company:boston review

Critique de la critique critique du livre ’Conversations entre Adultes’ de Yanis Varoufakis
▻http://www.cadtm.org/Critique-de-la-critique-critique-du-livre-Conversations-entre-Adultes-de-Yani

Dans le monde anglo-saxon de gauche, le livre Conversations entre Adultes [1] (Adults in the Room) de Yanis Varoufakis a suscité des critiques tout à fait intéressantes de la part d’Adam Tooze dans The New York Review of Books (« A Modern Greek Tragedy »), de J.W. Mason dans Boston Review (« Austerity by Design »), de Pavlos Roufos dans The Brooklyn Rail (« Inside the Disenchanted World of Left Keynesianism »), de Helena Sheehan dans Jacobin (« Closed Rooms and Class War »), notamment. De mon côté j’ai également rédigé une critique de ce livre important sous la forme d’une série qui a été publiée sur le blog de la maison d’édition anglophone Verso. Adam Tooze s’y est référé dans sa synthèse critique des critiques (« Europe’s Political Economy : Reading Reviews of Varoufakis’s Adults in the Room ») et Yanis Varoufakis a répondu sur son blog à une série de critiques dont la mienne. Ces échanges ont mis en avant une série d’arguments qui méritent d’être discutés. Voilà pourquoi j’ai rédigé cet article « Critique de la critique critique du livre Conversations entre Adultes de Yanis Varoufakis ». Il faut également dire que j’ai été fortement encouragé par Sebastian Budgen de la maison d’édition Verso qui a souhaité que je contribue à la discussion en cours. Je l’en remercie.

Comme l’écrit Adam Tooze dans son indispensable synthèse des critiques, le débat autour du livre témoignage de Yanis Varoufakis renvoie à l’économie politique de l’Europe et notamment aux questions : comment sortir des politiques néolibérales qui dominent l’histoire du « vieux continent » depuis des décennies ? Quelle stratégie adopter ?

Article repris par : ►https://www.les-crises.fr/critique-de-la-critique-critique-du-livre-conversations-entre-adultes-de-

#dette #Grèce #Syriza #troïka #Union_Européenne

Comment la gauche israélienne et le Camp de la paix perpétuent l’occupation
Armelle Laborie & Eyal Sivan, Etat d’Exception, le 2 octobre 2018
▻http://www.etatdexception.net/quest-ce-que-la-gauche-israelienne-et-le-camp-de-la-paix

http://www.etatdexception.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Un-boycott-l%C3%A9gitime-Couv-EE.jpg

À l’étranger, le Camp de la paix bénéficie d’un important réseau de soutien. En France par exemple, le comité de parrainage de La Paix maintenant compte des personnalités aussi pacifistes et prestigieuses qu’Élisabeth Badinter, Alain Finkielkraut, Élisabeth de Fontenay ou Pierre-André Taguieff.

Bien plus que les atteintes aux libertés des Palestiniens, ce sont en fait leurs propres libertés que défendent les représentants de la gauche sioniste et qui mobilisent leurs amis à l’étranger. Le traitement que réserve l’État israélien au Camp de la paix devient le baromètre du niveau de la démocratie israélienne et c’est à la mesure des privilèges dont bénéficie ce groupe particulier qu’est évalué l’état du pays tout entier.

Rappel : les fameux « israéliens juifs de gauche » dont on parle beaucoup, ne constituent que 7% des israéliens juifs
►https://seenthis.net/messages/701083

#Palestine #BDS #boycott #sionisme de « #gauche »

What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism

http://bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/cedrob2.png

This essay is the introduction to Boston Review’s new print issue, Forum I, titled Race Capitalism Justice. Inspired by Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, this themed issue is a critical handbook for racial justice in the age of Trump. Order your copy today.

Cedric J. Robinson’s passing this summer at the age of seventy-five went virtually unnoticed. Professor emeritus of political science and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and arguably one of the most original political theorists of his generation, no major U.S. newspaper determined that Robinson’s passing merited even a single paragraph. Although he deliberately avoided the pitfalls of intellectual celebrity, his influence was greater than perhaps he may have realized. Today’s insurgent black movements against state violence and mass incarceration call for an end to “racial capitalism” and see their work as part of a “black radical tradition”—terms associated with Robinson’s work.

#capitalisme #capitalisme_racial

The Moral Voice of Corporate America - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/moral-voice-ceos.html

Un article #sans_vergogne du « #progressiste » #new_york_times à la gloire des patrons d’entreprise, qui ne s’occuperaient de #politique que contraints et forcés...

Companies got political only under duress...

Une réponse ici :

Business as Usual : The Long History of Corporate Personhood | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/politics/lawrence-b-glickman-business-usual-long-history-corporate-personhood

The reality is that business “got political” a long time ago; indeed, it has consistently been one of the most powerful forces in American political life. How did this story come to be obscured?

