virginia defense contractors into paying him for copy-and-pasting the CIA World Factbook into a PowerPoint.
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Following on from my last post on this thread 5^ on the subject of internet censorship .

Facebook Takes Down Page for Latin American Broadcaster Telesur
HeadlineAug 14, 2018
h13_facebook.jpg

For the second time this year, Facebook has taken down the page of the Latin American broadcaster Telesur English without explanation. In a statement, Telesur said, “This is an alarming development in light of the recent shutting down of pages that don’t fit a mainstream narrative.” Telesur is an international broadcaster that receives funding from the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Bolivia. Last week, Facebook also temporarily took down another page related to Venezuela, the page for the news outlet Venezuela Analysis.
Click to expand...

Facebook Takes Down Page for Latin American Broadcaster Telesur | Democracy Now!
 
Idris2002 said:
Interesting review of the new Mike Davis book:

The Last Man to Know Everything
Click to expand...

He also spent time in London where, through Trotskyist channels, he met Perry Anderson. Impressed by Davis’s essay on the French “regulation school” of political economy, Anderson invited him to join the editorial board of New Left Review in 1980.
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Or, more accurately he was part of the new intake that was forced on Anderson and the old guard following the near collapse (politically) of the journal following it's long series of getting things wrong leading to a hilarious series of madly contradictory twists and turns year by year.

Alongside Old Gods, New Enigmas, one should read “A History of Separation” by the French Marxist collective Endnotes. They chastise “revolutionaries” who “get lost in history, defining themselves by reference to a context of struggle that has no present-day correlate. They draw lines in sand which is no longer there.”...What is most confounding is that Davis knows this. Brenner, his mentor at UCLA, wrote the book on the “Long Downturn,” The Economics of Global Turbulence (2006)—which Endnotes itself relies on for its analysis.
Click to expand...

Endnotes are also not french, they are british and american - and he has totally misread what Brenner's issue of the NLR on the Global Turbulence argued and why endnotes used it to support their periodisation of capitalist development(not 'relies on'). It never argued - as Endnotes do - that the old workers movement is dead and that all programmatic politics are now also part of capital, that the still existing workers movement (as such) can therefore only ever express it's trapped nature and to the benefit of capital. Brenner does no such thing. This was a rather transparent attempt at a name drop that he got totally wrong.

I only skimmed the rest after that last one. Uppity student in act of father-killing.
 
Maybe one for gawkrodger - the book anyway:

The Center Has Fallen and There's No Going Back - Phil Neel talks to Paul Mattick

One of the big points in the book is that the unrest we’ve seen over the past decade was largely not taking place in the hinterland, and that’s one reason it was so easily crushed. The areas that saw it bleed into the hinterland more readily also saw the most successful insurrections, which then had to be destroyed in more nefarious ways. But the dynamic was really one in which people who lived in peri-urban proletarian neighborhoods or even rural areas entered into the downtown core in an attempt to draw attention and disrupt the normal flow of the city. During Occupy, for example, I worked in a wholesale food processing facility in one of Seattle’s southern industrial stretches and lived nearby. In the evenings I would take the train downtown in order to join the protests. The irony here is that the real ability to “shut things down” lay not in the city’s public square, but precisely in the neighborhoods that I lived and worked in. Meanwhile, the downtown cores of almost every major city are literally built with counterinsurgency in mind. So one of the real problems we see is this persistent inability of unrest to take place within the hinterland, because politics is so often seen as being about visibility, or “raising awareness.” Since so much of the hinterland is invisible, it’s just not attractive for these purposes. But when we shift the emphasis from visibility to questions of power, it’s clear that the near hinterland is of central importance.
 
butchersapron said:
Uppity student in act of father-killing.
Click to expand...

Alright, Harold Bloom.

butchersapron said:
The Center Has Fallen and There's No Going Back - Phil Neel talks to Paul Mattick
Click to expand...

That's a great magazine. Is that Paul Mattick Jr? The phrase (& threat of a) 'Global Syria' is genuinely haunting. He's full of them, isn't he, unforgettable dystopian zingers? 'The last days of mankind march on, apparently endlessly', & 'No slight challenge, but the stakes are very high: literally, survival of organized human society in any decent form'. Trotz alledem.
 
butchersapron said:
Maybe one for gawkrodger - the book anyway:

The Center Has Fallen and There's No Going Back - Phil Neel talks to Paul Mattick

One of the big points in the book is that the unrest we’ve seen over the past decade was largely not taking place in the hinterland, and that’s one reason it was so easily crushed. The areas that saw it bleed into the hinterland more readily also saw the most successful insurrections, which then had to be destroyed in more nefarious ways. But the dynamic was really one in which people who lived in peri-urban proletarian neighborhoods or even rural areas entered into the downtown core in an attempt to draw attention and disrupt the normal flow of the city. During Occupy, for example, I worked in a wholesale food processing facility in one of Seattle’s southern industrial stretches and lived nearby. In the evenings I would take the train downtown in order to join the protests. The irony here is that the real ability to “shut things down” lay not in the city’s public square, but precisely in the neighborhoods that I lived and worked in. Meanwhile, the downtown cores of almost every major city are literally built with counterinsurgency in mind. So one of the real problems we see is this persistent inability of unrest to take place within the hinterland, because politics is so often seen as being about visibility, or “raising awareness.” Since so much of the hinterland is invisible, it’s just not attractive for these purposes. But when we shift the emphasis from visibility to questions of power, it’s clear that the near hinterland is of central importance.
Click to expand...

Cheers, just ordered the book on the strength of that.
 
The wiki entry on the VAPS movement of interwar Estonia. While part of the general fascist trend of that period, VAPS combined an apparent (this may be wiki being misleading of course) aversion to anti-semitism with some use of liberal institutions.

Vaps Movement - Wikipedia

That use of such institutions immediately made me think of Bolsanaro in Brazil, and other similar cases. So I think this might be of relevance to current threats.
 
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