• Protégés par intérêt
    https://laviedesidees.fr/Proteges-par-interet

    Dans l’Italie de la #Renaissance, les princes toléraient les Juifs dans la mesure où ils se livraient à des activités bancaires. Cette bienveillance intéressée constitue une particularité dans une Europe marquée par les persécutions et les expulsions. À propos de : Pierre Savy, Les princes et les Juifs dans l’Italie de la Renaissance, Puf

    #Histoire #Italie #judaïsme #économie_politique
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20231127_juifsproteges-2.docx
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20231127_juifsproteges.pdf

  • L’#utopie de la #décroissance

    For economist #Timothée_Parrique, our survival depends on our ability to change our economic model to degrowth towards a post-growth economy.
    A researcher in ecological economics at Lund University in Sweden, his thesis “The political economy of degrowth” (2019) has been adapted into a mainstream book: “Slow down or perish. The economics of degrowth” (September 2022). In it, he explains the urgent need for a great slowdown of production in rich countries, the overcoming of the mythology of growth, and the dismantling of capitalism. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfulzow1LGU


    #TedX #conférence #croissance_verte #croissance #décarboner #empreinte_écologique #économie #récession #limites_planétaires #green-washing #responsabilité #PIB #bien-être #justice_sociale #transition #contentement #post-croissance #capitalisme #post-capitalisme #solidarité #entraide #crise #écocide #économie_du_futur

    • The political economy of degrowth

      Qu’est-ce que la décroissance et quelles sont ses implications pour l’économie politique ? Divisée en trois parties, cette thèse explore le pourquoi, le quoi, et le comment de la décroissance.La première partie (De la croissance et des limites) étudie la nature, les causes, et les conséquences de la croissance économique. Chapitre 1 : Comprendre la croissance économique répond à plusieurs questions : Qu’est-ce qui croît exactement ? À quelle vitesse ? Quand et où est-ce que ça croît ? Comment est-ce que ça croît ? Et pourquoi est-ce que ça devrait croître ? Les trois chapitres suivants développent une triple objection à la croissance économique qui n’est plus possible (Chapitre 2 : Limites biophysiques de la croissance), plausible (Chapitre 3 : Limites socioéconomiques de la croissance), et souhaitable (Chapitre 4 : Limites sociales à la croissance).La deuxième partie (Éléments de décroissance) porte sur l’idée de la décroissance, en particulier son histoire, ses fondements théoriques, et ses controverses. Le Chapitre 5 : Origines et définitions retrace l’histoire du concept de 1968 à 2018. Le Chapitre 6 : Fondements théoriques présente une théorie normative de la décroissance comme déséconomisation, c’est-à-dire une réduction de l’importance de la rationalité et des pratiques économiques. Le Chapitre 7 : Controverses passe en revue les attaques reçues par le concept. Si la première partie a diagnostiqué la croissance économique comme étant le problème, cette partie propose une solution. L’argument principal est que la décroissance n’est pas seulement une critique mais aussi une alternative complète à la société de croissance.La troisième partie (Recettes de décroissance) concerne la transition d’une économie de croissance à une société de décroissance. La partie s’ouvre sur un inventaire des politiques mobilisées par les décroissants jusqu’à aujourd’hui (Chapitre 8 : Stratégies de changement). Les trois chapitres suivants, sur la propriété (Chapitre 9 : Transformer la propriété), le travail (Chapitre 10 : Transformer le travail) et l’argent (Chapitre 11 : Transformer l’argent) passent de la théorie à la pratique et transforment les valeurs et les principes de la décroissance en stratégies de transition. Le Chapitre 12 : Stratégie de transition décrit une méthode pour étudier l’interaction entre plusieurs politiques de décroissance, et cela pour mieux planifier la transition. Le message central de cette troisième partie est que la décroissance est un outil conceptuel puissant pour réfléchir à une transition vers la justice sociale et écologique.

      https://www.theses.fr/2019CLFAD003
      #économie_politique #thèse #PhD

  • From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone
    https://jacobin.com/2022/12/from-bowling-alone-to-posting-alone
    Voici une bonne réflexion sur le déclin des partis et autres organisations de gauche aux États Unis et en Europe

    12.5.2022 by Anton Jäger - Last year, the Survey Center on American Life published a study tracking friendship patterns in the United States. The report was anything but heartening. Registering a “friendship recession,” the report noted how Americans were increasingly lonely and isolated: 12 percent of them now say they do not have close friendships, compared to 3 percent in 1990, and almost 50 percent said they lost contact with friends during the COVID-19 pandemic. The psychosomatic fallout was dire: heart disease, sleep disruptions, increased risk of Alzheimer’s. The friendship recession has had potentially lethal effects.

    The center’s study offered a miniaturized model of a much broader process that has overtaken countries beyond the United States in the last thirty years. As the quintessential voluntary association, friendship circles stand in for other institutions in our collective life — unions, parties, clubs. In his memoirs, French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa said that one of the most disconcerting moments of his childhood was the day he discovered that there were people in the village who were not members of the Communist Party. “That seemed unimaginable,” he recalled, as if those people “lived outside of society.” Not coincidentally, in May 1968, French students sometimes compared the relationship of workers to the Communist Party with that of Christians to the church. The Christians yearned for God, and the workers for revolution. Instead, “the Christians got the church, and the working class got the party.”

    The son of communist parents, Michéa saw the party as an extension of a more primary social unit. Friendship patterns have always served as a useful indicator for broader social trends, and writers at Vox were quick to apply the data to political analysis. The researchers invoked Hannah Arendt’s dictum that friendship was the best antidote for authoritarianism. At the end of 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt postulated that a new form of loneliness had overtaken Westerners in the twentieth century, leading them to join new secular cults to remedy their perdition. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she claimed, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.” The conclusions were clear. As Americans become lonelier and more isolated in the new century, the same totalitarian temptation now lurks.
    Putnam’s Warning

    To social scientists, this refrain must sound tiredly familiar: it is the stock-in-trade of one of the classics of early twenty-first-century political science, Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. That book noted a curious pattern: more and more Americans took up bowling toward the end of the twentieth century, but they increasingly undertook the activity alone, with the sudden decline of many bowling leagues the clearest explanation. Such a crisis was by no means limited to sports clubs. From churches to trade unions to shooting establishments to Masonic lodges, all experienced a dramatic contraction of membership in the 1980s and 1990s and began to disband. What remained was a wasteland of sociability.

    Putnam surveyed a variety of causes for this great disengagement. The luring of the middle class from city centers to exurbs in the 1960s encouraged privacy. Removed from American cities, citizens ended up in suburbs designed mainly for motorists and without footpaths. Consumption was democratized in the postwar boom. People spent more time in their cars, a mobile privatization of public space. Corner stores were bulldozed in favor of shopping malls, and train tracks lost out to highways. With the steady entry of women into the labor market, voluntary associations lost a central base of support. Employees began working longer hours than their parents had and found little time for volunteering. Television locked citizens at home in the evening: the tombstone of postwar loneliness.

    Putnam also debunked some powerful misconceptions about the crisis of civil society. The first was that the welfare state was the real culprit. The transfer of social services from the community to the state level, the argument ran, would threaten citizens’ self-reliance. Putnam was skeptical: both strong (Scandinavia) and weak (United States) welfare states had seen a decline in civic capacity. In France and Belgium, a “red” civil society was even allowed to manage part of the social security budget. Battles over integration also proved an insufficient explanation: both black and white Americans withdrew from clubs, while overall distrust between racial groups was declining.