Contingent No More

Academia is in the midst of an acute, unsustainable crisis. For those working in the higher-education industry, and increasingly for those outside of it, it has become impossible to ignore.

New generations of faculty and students crushed by unprecedented levels of debt; the increased precariousness of the academic labor force; the systematic devaluation of academic labor itself; the corporate-style structuring of higher education—something, somehow is going to give.

In spite of the cold facts—that “contingent faculty” make up more than 70 percent of the academic labor force, that the gap between doctorates awarded and jobs available is wider than ever, that the overwhelming majority of academic workers live in a state of economic insecurity—we remain individually hypnotized by the poisonous conviction that hard work is all we need, that the “best” people in the best programs produce the best work, etc.

The neoliberalization of higher education is every academic’s problem. This is the reality in which we are all participating, even those of us at “top” programs, even those of us who have reached the promised land of tenure. Not surprisingly, many at the top are mostly fine with it. But their eager complicity makes it all the more incumbent on the rest of us to recognize how deeply the current system skews all relevant outcomes—from the accrual of professional prestige to basic salary-and-benefit protections—in the favor of the already privileged.

▻https://thebaffler.com/the-poverty-of-theory/contingent-no-more

#université #crise #académie #néolibéralisme #néo-libéralisme #précarité #précarisation #travail #mythe #méritocratie #hiérarchie

Avec une belle et longue #bibliographie :

Resources for Resistance (an introductory bibliography) :

Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”

The Conversation, Articles on Academic Journal Debate

Hugh Gusterson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No“

Michael White, Pacific Standard, “How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing”

Jonathan Gray, The Guardian, “It’s Time to Stand Up to Greedy Academic Publishers”

Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free”

Modern Languages Association, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” (2002 Report)

American Council of Learned Societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” (2003 Report)

Christover J. Broadhurst and Georgianna L. Martin (Eds.), “Radical Academia”? Understanding the Climate for Campus Activists

The Sociological Imagination, Radical Education Projects

Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review, “Black Study, Black Struggle”

Simon Batterbury, The Winnower, “Who Are the Radical Academics Today?“

Gwendolyn Beetham, Feministing, “The Academic Feminist: Summer at the Archives with Chicana Por Mi Raza (An Interview with Maria Cotera)”

The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, Antipode, “What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities”

Culum Canally, Antipode, “Timidity and the ‘Radical’ Academic Mind: A Response to the SIGJ2 Writing Collective”

Yasmin Nair, Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species“

Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors, “A Faculty Agenda for Hard Times”

Jennifer Ruth, Remaking the University, “When Tenure-Track Faculty Take On the Problem of Adjunctification“

Thomas Duke, The Undercurrent, “The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education”

Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Nation, “How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.“

Mary Elizabeth Luka, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro, Studies in Social Justice, “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’”

Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, ACME, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, International Journal of Communications, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication”

Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, Neoliberalization, Universities, and the Public Intellectual

Kevin Birmingham, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’”

Mac Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation

Shannon Ikebe and Alexandra Holmstrom-Smith, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Union Democracy, Student Labor, and the Fight for Public Education”

Anonymous, Inside Higher Ed, “Treadmill to Oblivion”

Lucia Lorenzi, thoughts on mediocrity

Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin, “In the Name of Love”

Sarah Kendzior, Vitae, “The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”

Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, “The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market”

Denise Cummins, PBS, “Why the Backlash against Adjuncts Is an Indictment of the Tenure System”

Christopher Newfield, American Association of University Professors, “Avoiding the Coming Higher Ed Wars”

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, “Angela Davis, Freedom and the Politics of Higher Education”

Charles R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Social Text, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”

Ji-Young Um, #alt-academy, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons”

Undercommoning Collective, ROAR, “Undercommoning within, against, and beyond the University-as-Such”

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, “Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles“

Trish Kahle and Michael Billeaux, Jacobin, “Resisting the Corporate University”

Levi Gahman, ROAR, “Dismantling Neoliberal Education: A Lesson from the Zapatistas“

#résistance

Excellent papier de Cas Muddle, Boston Review, sur le caractère américain et non populiste du phénomène Trump :

[…]

“Though the Trump phenomenon is properly understood within the scope of American history, it is vportrayed as an aberration. In thousands of stories, U.S. readers are treated to comparisons with Adolf Hitler, Silvio Berlusconi, and Marine Le Pen, but much less so Huey Long, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan. Trump, implicitly or explicitly, is being presented as “un-American”; a European Fremdkörper (“foreign body”) in the American polity.”

