Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article by Christian Parenti:
“Saving the Planet Without Self-Loathing”
Bonus links: “Greta Thunberg Is No Genius – She’s an Apostle” and “‘Clever Statistics and Creative PR’ Cover Inaction on Climate Crisis” and “How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet”
Link to an article by Joan Roelofs:
“Military Keynesianism Marches On”
Bonus links: “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” and Modern Money Green Economics for a New Era and “Documents Expose How Hollywood Promotes War on Behalf of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA” and “American Sniper?” and “culture industry” and “How the U.S. Military Undermines the American Economy” and Super Imperialism and Review of The Global Minotaur
Link to an interview with Nancy Fraser, conducted by Olimpia Malatesta:
“A Feminism Aimed at Liberating All Women Must Be Anti-Capitalist”
This makes a rather incongruous endorsement of “left populism” in the context of “anti-capitalism”, which is a bit of an oxymoron. Fraser is too tepid here — she’s mostly offering a slightly watered-down version of ideas that have been circulated by others for some time, with little justification for watering things down. Overarchingly, though, she is astutely arguing Walter Benjamin’s maxim that behind every rise of fascism lies a failed revolution.
Bonus links: Review of Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (includes a useful questioning of Fraser’s “social reproduction” theory) and “On Sex Without Identity: Feminist Politics and Sexual Difference” (this interview expresses a more coherent position than Fraser’s) and “Alt-right Trump Supporters and Left-wing Bernie Sanders Fans Should Join Together to Defeat Capitalism” and “Today’s Anti-fascist Movement Will Do Nothing to Get Rid of Right-wing Populism – It’s Just Panicky Posturing” and “The U.S. Political Scene: Whiteness and the Legitimacy Crisis of Global Capitalism” and “About the Fate of Contemporary Girls” Excerpt (“women should be much more wary today of what capitalism is offering them in the way of liberation than they should be of men.”) and “Supporting a Feminism for the 99%” and “Against the Populist Temptation”
Link to an article by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:
“Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?”
This article raises some excellent points and identifies many key issues (for instance, aptly referencing Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”), though its analysis is often vague and occasionally superficial (that vagueness and superficiality being explainable in political terms)
Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and Crowds and Party and The State and Revolution and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (the gist of Taylor’s theoretical framework is more thoroughly stated in this book) and …And the Poor Get Prison and “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People” and “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State”
Link to an article by Muhammed Shabeer:
“European Parliament’s Anti-Communist Resolution Draws Widespread Criticism”
Bonus links: “The End of Anti-Fascism” (“More than simply changing, historical memory is actively reshaped by pop-culture representations as well as by active political forces.”) and “The Two Totalitarianisms” (“It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.”) and “Ernst Nolte’s Revenge”
Link to an interview with Rafael Correa & Jean-Luc Mélenchon, conducted by Denis Rogatyuk & Patricio Mery Bell:
“Lawfare: The Technocrats’ War on Democracy”
Bonus links: “Democracy: When the Opposition is the Media” and “Their Little Show” and An Alger Hiss Memoir
Link to an article by Rob Urie:
“Strike for the Environment, Strike for Social Justice, Strike!”
Bonus links: “Greta Thunberg in Review” and “Greta Thunberg Is No Genius – She’s an Apostle”
Link to a review by Fabian Van Onzen of the book Value and Crisis: Essays on Labour, Money and Contemporary Capitalism (2019) by Alfredo Saad-Filho:
Bonus links: Review of Making Money and “How Decades of Neoliberalism Led to the Era of Right-Wing Populism” (this article reviews another book on the same topic but is rather questionably historicist, though it is absolutely correct to note that “all policies — whether statist or neoliberal — are normative”) and “When Socialist Hungary Went Neoliberal” (“neoliberalism represents a class project, aiming not so much to ‘restore’ the power of economic elites . . . but instead to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation following the global crisis of capital accumulation (1968-75). . . . as neoliberalism gradually gained traction amongst ruling classes across the world it has come to represent the current phase of global capitalism. In this regard, neoliberalism is, among others, characterized by a structural reorientation of the state towards export-oriented, financialized capital, open-ended commitments to market-like governance systems, privatization and corporate expansion, a deep aversion to social collectives and the progressive redistribution of wealth on the part of ruling classes, etc.”) (note that this interviewee makes much-contested if not outright dubious claims about “Soviet-style state capitalism” and “the Stalinist myth that the Soviet bloc regimes were somehow ‘post-capitalist’ societies”, that is, he calls the former USSR “state capitalist” rather than communist/socialist)
Link to a review by Sam Husseini:
Quote by Slavoj Žižek from “Margaret Atwood’s Work Illustrates Our Need to Enjoy Other People’s Pain”:
“In his Summa Theologica, philosopher Thomas Aquinas concludes that the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them. Aquinas, of course, takes care to avoid the obscene implication that good souls in heaven can find pleasure in observing the terrible suffering of other souls, because good Christians should feel pity when they see suffering. So, will the blessed in heaven also feel pity for the torments of the damned? Aquinas’s answer is no: not because they directly enjoy seeing suffering, but because they enjoy the exercise of divine justice.
“But what if enjoying divine justice is the rationalisation, the moral cover-up, for sadistically enjoying the neighbour’s eternal suffering? What makes Aquinas’s formulation suspicious is the surplus enjoyment watching the pain of others secretly introduces: as if the simple pleasure of living in the bliss of heaven is not enough, and has to be supplemented by the enjoyment of being allowed to take a look at another’s suffering – only in this way, the blessed souls ‘may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly’.
***
“In short, the sight of the other’s suffering is the obscure cause of desire which sustains our own happiness (bliss in heaven) – if we take it away, our bliss appears in all its sterile stupidity.”