    Putnam had no use for panaceas either. Back in 2000, he had already presaged that the internet would offer a poor substitute for those old associations and reinforce antisocial tendencies. In 2020, holed up in his New Hampshire home during the pandemic, the social scientist added an afterword to a new edition of Bowling Alone. Its tone was characteristically melancholic: there was no “correlation between internet usage and civic engagement,” while “cyberbalkanization” and not “digital democracy” was the future. The stock of “social capital” had not been replenished.
    Testing Time

    The weaknesses in this approach were already plain to see by the early 2000s. For one, Bowling Alone spent too little time investigating the structural transformation of its civil society — the rise of new NGOs as substitutes for mass membership organizations, the ascent of new sporting clubs, the revival of association in evangelical megachurches and schools.

    Putnam also deployed a highly dubious notion of social capital. In this aspect, the book spoke to the market-friendly sensibilities of the late 1990s: civic ties were useful as a means for social mobility, not as expressions of collective power. They could adorn college applications or help people land trainee programs, not change nations or make revolutions.

    Such economism also explained a glaring gap in Putnam’s book — the aggressive drop in union strength at the close of the century. In a book of more than five hundred pages, there was no index entry for “deindustrialization.” With limited discussions of labor as well, Bowling Alone had little to say about how capital’s offensive contributed to the decline of civil society — and how representative worker power was for civic life as a whole. The dwindling of union membership not only had dramatic consequences on the Left but also disoriented the Right — a side of the story that barely appears in Bowling Alone.

    Despite these evident faults, however, Putnam’s book has stood the test of time. Statistics still point to a steady decline for many secular membership organizations. Despite growing public approval for union efforts, the US unionization rate declined by 0.5 percentage points to a mere 10.3 percent in 2021, returning to its 2019 rate. The political developments of the last decade, from COVID-19 lockdowns to the escalating downsizing of classical parties, also validated Putnam’s intuition. More than that, his book has now been used to explain the uncertainty of the Donald Trump years, in which the controlled demolition of the public sphere in the 1980s and 1990s drove a new form of resentment politics.

    The hyperpolitics of the 2010s also hardly falsified Putnam’s thesis. While the interactive internet has largely replaced the monological television set, the general crisis of belonging and place that the new media inaugurated has not abated. Even in a society ever more heavily politicized and riven by partisan conflict, the levers for collective action, from states to unions to community groups, remain brittle. Despite surges of militancy in some sectors, the “great resignation” ushered in by COVID’s tight labor markets has not led to a politics of collective voice but rather to one of individual “exit,” as Daniel Zamora put it. European unions have suffered a similar fate, losing members to self-employment. While Putnam noted the upswing in voter turnout in the 2020 election, this was “voting alone,” vastly different from the organized bands that found their way to the ballot box in the nineteenth century.

    There are both push and pull factors involved here. Since the 1980s, citizens have been actively ejected from associations through anti-union legislation or globalized labor markets. At the same time, passive alternatives to union and party power — cheap credit, self-help, cryptocurrency, online forums — have multiplied. The result is an increasingly capsular world where, as commentator Matthew Yglesias warned, our home has become an ever-greater source of comfort, allowing citizens to interact without ever leaving their house. “Sitting at home alone has become a lot less boring,” he claims, ushering in a world where we could all “stream alone.” The civic results will be dire.
    Putnam From the Left

    Here, then, was the rational core of the Putnam thesis: far beyond the bowling alley, social life in the West had indeed become increasingly atomistic over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The economic rationale for this restructuring was evident, and a Marxist interpretation proved a useful supplement to the Putnamite view: individualization was an imperative for capital, and collective life had to be diminished in order for the market to find new avenues for accumulation. By 1980, states could either cut ties with existing civil society organizations and let go of the inflationary threat or face ballooning public debt.

    This heavily conditioned the responses to the 2008 financial crash. Behind the short-term chaos of the credit crisis stood a much longer process: the slow but steady decline of party democracy since the 1973 slump. Parties also remain the paradigmatic victim of Putnam’s disengagement. As fortresses built between individuals and their states, these institutions secured people’s hold on the state throughout the twentieth century. The Austrian social democratic party in the 1930s hosted a theater club, a child welfare committee, a cremation society, a cycling club, workers’ radio and athletic clubs, and even a rabbit breeders’ association.

    On the conservative side, this legacy was bemoaned as a dangerous drive toward politicization that would ideologically supervise individuals from cradle to grave. Still, left-wing intellectuals like Gáspár Miklós Tamás saw the new parties as an essential part of not just socialist politics but of modernity itself. They comprised

    a counter-power of working-class trade unions and parties, with their own savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies — all with their own mores, manners and style.

    As “total organizations,” Tamás’s parties were predictably described as modern institutions par excellence. Unlike medieval guilds, membership in a party was not obligatory — it was a free association, in which members could join and defend their interests. As Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had it, the party thereby served as the modern equivalent of the Machiavellian prince, who could manage complex situations with tact and insight; here, parties worked from the top down, but also from the bottom up.

    In the past thirty years, these pillars of party democracy have gradually eroded and been hollowed out. Two trends remain symptomatic of this process. The first is the declining membership of parties across the board, coupled with the increasing median ages of their members. On the Left, the German Social Democratic Party went from one million members in 1986 to 660,000 in 2003; the Dutch Socialists went from 90,000 to 57,000. The French Communist Party tumbled from 632,000 members in 1978 to 210,000 in 1998; its Italian sister party went from 1,753,323 to 621,670 in the same period. The British Labour Party counted 675,906 members in 1978, falling to 200,000 in 2005.

    While the trend remains more marked for the classical left — which has always relied more squarely on mass mobilization — it is no less striking on the Right. The British Conservatives lost one million members between 1973 and 1994, while the French Gaullists dropped from 760,000 to 80,000. The Tories — the first mass party in European history — now receive more donations from dead members than from living ones, excluding their (now rebuffed) Russian oligarchs.

    The United States has often served as a natural outlier to these European cases. Americans never had any true mass parties after 1896, the last major examples being the antislavery agitation of the 1850s and the rise of the original Populist and Socialist movement in the 1880s and 1890s. After the People’s Party’s defeat — in the South with stuffed ballot boxes and guns, in the North by electoral inertia — America’s bipartisan elites constructed a system that essentially neutered any third-party challengers. American parties nonetheless had a variety of bases and roots within society. These organizations effectively made, for example, the New Deal Democratic Party a mass party by proxy, tied to a hinterland of labor, union, and civil organizations that represented popular sectors. On both the Left and the Right, workers, employers, and shop owners have defended their interests in local clubs, committees, trade guilds, and syndicates.

    This infrastructure was also a key launching pad for the revolts that detonated the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Detroit labor leader Walter Reuther marched with Martin Luther King Jr in the early 1960s, while one of the foremost supporters of the 1963 March on Washington was A. Philip Randolph, the union radical who had begun by organizing workers under Jim Crow. The relation of these forces to the Democratic Party was always complicated and stepmotherly. Overall, however, they ensured that the party remained a “party of workers” without ever becoming a workers’ party.

    From the 1970s onward, this same landscape began to desiccate, both passively and actively. The Tocquevillian utopia portrayed by generations of European visitors to North America was replaced by the reality of bowling alone. Instead of mass membership organizations, voluntary associations increasingly turned to a nonprofit model to organize advocacy in Washington.

    The shift to the nonprofit drastically changed the composition of these advocacy groups. Instead of relying on dues-paying members, they reached out to wealthy donors to fill their coffers. In a United States in which the government was increasingly giving up its redistributive role, this move created a natural constituency from new welfare recipients. The logic was self-evident: associations that practically operated as businesses but did not want to fulfill their tax obligations to the state saw an opportunity in the nonprofit model. The American political scientist Theda Skocpol casts them as “advocates without members”: nonprofit organizations functioning as the lawyers of a mute defendant.