[…]

“Though establishment Republicans have tried to distance themselves from Trump—much as op-ed writers have tried to distance the United States itself from Trump—the truth is that the party was shifting to the far right well before he entered the 2016 primaries. This is clearest at the state level, where Republicans, not third-party extremists, have been busy passing racist, misogynistic, and anti-gay legislation, such as legally pointless but politically potent sharia bans, laws curbing constitutionally protected access to abortion, and bills designed to protect discrimination against LGBT people. Many of these policies even predate the Tea Party movement, itself a symptom of a right turn underway in the GOP since the 1990s. Trump’s impending nomination can be seen as a powerful aftershock of the Tea Party, a grassroots mobilization whose impact is too-often minimized.”

[…]

“Trump, despite ample assertions to the contrary, is not a populist. Like European counterparts, he argues that “the elite” are uniformly corrupt. But unlike European politicians, he does not exalt the virtues of “the people.” Trump is not the Vox Populi (voice of The People) but the Vox Donaldus (voice of The Donald). Rather than claiming to offer common-sense solutions or follow the will of the people, Trump promises to make “better deals” because he knows “the art of the deal.”

[…]

“Trump stands in a long tradition of right-wing businessmen who present themselves as saviors of “the American way” and who are able to attract cross-class coalitions of supporters: Henry Ford, Robert W. Welch Jr., and Perot are just a few who have taken this approach.”

[…]

“If instead we take the history and traditions of U.S. radical-right politics more seriously, we will not only better understand the Trump phenomenon but also the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy in the United States.”

L’article complet: ▻https://tinyurl.com/zda5uvo

Don’t Believe the Hype—We’re Not Even Close to Full Employment | Boston Review
▻https://bostonreview.net/blog/dean-baker-full-employment

Six Shots in #Michael_Brown | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/michael-brown-ferguson-autopsy-simon-waxman

Brown was murdered by a white #police officer, the #Hollywood -ready personification of probity and self-sacrifice for the civic good. So every uncertainty will be magnified; every fault of Brown’s, no matter how irrelevant, will be marshaled against him; and every possible defense will be mustered on his killer’s behalf.

http://www.bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/brown-autopsy-drawing-banner.jpg

“The Industry of Ideas”: Measuring the Impact of #Think_Tanks | Boston Review
▻http://bostonreview.net/blog/andrew-mayersohn-transparency-think-tanks-money-politics

Investigating money in politics is a little like studying dark matter: we have to make inferences about what we can’t detect from the behavior of things that we can see. While the “visible” universe of money in politics—mandatory disclosure of campaign contributions, some types of election spending, and lobbying—is sizeable in its own right, it represents only a fraction of the money spent on influencing government. Ken Silverstein’s recent e-book Pay to Play Think Tanks: Institutional Corruption and the Industry of Ideas (PDF) delves into the invisible world, demonstrating that influencers have plenty of other, less transparent tactics at their disposal.

(...)

... consider what (thanks to disclosure laws) we do know about money in politics. The 2012 congressional and presidential elections cost about $6.3 billion in reported spending, and state-level candidates raised another $3.1 billion (per the National Institute on Money in State Politics). About $3 billion in federal lobbying is disclosed every year. While these numbers appear large, they are small relative to the size of the U.S. economy, leading some political scientists to ask why, given the immense economic stakes, corporations and unions spend so little money on politics. Generally, they conclude that lobbying and donations matter at the margins but don’t determine policy outcomes all by themselves. Campaign contributions, for example, are not usually powerful enough to convince a congressperson to vote against his core ideology or his party’s line on a salient issue. Given that wealthy interests are still very good at getting their way, then, it makes sense to look at the aspects of money in politics beyond campaign contributions and lobbying to understand why.

(...)

Silverstein suggests disclosure as a remedy, arguing that think tanks should voluntarily publish their officials’ financial statements as well as their donor list, but provides little evidence that think tanks are worried enough about their credibility to do so. On the contrary, think tanks are probably more concerned about the loss of credibility that would come with disclosing donors and having the media and political opponents pore over the list for embarrassing details. Moreover, disclosure will do nothing to address Silverstein’s other concern, the transformation of think tanks from idea factories into partisan attack dogs. Medvetz’s argument suggests that think tanks simply have too much to gain by “binding” themselves – turning themselves into reliable sources for the media and allies for politicians – to care about the loss of their autonomy.

