Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article by Susan Roberts:
“Are Modern Cities Sustainable?”
Bonus quote: “9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.” The Communist Manifesto
Link to a book review by Mike Beggs of In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution by Geoff Mann:
“The Keynesian Counterrevolution”
Bonus links: “The Left in a Foxhole?” (excerpt from Mann’s book) and “Liberalism: An Ideology of Exclusion” (this article rebuts Begg’s discussion of classical and modern liberalism, indicating that the archetype of all forms of liberalism is a politics of exclusion; in this case, merely elevating “the bourgeois and the intelligentsia” above others) and War and Revolution. Rethinking the Twentieth Century and Domenico Losurdo on Two Epidemics and “The Class Struggle on Wall Street” (“The problem [with Keynesianism] is, the rentier doesn’t want to be euthanized. Capital is not going to say, ‘okay, our work here is done, goodbye.’ So to maintain the social position of money-owners, you have to create an artificial shortage of money, and that’s another way of looking at the job of the central bank.”)
Bonus quote:
“class struggle is ultimately the struggle for the meaning of society ‘as such’, the struggle for which of the two classes will impose itself as the stand-in for society ‘as such’, thereby degrading its other into the stand-in for the non-Social (the destruction of, the threat to, society).
“To simplify: Does the masses’ struggle for emancipation pose a threat to civilization as such, since civilization can thrive only in a hierarchical social order? Or is it that the ruling class is a parasite threatening to drag society into self-destruction, so that the only alternative to socialism is barbarism?” Slavoj Žižek, Afterword to Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin From 1917 (pp. 209-10).
Link to an article by Adam Johnson:
“DSA-Endorsed Judge’s Bail Reforms Prompt Media Attack”
Bonus links: …And the Poor Get Prison, The Five Filters of the Mass Media Machine, “Liberal Philadelphia DA is Impeached by Pennsylvania House; What Are the Allegations?” and “Meet Larry Krasner”
Link to an article by Jonathan Cook:
“The UK’s Hidden Role in Assange’s Detention”
Bonus links: “The Scourging of Julian Assange” and “British Judge Refuses to Overturn Julian Assange’s Arrest Warrant” and “Inside WikiLeaks: Working with the Publisher that Changed the World” and “U.K. and Ecuador Conspire to Deliver Julian Assange to U.S. Authorities” and “Guardian Ups Its Vilification of Julian Assange”
Link to an article by Timothy Bryar:
“Preferring Zizek’s Bartleby Politics,” International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol 12, No 1 (2018).
Bonus links: Crowds and Party, “Rimbaud’s Systematic Derangement of the Senses” and “John Cage’s Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse”
Bonus quotes: “When the self ceases to exist, the world exists.” Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Finger and the Moon: Zen Teachings and Koans and “The Sunrise Movement seems much more positive to me. I love that [students] are not going to school and are calling for people to not go to school. I think that’s awesome. Because young people’s job . . . is to reproduce the society that exists. So if they say, ‘No, we’re not going to do that, we have to stop right now. Reproducing this society is the thing we can’t do…’ To step back and say, ‘No, we want to do something different’ — I think that’s really powerful and very smart on them.” Malcolm Harris, “The Millennial Condition: History, Revolution, and Generational Analysis”
Link to an interview with Linda Gordon, author of The Second Coming of the KKK (2017), conducted by Jack Smith IV:
“Why Women Have Always Been Essential to White Supremacist Movements”
Link to an interview with John Pilger, conducted by Dennis J Bernstein and Randy Credico:
“Mainstream Media and Imperial Power”
Bonus link: “Clinton, Assange and the War on Truth” and “Honoring Robert Parry”
Link to an article by
“Untying PropOrNot: Who They Are … and a Look at 2017’s Biggest Fake News Story”
This article is rather poorly written, full of self-congratulatory statements, gossipy digressions, and poor organization. It also succumbs to the philosophically naive belief that “objective” journalism free from ideology is possible — as Rex Butler put it, “it is not simply a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest being the least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already — whether we know it or not — made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on.” But in spite of all that, the article does point to useful information about the likely source of this neo-McCarthyist campaign within the Clinton political camp.
Bonus links: “Washington Post Reporter Spreads Blacklist of Independent Journalist Sites” and “Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies” and “New York Times Cashes in on Facebook’s News Censorship” and “From Facebook to Policebook” and “The New Blacklist”
Link to an excerpt from the book The End of Imagination (2016) by Arundhati Roy:
“The NGO-ization of Resistance”
Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and “How Corporate Power Converted Wealth Into Philanthropy for Social Control” and “The Joy of Inequality: The Libidinal Economy of Compassionate Consumerism” and “Preferring Zizek’s Bartleby Politics”
Link to an interview with Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2018), conducted by Sam Adler-Bell:
Bonus links: “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State” and I, Daniel Blake and Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare and The State and Revolution and “How to Make a Pencil” and “Welcome to the Black Box” and “Can Algorithms Violate Fair Housing Laws?” and “Algorithmic Accountability” and “Love in the Age of Data” and “algorithmic despotism” and Mathwashing and Mladen Dolar on “University Discourse”