By Joshua Clover
How swiftly do genres of the quarantine emerge! Notable among them is the discovery of the relation between the present pandemic and onrushing climate collapse. The driving force of this genre is not holy shit two ways for a lot of people to die but the realization, or hope, that the great mobilizations […]
via The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour — In the Moment
by Anna Tsing (2009) PDF
This article theorizes supply chain capitalism as a model for understanding both the continent-crossing scale and the constitutive diversity of contemporary global capitalism. In contrast with theories of growing capitalist homogeneity, the analysis points to the structural role of difference in the mobilization of capital, labor, and resources. Here labor mobilization in supply chains is the focus, as it depends on the performance of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and citizenship status. The article uses the concept of figuration to show how difference is mobilized within supply chains, and to point to the importance of tropes of management, consumption, and entrepreneurship in workers’ understandings of supply chain labor. These tropes make supply chains possible by bringing together self-exploitation and superexploitation. Diversity is thus structurally central to global capitalism, and not decoration on a common core.
Source: Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148–176, 2009
See also: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Anna Tsing, 2015
A socialist biologist explains the tight links between new viruses, industrial food production, and the profitability of multinational corporations.
The new coronavirus is keeping the world in a state of shock. But instead of fighting the structural causes of the pandemic, the government is focusing on emergency measures.
Yaak Pabst for the German socialist magazine Marx21 spoke to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press, 2016) about the dangers of Covid-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases. Marx21 released the interview in advance of its scheduled March 30 publication date.
Marx21: How dangerous is the new coronavirus?
Rob Wallace: It depends on where you are in the timing of your local outbreak of Covid-19: early, peak level, late? How good is your region’s public health response? What are your demographics? How old are you? Are you immunologically compromised? What is your underlying health? To ask an undiagnosable possibility, do your immuogenetics, the genetics underlying your immune response, line up with the virus or not?
The ‘Russian Question’ was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century. It was, as Castoriadis put it, ‘the touchstone of theoretical and practical attitudes which lay claim to revolution’. For that reason, it is all the more astonishing that, until this very day, not one scholar has tried to portray the historical development of Marxist thought about the Soviet Union since 1917 in a coherent, comprehensive appraisal. Quite possibly, this lacuna in the literature has less to do with the specific topic area than with the underdeveloped historiography of Marxist theories generally. Anderson concluded years ago in his Considerations on Western Marxism that ‘the causes and forms of [Marxism’s] successive metamorphoses and transferences remain largely unexplored’. Likewise, in the history of ideas Marxist theories have not received the attention they deserve.
All the leaflets published by the White Rose group of anti-fascists in Germany, including other documents and texts related to the group. [source: Libcom]
The first leaflet of the German anti-Nazi group the White Rose, produced in June 1942.
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilised nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government.
communists in situ 