Studying the Rich | Boston Review

▻http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/mike-konczal-thomas-piketty-capital-studying-rich

In the 1790s, Frederick Eden, concerned about the economy and the realities of the poor, went into the British countryside and began to collect data on household budgets for poor agricultural laborers. He collected budgets himself, got additional data from “respectable clergymen,” and hired others to get even more. The results were published in a major, groundbreaking work, The State of the Poor, in 1797. In the end, Eden had eighty-six families worth of data.

http://www.bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/Piketty-photo_credit_Emmanuelle-Marchadour-web.jpg

It is easy to overlook the achievement of Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, as a work of economic history. Debates about the book have largely focused on inequality. But on any given page, there is data about the total level of private capital and the percentage of income paid out to labor in England from the 1700s onward, something that would have been impossible for early researchers like Eden to assemble or comprehend. Capital reflects decades of work in collecting national income data across centuries, countries, and class, done in partnership with academics across the globe. But beyond its remarkably rich and instructive history, the book’s deep and novel understanding of inequality in the economy has drawn well-deserved attention and criticism. By understanding the initial debate over the book, we can examine what is at stake in how Capital is understood.

#thomas_piketty #économie #riches #pauvres #richesse #pauvreté

Inequality Kills | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/us/stephen-bezruchka-inequality-kills

If the culprit of the decline in health is not health care, are individual health-related behaviors, often blamed for the high death rates in some groups, causing our low ranking in health?

Apparently not. Americans smoke less than both men and women in the healthier countries, so tobacco, though important, is not a significant cause for our higher mortality. Diet and other similar individual behaviors prevalent in the United States also don’t account for our health disadvantage compared to other rich nations. When asked to identify solutions to our poor health status as a nation, many respond that we need more education. Many see education as the solution to a wide range of problems. But on average the U.S. population has more years of schooling than in any other country in the world. And while we spend a great deal of money on education, we don’t get much bang for those bucks.

(...)

There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing.

http://www.bostonreview.net/sites/default/files/divided-web.jpg

High Inequality Results in More US Deaths than Tobacco, Car Crashes and Guns Combined | Blog, Q&A | BillMoyers.com
▻http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/19/high-inequality-results-in-more-us-deaths-than-tobacco-car-crashes-and-g

#inégalités #santé #mortalité #Etats-Unis

Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral ? | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/blog/paula-ml-moya-does-reading-literature-make-you-more-moral

Lost Radicals | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/eric-mann-michael-dawson-radical-black-left-history

Since the March on Washington fifty years ago, the condition of black people has deteriorated; today they are subject to injustices ranging from mass unemployment to mass incarceration. Yet gone is the rhetoric of militant hope, black liberation, and economic equality generated by the Third World revolutions five decades ago. It is difficult even to draw on the lessons and legacies of these revolutions, for the state suppression of radical organizations in the 1960s has extended into the suppression of their history. As Mumia Abu Jamal explained, young black people are suffering from “#menticide,” deprived of their tradition, its strategy and tactics, and the hope it provides.

Michael C. Dawson’s important new book Blacks In and Out of the Left, expands on Jamal’s diagnosis by characterizing one of its sources: the abandonment of the Black Power movement by white liberals and social democrats who claimed that a black-led movement was inconsistent with their “universalist” ambitions. Yet Dawson’s history shows the immense unifying power that black groups had. They brought together marginalized groups, created networks of support, and built a creative community. Indeed, restoring black politics means restoring a multinational, multiracial left.

#afro_américains

The Truth About GMOs | Boston Review
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/forum/pamela-ronald-gmo-food

Opening the Debate Pamela Ronald: Genetically modified foods are safe for humans and pose no special environmental risk. Yet there are serious policy questions to consider.

Boston Review — Wajahat Ali: Against the Brahmins (#Pankaj_Mishra)
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/BR38.3/wajahat_ali_pankaj_mishra.php

Wajahat Ali : Reflecting on recent events, could an argument be made that the disastrous Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis have shifted the axis of power from the United States to rising Asia?

Pankaj Mishra : I don’t think Asians and South Asians have much cause for celebration if power is indeed shifting to the East due to the disastrous blunders of the United States. One still has to ask, whose power? And to whom is it shifting and who in Asia will it eventually benefit? We Asians have shown ourselves very capable of making the same kind of mistakes. I write from Japan, which has its own history of militarism and imperialism, and where the ghost of nationalism is yet to be exorcised. And we know about South Asia’s inability to defuse its toxic nationalisms or provide a degree of social and economic justice to its billion-plus populations.

Boston Review — Lindsey Gilbert: The Networked Era (Michael Nielsen)
▻http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.1/michael_nielsen_reinventing_discovery.php

Boston Review — John R. Bowen : Europeans Against Multiculturalism
►http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.4/john_r_bowen_european_multiculturalism_islam.php

But while it is hard to know what exactly the politicians of Europe mean when they talk about multiculturalism, one thing we do know is that the issues they raise—real or imagined—have complex historical roots that have little to do with ideologies of cultural difference. Blaming multiculturalism may be politically useful because of its populist appeal, but it is also politically dangerous because it attacks “an enemy within”: Islam and Muslims. Moreover, it misreads history. An intellectual corrective may help to diminish its malign impact.