    The Populist Moment

    The abandonment of mass parties and the growing alienation between politicians and citizens can only be temporarily averted by television commercials and marketing stunts. By 2010, it was clear that both classical PR and protest politics were falling short of their promises. Austerity was decimating pensions and public sectors across the Global South. Public debt, itself channeled by private debt, was rising. In March 2013, a group of leftist academics energized by the Indignados movement began to meet at Madrid’s Complutense University. One year later, they ran for office in the European election as Podemos and won seats. La France Insoumise’s organizers would reach for the same playbook in late 2016, looking at the Spanish example.

    For socialists, the transition from mass to cartel parties was shot through with ambiguity. On one hand, it generated real opportunities for radicals to appeal to disaffected voters who could no longer voice discontent within parties. The Left could politicize the prevailing antiestablishment mood, turning anti-politics into politics.

    Yet it also heavily constrained the space in which left-wing politics itself could operate. The social landscape sculpted by the neoliberal reforms meant not just an estrangement from traditional parties but a retreat from the public sphere as such, only weakly compensated for by the new medium of the internet. Left populists had to mobilize profoundly demobilized societies.

    The first signal of this populist shift was audible in the rhetoric of these forces themselves. From 2012 onwards, the subject of “the people” became a central referent for left-wing parties, both old and new. The adoption of a cross-class language was not a novelty for the Left. The theorists most strongly associated with it — thinkers such as Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau and Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe — had drafted their theses decades before. In the world of bowling alone, they finally found an application.

    Yet Laclau and Mouffe’s populism also took a highly specific organizational form in the 2010s, both in Europe and the United States, including the coalition of groups it tried to tie together. Instead of the mass parties of the twentieth century, leftists had to face a profoundly disorganized civil society that had driven civilians out of politics altogether and rendered relations between elites and average citizens highly volatile. The crises of the 2010s thus confronted the Left with a twin set of dilemmas: one of substance and one of form.

    The first concerned the question of what the natural base for a left-wing program was — where it lay and how it could be assembled. This puzzle always assumed a particular shape for twentieth-century social democrats. As Polish political scientist Adam Przeworski saw it, there was a clear threshold beyond which left-wing parties would trade talk of the working class with that of “the people.”

    The famous dilemma ran as follows. On the one hand, social democrats hoped that the expansion of industry would usher in a working-class majority, which would allow them to capture political office and reform their route to socialism. On the other, the continuing stagnation and eventual shrinkage of that class created a quandary. Broadening the base would require concessions to middle-class constituencies, who had to remain the fiscal providers to the welfare state and use the same public services as lower classes. On the other hand, the more benefits were granted to the middle classes in terms of consumption goods, the less breathing room domestic industry would have, and the material bases of proletarian strength and support would wither. Hence the bitter choice laid out by Przeworski.

    Przeworski’s dilemma received a shifting set of answers across the history of social democracy. For German Social Democratic Party theorist Karl Kautsky, it implied a promise of land redistribution to appease peasants. For a reformist like Eduard Bernstein, it meant a tactical alliance between the new middle classes and the working classes — a bridge built from office to factory. For Gramsci, it meant reaching out to Italy’s peasantry, held in check by the fascist state and mainly situated in the South. For French thinkers such as Serge Mallet and André Gorz, in turn, it meant a focus on the student class rather than the industrial proletariat of yesterday. All these options already exhibited a populist temptation, trading the working class for the people.

    In the 2010s, left parties again had to solder together an older working class and a middle class squeezed by the financial crisis. Most left populists moved to the former by starting with the latter, generating several predicaments along the way. Yet the makeup of those groups was also vastly different from the working and middle classes socialists encountered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, driven out of not only the factory but the public arena itself. Here, then, was the real result of Putnam’s bowling alone, the second and even more vexing dilemma for the populists. How was the Left to respond to the secular impoverishment of political life since the 1970s, and what opportunities, if any, could it offer?

    This in turn acted as a multiplier on the puzzle that had troubled social democracy from the start. While socialists classically had an industrial working class and middle class to rely on, left populists could assume the support of neither of these two groups. Instead, the 1980s’ deindustrialization and ensuing crisis of civil society opened a void between citizens and states, radically decoupling elites from their societies. This void dislocated the boundaries of left-wing politics in an even more disorienting way — in a world in which politics itself was in crisis, the Left’s goals appeared tenuous at best, and actively unrealistic at worst. Hence the resort to a populist strategy from within the Left: to rethink mobilization for an age of demobilization — or how to stop people from bowling alone.

    This was no undemanding task, and in the end, such an option put leftists in a crippling double bind. They could go full populist, soliciting the wider base of citizens driven out from traditional politics and disaffected by social democracy. But this approach risked emptying out the Left’s historic commitments, condemning people to “posting alone.” Eschewing this left strategy also meant a heavily digital and top-down approach to coalition building. Moreover, such a strategy might not grant the Left enough organizational heft to face the forces of capital on their own terrain.

    On the other hand, falling back on a classical left-wing identity could also scare off voters whose loyalty to the traditional left was now fading. Partly through the latter’s participation in the Third Way and the demands of the post-2008 austerity program, a return to this tradition had become a liability. Once again, the trade-off between the middle and working classes that had troubled social democracy from the beginning now found a new manifestation in the compromise between a populist and a socialist approach. Reshuffling the first, the second dilemma was intimately tied to the crisis of political engagement so specific to the twenty-first century.

    As the sociologist Dylan John Riley noted in 2012, “the contemporary politics of the advanced-capitalist world bears scant resemblance to that of the interwar period.” At the time, “populations organized themselves into mass parties of the left and right,” not an era of “a crisis of politics as a form of human activity,” where it was “unlikely that either Bernstein or Lenin can offer lessons directly applicable.”
    Debating Fascism

    A view of today’s politics as a direct productof the 2010s thus necessitates an emancipation from a series of frames we have inherited from an older age — and chief among them is a vision that sees our age as one of fascist resurgence. In the six years since Donald Trump’s election, a waspish debate on whether he should be classified as a fascist has overtaken American and European academia. The January 6 riots proved shocking and unsurprising to these observers.

    Putnam had already warned that social capital was never an unqualified good, and subsequent writers have regularly spoken about “Bowling for Fascism” as an adequate description of Nazi strength in the 1930s. As Putnam himself noted: “It was social capital, for example, that enabled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh’s network of friends, bound together by a norm of reciprocity, enabled him to do what he could not have done alone.”

    Ever since this warning, readings of Trumpism as heralding a new age of association have multiplied. In a recent paper, three social scientists have claimed that voters in flyover states have gone from bowling alone to “golfing with Trump,” arguing that “the rise in votes for Trump has been the result of long-term economic and population decline in areas with strong social capital.” The conclusion seems inescapable: since Germans and Italians first went bowling for fascism in the 1930s, Trump is now deserving of the same term.

    This reading has appeared in both prudent and imprudent versions. For academics such as historian Timothy Snyder or philosopher Jason Stanley, Trump and Jair Bolsonaro appear in perfect continuity with the strongmen of the 1930s, with the former president as “the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far.” This was still “pre-fascism” to Snyder, and “for a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. . . . Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this.” Journalists like Paul Mason and Sarah Kendzior have drafted texts instructing us in “how to stop fascism,” while anti-fascist in chief Madeleine Albright published Fascism: A Warning.

