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Theory

http://hydrarchy.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-is-left.html

What is the Left?

An excerpt from The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics in Polemics, Verso, 2006.

Civil Society, Citizenship and the Politics of the (Im)possible: Rethinking Militancy in Africa Today by Michael Neocosmos

Abstract

The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This paper makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil

Venezuela 2008: A Libertarian Proposal for the Current Situation

* The Collective Editorship of El Libertario, www.nodo50.org/ellibertario, expounds its vision of which path to follow in the current situation in Venezuela, summed up in the slogan, “Against the (B)oligarchy, demagoguery and corruption: Autonomous struggle of the underdogs!

Democratic Aesthetics: Actual, Radical, Global Call for papers for a themed issue of the journal Culture, Theory and Critique to be published in April 2009

From Ken Knabb:

Dear Friends,

You might find of interest the two webpages linked below.

"2007 and I" is a text by a British contact of mine, Wayne Spencer, recounting his recent personal and political trajectory.

"A Discussion with Ken Knabb" is an email exchange between us that followed.

http://significantfailure.blogspot.com/2008/02/2007-and-i.html

The American economy is in shambles, with a spiraling debt crisis, a vanishing industrial base, and a plummeting dollar. And, as the debacle of the occupation of Iraq continues to demonstrate, the US is finding it increasingly difficult to keep the rest of the world under its hegemonic thumb through military intervention. Giovanni Arrighi's new book, Adam Smith in Beijing, situates this global decline of US power within the context of a epochal shift in the world-system away from North American dominance and towards Asia. Is China the real winner of the "War on Terror"?

New Issue of The Commoner Released

The Commoner N.12 - spring/summer 2007

Value strata, migration and “other  values”  

This issue proposes some lines of enquiry around three interrelated themes: the migratory flows of people in today global factory, the dynamics and hierarchies underpinning the production of value for capital, and the production of values other than those for capital. The search for the connection among these themes is what allows us to weave together these papers so much different in style and subject matter.

saroj giri writes:

"Radical, Subversive Acts
Or, the Myth of Contingency, Freedom"

Saroj Giri

What makes individual cases of excess catapult from the particular to the universal? How is it that one particular event or person gets so highlighted at the expense of all other (counter-factual) particulars, so that the one universalised particular blocks our view of the rest? Isn’t this a prime ideological move in a commodity economy, under capitalism?


So often when we see someone achieving something under capitalism, when we find that somebody has made it big or has been successful in something we usually as a matter of habit perhaps associate it with the person’s individual abilities, luck, sense of enterprise, willingness to take risk etc.

This tendency to take up what is actually an effect of larger social relations to be just an individual thing is a widespread tendency under commodity fetishism. So we see only the individual and refuse to see the overall relations in which the individual exists. If the individual fails, that is due to the personal inability, bad luck etc of the person. If the person succeeds that is due to hard work and sense of enterprise etc of the individual. In either case, the individual is important, apparently.

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