Link to an interview with Txema Guijarro, conducted by Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene:
Bonus links: “I Was Fired for Helping Julian Assange, and I Have No Regrets” and “The Guardian Forced to Clarify Misleading Article on Assange and Russia”
Tag: Politics
Peter Bratsis – Political Corruption Under Transnational Capitalism
Link to an article by Peter Bratsis:
“Political Corruption Under Transnational Capitalism: A Marxist View”
Michael Hudson – Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom
Link to an interview of Michael Hudson summarizing his essential books Super Imperialism and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, conducted by Bonnie Faulkner:
“Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom” and
“De-Dollarizing the American Financial Empire”
This interview provides an excellent summary of many of the main points of Hudson’s books. For a latter-day treatment of a portion of these topics, see also The Global Minotaur and “Imperialism in a Coffee Cup.”
Peter Greene – Winners Take All, Education Edition
Link to a review by Peter Greene of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) by Anand Giridharadas:
“Winners Take All, Education Edition”
Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and “Education, Jobs and Capitalism” and Summary of Dupuy on Social Hierarchy and Slavoj Žižek On Political Struggle and “Democracy Is the Enemy” and Oscar Wilde Quote and Review of The New Prophets of Capital and Critique of Cynical Reason and “Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas Review – Superb Hate-reading”
Ian Angus – Barry Commoner: The Systems We Depend on Are Upside Down
Link to an article/review by Ian Angus:
Marcie Smith – Gene Sharp, the Cold War Intellectual Whose Ideas Seduced the Left
Link to an interview of Marcie Smith, conducted by Branko Marcetic:
“Gene Sharp, the Cold War Intellectual Whose Ideas Seduced the Left”
Bonus links: “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One)” and “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part Two)” and Non-violence: A History Beyond the Myth and War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century and Violence and “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said” and Crowds and Party and The Idiot Pool and Walter Benn Michaels on Neoliberalism and The State and Revolution
Bonus quotes:
“rich and powerful men engage in what the writer Kevin Roose has called ‘anarchist cheerleading,’ in keeping with their carefully crafted image as rebels against the authorities. To call for a terrain without rules in the way they do, to dabble in the anarchist cheerleading, may be to sound like you wish for a new world of freedom on the behalf of humankind. But a long line of thinkers has told us that the powerful tend to be the big winners from the creation of a blank-slate, rules-free world.
“The self-styled entrepreneur-rebels were actually seeking to overturn a major project of the Enlightenment– the development of universal rules that applied evenly to all…”
Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018)
“The assumption is that the fight against these excesses should take place in the familiar liberal-democratic frame. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control over the global economy, through the pressure of media exposure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, police investigations etc. What goes unquestioned is the institutional framework of the bourgeois democratic state. This remains sacrosanct even in the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ – the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement and so on. ***
“Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.”
Slavoj Žižek, “Democracy Is the Enemy”
Sam Natale & John Sadek – The Socialist Origins of Public Defense
Link to an article by Sam Natale & John Sadek:
Thomas Scripps – The Guardian’s Direct Collusion with Media Censorship by Secret Services Exposed
Link to an article by Thomas Scripps:
“The Guardian’s Direct Collusion with Media Censorship by Secret Services Exposed”
Bonus link: “New York Times Admits it Sends Stories to Government for Approval Before Publication”
Rob Urie – Race, Identity and the Political Economy of Hate
Link to an article by Rob Urie:
“Race, Identity and the Political Economy of Hate”
Bonus links: “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class” and “The Politics of Identity” and “The Ideology of Postmodernism is to Present All Existing Injustice as an Effect of Discrimination” and The Trouble With Diversity and Racecraft and “Should We Care About Inequality?” and “King of the Hate Business: Inside the Southern Poverty Law Center”
Yanis Varoufakis – “We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Debts”
Link to an interview with Yanis Varoufakis conducted by David Broder:
“We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Debts”
Bonus links: “Syriza Let Us Down — But We Can Still End Austerity” and “Greece: a Chronology From January 25, 2015 to 2019” and “Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Syriza Was a Bigger Blow to the Left Than Thatcher'”