    More subtle versions of this thesis are available. Writers Gabriel Winant and Alberto Toscano, for instance, have proposed a frame of “racial fascism” to read Trumpism on a broader timeline. In their view, white identity politics and fascism have always been interlinked. As Winant notes, “The primary factor of social cohesion in Tocqueville’s America was nothing other than white supremacy. Given that this structure has endured . . . it makes little sense to imagine our society as formerly rich with association, but now bereft of it.” Although “the gun-waving McCloskeys in St. Louis are presumably not members of the same kind of fraternal organizations that were popular in the 19th century … they are members of a homeowners’ association,” and they rely on “whiteness [as] a kind of inchoate associational gel, out of which a variety of more specific associations may grow in a given historical conjuncture.”

    Hence, if Trump looks like a racial fascist, swims like a racial fascist, and quacks like a racial fascist, then he probably is a racial fascist. Voices in high quarters have recently joined Winant on this point. In a September 1 speech, President Joe Biden castigated Trumpist Republicans as a “threat to the republic” and saw them tending toward “semi-fascism.”

    This reading now faces its own chorus of critics. To scholars like Riley and Corey Robin, Trumpism is better theorized as a form of Bonapartism that shares little with the “superpoliticized” fascisms of the interwar period. Above all, the two crucial preconditions for any fascist movement remain lacking: a prerevolutionary working class on the verge of power and a population’s shared experience of total war, which would create a mass body. Fascism in power, they claim, has a hegemonic character and is not content to meddle on the margins. Just like pagans in a Christian world, they would have little purchase in the new order.

    One of the most recurrent responses to this critique points at asymmetries between Left and Right. While the 1980s and ’90s saw a dramatic decline in left-wing civic life, the Right has weathered Putnam’s era fairly better, with police unions and neighborhood defense clubs surviving the neoliberal onslaught. Fascism, after all, is the mentality of rank-and-file police elevated to state policy, a type of countermobilization for a militant working class. It’s no surprise that Marine Le Pen has received overwhelming support from French policemen.

    A similar argument has been made for the British Conservative Party. This outfit has supposedly retained its bastions of strength across society in private schools, Oxbridge, and sporting clubs. As political scientist R. W. Johnson noted in 2015, “the atomisation and dispersal of the Labour vote” has led to “whole chunks falling off the side to the SNP and Ukip,” while “the institutional base of the Tory Party — private schools, the Anglican Church, wealthy housing districts, the expanded private sector and even home ownership in general — is as healthy as ever.” The result was “a one-sided decay of the class cleavage, with the Tories holding onto their old hinterland far better than Labour has.” From Oxford’s Bullingdon Club to the City guilds, conservative parties have managed to preserve their elite incubators and retain deeper pools of personnel.

    It is difficult to see how such statements invalidate Putnam’s original hypothesis, however. The metrics for social capital used by anti-Putnamites are, for instance, curiously indeterminate. Collapsing NGOs and homeowner associations into the same category as parties and unions tells us little about the relative strength of civil society institutions. Rather than civic fortresses, NGOs function as heads without bodies — finding it easier to attract donors than members.

    Even if Trump and other nationalists did rely on high associational density, this would not detract from the overall context of demobilization in which they operate. As islands in a minoritarian political system, they can only retain power by exploiting the Constitution’s most anti-majoritarian features. This is worlds removed from the anti-constitutionalism of the Nazis, who saw the Weimar Republic as born with socialist birthmarks. Fascist parties were hardly card-playing clubs, and golfing with Trump is a pallid replacement for fascist boot camps.

    What about the Right’s other reserve institutions, from “white-ness” to homeownership? It is indeed true that many right-wing institutions have fared better in the neoliberal age. Yet an argument such as Winant’s makes it unclear how we should distinguish between being white and being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, just like being an employer is not the same as paying dues to an employer’s organization. In an age in which legal segregation has been abolished, racial status is not the guarantee of civic inclusion that it used to be under the Jim Crow regime. And a homeowner’s convention is no John Birch Society chapter, much like Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp groups are not Benito Mussolini’s squadristi.

    The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations might well count as the first properly fascist organizations in history. But as institutions, they have been on the wane for decades, and they do not supply the shock troops for white supremacy that they did in the past. Militias like the Proud Boys and the boogaloo movement instead thrive as “individualized commandos,” as Adam Tooze put it, far removed from the veterans that populated the Freikorps or the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. These were highly disciplined formations with direct experience of combat, not lumpen loners who drove out to protect car dealerships.

    The same holds true in European cases. Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia has grown precipitously in the last year and now presides over one hundred thousand members and leads a governing coalition. Still, it will not equal the 230,000 members that its predecessor MSI had in the early 1960s, leading to a fascism with “no squads, uniforms or baseball bats.” Both numerically and qualitatively, the hard right remains a shadow of its former self —  as does the center right.

    The Tory Primrose League was disbanded in 2004, and visitors to the British Isles will quickly be struck by the fading colors of the “Conservative Club” placards in thecountry’s rural towns. Like the old Workingmen’s Associations, these clubs scarcely function as mass mobilizers anymore, often appearing more like retirement homes (the median age of the Conservative Party membership is now estimated at seventy-two). As New Left Review’s Tariq Ali has noted, this self-immolation was itself a product of the neoliberal 1980s. Margaret Thatcher’s market reforms led to “the decimation of the Tories’ provincial base of local gentry, bank managers and businessmen through the waves of trans-Atlantic acquisitions and privatizations she unleashed.”

    There are exceptions to this rule, of course — the anti-Obama Tea Party activists who met up in basements in the early 2010s, the Hindu youth clubs run by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or the anti-immigrant “defense leagues” organized by the Scandinavian far right. In general, however, the civic pattern looks as disarticulated on the Right as it does on the Left.

    Perfecting Oligarchy

    Why, then, has the Right nonetheless done better than the Left in the age of Putnam? The reasons are unsurprising: the Right has always grown organically out of capitalist society and relies on the default forms of association that capital generates. As Friedrich Engels pointed out in a report to British trade unionists in 1881:

    Capitalists are always organized. They need in most cases no formal union, no rules, officers, etc. Their small number, as compared with that of the workman, the fact of their forming a separate class, their constant social and commercial intercourse stand them in lieu of that. . . . On the other hand, the workpeople from the very beginning cannot do without a strong organization, well-defined by rules and delegating its authority to officers and committees.

    The crisis of civil society, in the latter sense, poses more of a problem on the Left than on the Right because the benchmarks of any successful socialist politics are always higher. To the Right, the stabilization or preservation of property relations is mostly enough. Inertia and resignation, more than militancy, remain its great assets. Nonetheless, homeowner associations, QAnon groups, and golf clubs are no durable replacement for this older civic infrastructure.

    Clear parallels between the current day and the 1930s need not be minimized, of course. Like Adolf Hitler and Mussolini, Trump was an eminently lazy regent, happy to leave his policies to specialists and high-ranking officials, while, like a digital Napoleon Bonaparte, he dabbles with the crowds. And like those leaders, Trump owes his power mainly to that group of compliant conservatives in the Republican Party who seek to deploy the far right as a wedge against rival oligarchs.

    After that, the analogies quickly weaken. Trump built on the executive power unbound by presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Nor do Republicans owe their power to a mass movement in a tightly organized party. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell regularly complains of slacking parliamentary discipline in the Majorie Taylor Greenes of the party. The Republicans thereby prefer to derive power from preexisting posts in the US state, which always exhibited aggressively elitist traits since the eighteenth century. Corey Robin rightly speaks of “gonzo constitutionalism”: a merciless deployment of the most antidemocratic features of the US political order.

    The most unsettling fact about MAGA Republicanism is, as Robin writes, that it does not depend “upon these bogeymen of democracy — not on demagoguery, populism, or the masses — but upon the constitutional mainstays we learned about in high-school civics.” Only in 2004 did the GOP win the presidential election with a popular majority, when Bush Jr took a narrow 50.7 percent of the vote. Otherwise, the Republican Party strengthened its grip on the state apparatus mainly through minority mechanisms: appointing judges to the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, and filibustering.

    Rather than a fascist threat, the party offers a pared-down oligarchy — the wielding of the last anti-majoritarian levers in the American ancien régime. “Nationalizing our elections is just a multi-decade Democratic Party goal in constant search of a justification,” McConnell stated in Congress last year, openly admitting that low voter turnout is a boon to his party. “Semi-fascism” might be a rhetorically grateful term for this behavior — but at the end of the day, not everything that is bad is the same.
    Online and Offline

    In the past ten years, pundits across the political spectrum have scouted for technical fixes for Putnam’s crisis. Undoubtedly the most appealing of these has been the new online world. This is an old story: two decades ago, when Putnam published his book, theorists were already wondering whether the internet’s new global connectivity, conceived in the bosom of the American security state, could remake society. Today, the children of the internet retain little faith in Twitter or TikTok’s capacity for good, much like Putnam doubted that online engagement could replace older civic mores.

    This skepticism is mirrored by a confusion about the internet’s supposed political potential. If the Scylla of social media analysis was the naive utopianism of the early 2000s, its Charybdis is our current digital pessimism, which sees so much of the world’s problems — from political polarization to sexual impotence to declining literacy rates — as both the causes and consequences of being “too online.”

    Clearly, the internet only becomes comprehensible in the world of the lonely bowler. Online culture thrives on the atomization that the neoliberal offensive has inflicted on society — there is now ample research showing positive correlation between declining civic commitment and broadband access. At the same time, the internet accelerates and entrenches social atomization. The exit and entry costs of this new, simulated civil society are extremely low, and the stigma of leaving a Facebook group or a Twitter subculture is incomparable to being forced to move out of a neighborhood because a worker scabbed during a strike.

    The extreme marketization of Putnam’s 1980s and 1990s also made the world vulnerable to the perils of social media. The dissolution of voluntary organizations, the decline of Fordist job stability, the death of religious life, the evaporation of amateur athletic associations, the “dissolution of the masses,” and the rise of a multitudinous crowd of individuals were all forces that generated the demand for social media long before there was a product like Facebook or Instagram. Social media could only grow in a void that was not of its own making.

    Disorganizing Capital

    The internet is thus best read as a Pharmakon — a Greek noun that denotes both a means of remedy and a poison, a supposed antidote that can only exacerbate the disease. This also poses sensitive issues for the Right, particularly as capital itself had become increasingly divided in the preceding decades. As Paul Heideman has noted about the GOP in Catalyst, the assault on working-class organizations of the 1980s removed the external sources of discipline that once grouped capitalists together and imposed a common policy agenda.

    Without this opponent, internal fractures are likely to widen. With the compounding “weakening of the parties since the 1970s, and the political disorganization of corporate America since the 1980s,” it is, as the academic Cathie Jo Martin has argued, “much harder for U.S. employers to think about their collective long-term interests.” And rather than a process of realignment in which Republicans have seized working-class votes, it is the ruthless march of “dealignment” that drives our age of political tumult.

    Capital’s disorganization provides a much more rewarding frame for the “populist explosion” than ahistorical references to the authoritarianism of the 1930s. The German author Heinrich Geiselberger has noted how, without “the enemies of socialism,” the Right “can only invoke its spectre.” Geiselberger, together with Tamás, prefers to speak of post-fascism: an attempt to make citizenship less universal and confine it to national borders, but without the organizational clout that fascists demonstrated in the twentieth century. The new right is therefore “atomised, volatile, swarm-like, with porous borders between gravity and earnestness, sincerity and irony.”

    Above all, the new politics is consistently informal. The mob that expressed unconditional support for Trump on January 6 does not even have membership lists. QAnon and the anti-lockdown movement are a subculture that thrives mostly on blogs, Instagram, and Facebook groups. There are, of course, more and less prominent QAnon figures — influencers, so to speak. Yet their leadership is not official or mandated by votes. Rather than a militarily drilled mass, we see a roving swarm, incited by a clique of self-selected activists.

    This informality also manifests itself economically. In the past year, Trump extorted thousands of dollars from his followers and continued to rake in funds, without ever building a clear party structure. As early as 1920, sociologist Max Weber noted how charismatic leaders did not pay their followers and backers with fixed salaries, but rather worked through “donations, booty or bequests.” Unsurprisingly, charismatic leadership was also a thoroughly unstable mode of rule: succession to the throne could not simply be guaranteed for the mob, which would now have to look for its next redeemer.

    What would a viable alternative to this fascist frame look like? As Riley suggests, a far more powerful precedent for our situation can be found in Karl Marx’s account of the 1848 revolution. At the revolution’s close, instead of giving in to this unrest, Napoleon III gathered an apathetic peasant population and ordered them to quell the revolution. Marx described these French peasants as a “sack of potatoes” for whom the “identity of their interests fosters no community spirit, no national association and no political organization.” And since the peasants could not represent themselves, “they must be represented” — in this case by a king.

    Rather than a politics pitting workers against bosses, structured by the capital-labor opposition, Bonaparte’s was a politics of debtors and creditors — another shared feature with the 2010s, in which private debts transferred onto public accounts fueled the American and European debt crises. Bonaparte’s peasants focused on circulation and taxes rather than on production. Instead of peering aimlessly at the 1930s, we would have to look at a much older, primal age of democracy for suitable parallels with our populist era.

    Yet the fascist frame also carries an even graver risk: an overestimation of socialist strength. Fascism implies a popular front and strategic alliances with liberalism, including no-strike pledges. Rather than force focus, the fascist frame will distract and confuse us from the crisis of political engagement so typical of the twenty-first century.

    Putnam was right, but for the wrong reasons: associationalism matters for democracy, but it hardly matters to capital — and might even threaten it. For those contemplating a 2024 Bernie Sanders run, the question of the legacy the campaign leaves behind seems of even greater importance than what it accomplishes, let alone whether it will allow Bernie to ascend to the presidency. Only in that case will we see a true test of constitutional loyalty for capital, and only then can we gauge money’s alignment with liberal democracy. In the absence of this threat, both on left and right, we will keep on bowling alone.

    Anton Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

    #USA #crise #gauche #politique #économie_politique #histoire #capitalisme

  • Quelle économie politique de la #science ?
    https://laviedesidees.fr/Quelle-economie-politique-de-la-science.html

    À propos de : Gabriel Galvez-Behar, Posséder la Science. La propriété scientifique au temps du #capitalisme industriel, Éditions de l’EHESS. En proposant un examen de la profondeur historique des liens entre science et capitalisme, Gabriel Galvez-Behar ouvre des perspectives de recherche stimulantes pour l’analyse critique de l’économie politique de la connaissance.

    #Économie #industrie #économie_politique #propriété_intellectuelle
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20211004_possederlascience.docx
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20211004_possederlascience.pdf

  • Academic freedom is in crisis ; free speech is not

    In August 2020, the UK think tank The Policy Exchange produced a report on Academic Freedom in the UK (https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk-2), alleging a chilling effect for staff and students expressing conservative opinions, particularly pro-Brexit or ‘gender critical’ ideas. This is an issue that was examined by a 2018 parliamentary committee on Human Rights which found a lack of evidence for serious infringements of free speech (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201719/jtselect/jtrights/1279/127904.htm). In a university context, freedom of speech is protected under the Human Rights Act 1998 as long as the speech is lawful and does not contravene other university regulations on issues like harassment, bullying or inclusion. Some of these controversies have been firmly rebutted by Chris Parr (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/free-speech-crisis-uk-universities-chris-parr) and others who describe how the incidents have been over-hyped.

    Despite this, the government seems keen to appoint a free speech champion for universities (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/tories-war-on-the-woke-ministers-statues-protests) which continues a campaign started by #Sam_Gyimah (https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/sams-on-campus-but-is-the-campus-onto-sam) when he was minister for universities in 2018, and has been interpreted by some commentators as a ‘war on woke’. In the current climate of threats to university autonomy, many vice chancellors wonder whether this might be followed by heavy fines or reduced funding for those institutions deemed to fall on the wrong side of the culture wars.

    While public concern has been directed to an imagined crisis of free speech, there are more significant questions to answer on the separate but related issue of academic freedom. Most university statutes echo legislation and guarantee academics ‘freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial and unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions.’ [Section 202 of the Education Reform Act 1988]. In reality, these freedoms are surrendered to the greater claims of academic capitalism, government policy, legislation, managers’ responses to the pandemic and more dirigiste approaches to academics’ work.

    Nevertheless, this government is ploughing ahead with policies designed to protect the freedom of speech that is already protected, while doing little to hold university managers to account for their very demonstrable violations of academic freedom. The government is suspicious of courses which declare a sympathy with social justice or which manifest a ‘progressive’ approach. This hostility also extends to critical race theory and black studies. Indeed, the New York Times has identified a right wing ‘Campaign to Cancel Wokeness’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html) on both sides of the Atlantic, citing a speech by the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, in which she said, “We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt…Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

    This has now set a tone for ideological oversight which some university leaders seem keen to embrace. Universities will always wish to review their offerings to ensure they reflect academic currency and student choice. However, operating under the cover of emergency pandemic planning, some are now seeking to dismantle what they see as politically troublesome subject areas.

    Let’s start with the most egregious and transparent attack on academic freedom. The University of Leicester Business School, known primarily for its disdain of management orthodoxy, has announced it will no longer support research in critical management studies (https://www.uculeicester.org.uk/redundancy-briefing) and political economy, and the university has put all researchers who identify with this field, or who at some time might have published in CMS, at risk of redundancy. Among the numerous responses circulating on Twitter, nearly all point to the fact that the critical orientation made Leicester Business School distinctive and attractive to scholars wishing to study and teach there. Among those threatened with redundancy is the distinguished former dean, Professor Gibson Burrell. The sheer volume of protest at this anomaly must be an embarrassment to Leicester management. We should remember that academic freedom means that, as a scholar of proven expertise, you have the freedom to teach and research according to your own judgement. When those in a field critical of structures of power have their academic freedom removed, this is, unarguably, a breach of that expectation. Such a violation should be of concern to the new freedom of speech champion and to the regulator, the Office for Students.

    If the devastation in the School of Business were not enough humiliation for Leicester, in the department of English, there are plans to cancel scholarship and teaching in Medieval and Early Modern literature. The thoughtless stripping out of key areas that give context and coherence within a subject is not unique to Leicester – similar moves have taken place in English at University of Portsmouth. At Leicester, management have offered the justification that this realignment will allow them to put resources towards the study of gender and sexuality. After all, the Vice Chancellor, Nishan Canagarajah, offered the keynote speech at the Advance HE conference in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion on 19th March (https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/programmes-events/conferences/EDIConf20#Keynotes) and has signalled that he supports decolonising the curriculum. This might have had more credibility if he was not equally committed to extinguishing critical scholarship in the Business School. The two positions are incompatible and reveal an opportunistic attempt to reduce costs and remove signs of critical scholarship which might attract government disapproval.

    At the University of Birmingham, the response to the difficulties of maintaining teaching during the pandemic has been to issue a ruling that three academic staff must be able to teach each module. The explanation for this apparent reversal of the ‘lean’ principle of staffing efficiency, is to make modules more resilient in the face of challenges like the pandemic – or perhaps strike action. There is a consequence for academic freedom though – only the most familiar, established courses can be taught. Courses that might have been offered, which arise from the current research of the academic staff, will have to be cancelled if the material is not already familiar to other colleagues in the department. It is a way of designing innovation and advancement out of courses at the University of Birmingham.

    Still at Birmingham, UCU is contesting a proposal for a new ‘career framework’ (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/strike-warning-over-birminghams-or-out-probation-plan) by management characterised as ‘up or out’. It will require newly appointed lecturers to achieve promotion to senior lecturer within five years or face the sort of performance management procedures that could lead to termination of their appointment. The junior academics who enter on these conditions are unlikely to gamble their careers on academic risk-taking or pursue a challenge to an established paradigm. We can only speculate how this apprenticeship in organisational obedience might restrain the pursuit of discovery, let alone achieve the management’s stated aim to “develop and maintain an academic culture of intellectual stimulation and high achievement”.

    Meanwhile at the University of Liverpool, Vice Chancellor Janet Beer is attempting to apply research metrics and measures of research income over a five-year period to select academics for redundancy in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Staff have been threatened with sacking and replacement by those felt to hold more promise. It will be an unwise scholar who chooses a niche field of research which will not elicit prime citations. Astoundingly, university mangers claim that their criteria are not in breach of their status as a signatory to the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment (https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2021/03/08/project-shape-update). That is correct insofar as selection for redundancy by grant income is clearly such dishonorable practice as to have been placed beyond contemplation by the international board of DORA.

    It seems we are reaching a pivotal moment for academic freedom for higher education systems across the world. In #Arkansas and some other states in the #USA, there are efforts to prohibit the teaching of social justice (https://www.chronicle.com/article/no-social-justice-in-the-classroom-new-state-scrutiny-of-speech-at-public).

    In #France, the education minister has blamed American critical race theory (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/france-about-become-less-free/617195) for undermining France’s self-professed race-blindness and for causing the rise of “islamo-gauchisme”, a term which has been cynically deployed to blunt any critique of structural racism.

    In Greece, universities are now bound by law to ensure policing and surveillance of university campuses (https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/library/section-list/1012-exiting-democracy-entering-authoritarianism) by ‘squads for the protection of universities’ in order to suppress dissent with the Orwellian announcement that the creation of these squads and the extensive surveillance of public Universities are “a means of closing the door to violence and opening the way to freedom” and an assertion that “it is not the police who enter universities, but democracy”.

    Conclusion

    It occurs to me that those public figures who feel deprived of a platform to express controversial views may well be outnumbered by the scholars whose universities allow their work to be suppressed by targeted intellectual purges, academic totalitarianism and metric surveillance. It is telling that assaults on academic freedom in the UK have not attracted comment or action from the organisations which might be well placed to defend this defining and essential principle of universities. I hereby call on Universities UK, the Office for Students and the freedom of speech champion to insist on an independent audit of academic freedom and autonomy for each higher education institution.

    We now know where intervention into the rights of academics to teach and research autonomously may lead. We also know that many of the candidates targeted for redundancy are UCU trade union officials; this has happened at University of East London and the University of Hull. Make no mistake, this is a PATCO moment (https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/reagan-fires-11-000-striking-air-traffic-controllers-aug-5-1981-241252) for higher education in the UK as management teams try to break union support and solidarity in order to exact greater control in the future.

    Universities are the canary down the mine in an era of right-wing authoritarianism. We must ensure that they can maintain their unique responsibility to protect against the rise of populism and the dismantling of democracy. We must be assertive in protecting the rights of academics whose lawful and reasoned opinions are increasingly subject to some very sinister threats. Academic freedom needs to be fought for, just like the right to protest and the right to roam. That leaves a heavy responsibility for academics if the abolition of autonomy and academic freedom is not to be complete.

    http://cdbu.org.uk/academic-freedom-is-in-crisis-free-speech-is-not
    #liberté_académique #liberté_d'expression #UK #Angleterre #université #facs #justice_sociale #black_studies #races #race #approches_critiques #études_critiques #privilège_blanc #économie_politique #Leicester_Business_School #pandémie #crise_sanitaire #Birmingham #Liverpool #Janet_Beer #concurrence #Grèce #Etats-Unis #métrique #attaques #éducation_supérieure #populisme #démocratie #autonomie #canari_dans_la_mine

    ping @isskein @cede

    • The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness. How the right is trying to censor critical race theory.

      It’s something of a truism, particularly on the right, that conservatives have claimed the mantle of free speech from an intolerant left that is afraid to engage with uncomfortable ideas. Every embarrassing example of woke overreach — each ill-considered school board decision or high-profile campus meltdown — fuels this perception.

      Yet when it comes to outright government censorship, it is the right that’s on the offense. Critical race theory, the intellectual tradition undergirding concepts like white privilege and microaggressions, is often blamed for fomenting what critics call cancel culture. And so, around America and even overseas, people who don’t like cancel culture are on an ironic quest to cancel the promotion of critical race theory in public forums.

      In September, Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered federal agencies to “begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’” which it described as “un-American propaganda.”

      A month later, the conservative government in Britain declared some uses of critical race theory in education illegal. “We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt,” said the Tory equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch. “Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

      Some in France took up the fight as well. “French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society,” Norimitsu Onishi reported in The New York Times. (This is quite a reversal from the days when American conservatives warned darkly about subversive French theory.)

      Once Joe Biden became president, he undid Trump’s critical race theory ban, but lawmakers in several states have proposed their own prohibitions. An Arkansas legislator introduced a pair of bills, one banning the teaching of The Times’s 1619 Project curriculum, and the other nixing classes, events and activities that encourage “division between, resentment of, or social justice for” specific groups of people. “What is not appropriate is being able to theorize, use, specifically, critical race theory,” the bills’ sponsor told The Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

      Republicans in West Virginia and Oklahoma have introduced bills banning schools and, in West Virginia’s case, state contractors from promoting “divisive concepts,” including claims that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.” A New Hampshire Republican also proposed a “divisive concepts” ban, saying in a hearing, “This bill addresses something called critical race theory.”

      Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering legal scholar who teaches at both U.C.L.A. and Columbia, has watched with alarm the attempts to suppress an entire intellectual movement. It was Crenshaw who came up with the name “critical race theory” when organizing a workshop in 1989. (She also coined the term “intersectionality.”) “The commitment to free speech seems to dissipate when the people who are being gagged are folks who are demanding racial justice,” she told me.

      Many of the intellectual currents that would become critical race theory emerged in the 1970s out of disappointment with the incomplete work of the civil rights movement, and cohered among radical law professors in the 1980s.
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      The movement was ahead of its time; one of its central insights, that racism is structural rather than just a matter of interpersonal bigotry, is now conventional wisdom, at least on the left. It had concrete practical applications, leading, for example, to legal arguments that housing laws or employment criteria could be racist in practice even if they weren’t racist in intent.

      Parts of the critical race theory tradition are in tension with liberalism, particularly when it comes to issues like free speech. Richard Delgado, a key figure in the movement, has argued that people should be able to sue those who utter racist slurs. Others have played a large role in crafting campus speech codes.

      There’s plenty here for people committed to broad free speech protections to dispute. I’m persuaded by the essay Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in the 1990s challenging the movement’s stance on the first amendment. “To remove the very formation of our identities from the messy realm of contestation and debate is an elemental, not incidental, truncation of the ideal of public discourse,” he wrote.

      Disagreeing with certain ideas, however, is very different from anathematizing the collective work of a host of paradigm-shifting thinkers. Gates’s article was effective because he took the scholarly work he engaged with seriously. “The critical race theorists must be credited with helping to reinvigorate the debate about freedom of expression; even if not ultimately persuaded to join them, the civil libertarian will be much further along for having listened to their arguments and examples,” he wrote.

      But the right, for all its chest-beating about the value of entertaining dangerous notions, is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory. It wants to eradicate them from public institutions.

      “Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” Christopher Rufo, director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank once known for pushing an updated form of creationism in public schools, wrote in January.

      Rufo’s been leading the conservative charge against critical race theory. Last year, during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, he called on Trump to issue an executive order abolishing “critical race theory trainings from the federal government.” The next day, he told me, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called him and asked for his help putting an order together.

      Last month, Rufo announced a “new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America’s institutions.” A number of House and Senate offices, he told me, are working on their own anti-critical race theory bills, though none are likely to go anywhere as long as Biden is president.

      As Rufo sees it, critical race theory is a revolutionary program that replaces the Marxist categories of the bourgeois and the proletariat with racial groups, justifying discrimination against those deemed racial oppressors. His goal, ultimately, is to get the Supreme Court to rule that school and workplace trainings based on the doctrines of critical race theory violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

      This inversion, casting anti-racist activists as the real racists, is familiar to Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in critical race theory. “There’s a rhetoric of reaction which seeks to claim that it’s defending these higher values, which, perversely, often are the very values it’s traducing,” he said. “Whether that’s ‘In the name of free speech we’re going to persecute, we’re going to launch investigations into particular forms of speech’ or — and I think this is equally perverse — ‘In the name of fighting racism, we’re going to launch investigations into those scholars who are most serious about studying the complex forms that racism takes.’”

      Rufo insists there are no free speech implications to what he’s trying to do. “You have the freedom of speech as an individual, of course, but you don’t have the kind of entitlement to perpetuate that speech through public agencies,” he said.

      This sounds, ironically, a lot like the arguments people on the left make about de-platforming right-wingers. To Crenshaw, attempts to ban critical race theory vindicate some of the movement’s skepticism about free speech orthodoxy, showing that there were never transcendent principles at play.

      When people defend offensive speech, she said, they’re often really defending “the substance of what the speech is — because if it was really about free speech, then this censorship, people would be howling to the high heavens.” If it was really about free speech, they should be.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html

      #droite #gauche #censure #cancel_culture #micro-agressions #Trump #Donald_Trump #Kemi_Badenoch #division #critical_race_theory #racisme #sexisme #Kimberlé_Crenshaw #Crenshaw #racisme_structurel #libéralisme #Richard_Delgado #Christopher_Rufo #Ian_Haney_López

    • No ‘Social Justice’ in the Classroom: Statehouses Renew Scrutiny of Speech at Public Colleges

      Blocking professors from teaching social-justice issues. Asking universities how they talk about privilege. Analyzing students’ freedom of expression through regular reports. Meet the new campus-speech issues emerging in Republican-led statehouses across the country, indicating potential new frontiers for politicians to shape campus affairs.

      (paywall)
      https://www.chronicle.com/article/no-social-justice-in-the-classroom-new-state-scrutiny-of-speech-at-public

  • Was spricht für den Kapitalismus? Artikelserie auf Telepolis


    1. Der Kapitalismus schafft nützliche Güter
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Kapitalismus-schafft-nuetzliche-Gueter-4873238.html

    24. August 2020 von Brend Tragen - Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise stellt eine unermessliche Gütervielfalt her. Beweis: Sieht man doch! Was ist von dieser Behauptung zu halten?

    2. Der Kapitalismus schafft Reichtum
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Kapitalismus-schafft-Reichtum-4873240.html

    Der Kapitalismus schafft immensen Wohlstand. Inwiefern stimmt das und wie stellt er das an?

    3. Der Kapitalismus stiftet Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Kapitalismus-stiftet-Freiheit-und-Gerechtigkeit-4873242.html

    Der Kapitalismus auf seinen Begriff gebracht, erfordert vertragsrechtliche Strukturen. Man könnte dieser Produktionsweise doch wenigstens zugute halten, dass sie, um bestehen zu können, einen Rechtsstaat um sich herum etabliert hat. Wir werden sehen.

    4. Im Kapitalismus wird wenigstens niemand ausgebeutet
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Im-Kapitalismus-wird-wenigstens-niemand-ausgebeutet-4873244.html

    Die Reihenfolge der hier präsentierten Argumente aus dem Buch „Das Kapital“ (Band 1) von Karl Marx folgen einem logischen Aufbau. Deshalb bitte ich den Leser, sofern nicht geschehen, vor dem Lesen des 4. Teils zunächst die Teile 1 bis 3 zu konsultieren.

    Zum Glück haben wir die Sklaverei und die feudale Leibeigenschaft überwunden. Das Arbeitsrecht verhindert Ausbeutung. Doch tut es das wirklich? Ist nicht viel mehr umgekehrt der Fall, dass es der Ausbeutung eine dauerhafte Verlaufsform gibt?

    5. Rationalisierung (wird noch später Thema sein)
    –---

    Diskussion der Einwände

    Marx ist Murks
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Marx-ist-Murks-Teil-1-4881920.html

    Antworten auf die Einwürfe der Forenten zur Artikelserie "Was spricht für den Kapitalismus?
    Teil 1

    Der Mehrwert ist überhaupt kein Rätsel
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Mehrwert-ist-ueberhaupt-kein-Raetsel-4892885.html

    Marx ist Murks. Die Diskussion mit den Foristen geht in die nächste Runde
    Teil 2

    Der Mehrwert ist überhaupt kein Rätsel
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Mehrwert-ist-ueberhaupt-kein-Raetsel-4916051.html

    Marx ist Murks - Eine weitere Replik auf die Einwürfe der Foristen
    Teil 3a
    Vorab: Es handelt sich in den folgenden Ausführungen um die Besprechung der Lesereinwürfe zu der Artikelserie „Was spricht für den Kapitalismus?“. Berücksichtigt werden Einträge, nur sofern sie zu Redaktionsschluss (24.09.2020) für die Foren von Teil 1, Teil 2, Teil 3 oder den bisherigen Repliken I und II vorlagen.

    Kapitalismus schafft Freiheit, Gerechtigkeit und Frieden
    https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Kapitalismus-schafft-Freiheit-Gerechtigkeit-und-Frieden-4928760.html

    Marx ist Murks - Replik auf die Einwürfe der Foristen
    Teil 3b
    Fortsetzung der 3. Replik „Der Kehrwert ist überhaupt kein Rätsel“ auf die Kommentare der Artikelserie "Was für den Kapitalismus spricht

    #marxisme #économie_politique

  • Michel Barrillon, Les marxistes, Marx et la question naturelle, 2013

    Résumé

    Nombre d’auteurs marxistes ou néomarxistes contemporains admettent « l’immense retard théorique » du marxisme dans l’appréhension de la question naturelle. Ils le déplorent d’autant plus que le paradigme marxien leur paraît parfaitement en mesure d’intégrer la dimension socio-écologique dans la critique ordinaire du mode de production #capitaliste. En marxistes conséquents, ils s’interrogent sur les raisons historiques de ce « rendez-vous manqué » avec l’écologie politique. Certains poussent l’analyse jusqu’à revenir aux écrits fondateurs de Marx et Engels. J. B. Foster a ainsi défendu la thèse d’un « Marx écologiste »… Cette thèse ne résiste pas à l’épreuve d’un examen critique du mode de traitement de la nature chez Marx. Rétrospectivement, Marx et la plupart de ses épigones apparaissent comme des théoriciens demeurés fidèles au projet baconien et cartésien inscrit dans l’imaginaire de la modernité ; prisonniers d’une vision progressiste de l’histoire, ils n’ont pu, en fait de critique radicale du capitalisme, que « le reproduire comme modèle ».

    https://sniadecki.wordpress.com/2020/06/04/barrillon-marxistes

    #Marx, #marxistes, #écologie, #critique_techno, #modernité, etc.

    En définitive, pour avoir voulu mener un combat scientifique sur le terrain de l’#économie_politique, le terrain même de ses ennemis désignés, Marx s’est pris au piège de la #théorisation froide et a fini par reproduire le capitalisme comme modèle, au lieu de dénoncer fermement ses crimes écologiques et humains sans lui faire de concession au nom d’une arbitraire nécessité historique. Paradoxalement, il a consacré ce qu’il croyait critiquer à la racine, vraisemblablement par désir de #scientificité, mais aussi parce qu’il demeurait convaincu que le capitalisme est un mal historique nécessaire, investi, malgré lui, d’une mission « civilisatrice ». En reconnaissant au capitalisme l’immense mérite d’avoir rendu la nature exploitable sans limites, il n’a pas simplement conforté le #productivisme capitaliste, il a aussi pleinement souscrit au projet baconien et cartésien puisque c’est dans le cadre de l’imaginaire de la modernité qu’il conçoit le passage au communisme. Si, aujourd’hui, le retour aux œuvres de Marx doit être une source d’enseignements, c’est bien pour nous éviter de répéter ses erreurs.

    Quelques chose me dit que la #WertKritik pourrait en prendre de la graine...

    • La wertkritik ne pense absolument pas que le capitalisme est une étape nécessaire à quoi que ce soit. :p
      Elle ne prend de Marx que telle ou telle partie qu’elle considère la plus importante de son travail, sur la critique du cœur de comment fonctionne le capitalisme. Et justement rejette ou tout du moins ne garde pas, la plupart des idées politiques de Marx, qui étaient propres à son temps.

  • Kako Nubukpo : « Le modèle de croissance des pays africains est mortifère »
    https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2019/09/22/kako-nubupko-le-modele-de-croissance-des-pays-africains-est-mortifere_601260

    Que reprochez-vous à l’actuel modèle de croissance des pays africains ?
    Kako Nubukpo De maintenir l’Afrique dans le modèle dit « d’esclavage colonial ». Les pays du continent restent intégrés, plus de soixante ans après les indépendances, dans un système économique qui les poussent à produire des matières premières puis à les exporter sans les transformer. En revanche, ces Etats importent, du reste du monde, des produits transformés. C’est un modèle de croissance mortifère, car c’est dans la transformation des matières premières qu’on crée des emplois, de la valeur ajoutée et donc des revenus. Ce modèle pousse notre jeunesse à migrer vers là où se créeront la richesse et les jobs.

    #Afrique #Economie_Politique #Résumé

  • La thèse de Daniel (1) une préhistoire de la monnaie européenne _ Librairie Tropique - 6 Mai 2019 *
    http://www.librairie-tropiques.fr/2019/05/la-these-de-daniel-1-une-prehistoire-de-la-monnaie-europeenne.ht

    Historique de la budgétaire de la France, de la fin des trentes glorieuses, de la lutte contre l’inflation, de l’inflation des actifs financiers, du logements, de la stagnation et la baisse des salaires, de l’amélioration de la qualification des travailleurs, de leurs productivités et la mise en concurrence artificielle avec les travailleurs d’autres pays.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc4pCPhJrqQ

    Daniel est autiste asperger.
    Il a été diagnostiqué tardivement.
     
    Né de père fils d’immigré polonais et de mère alsacienne, il a grandi dans un environnement social d’ouvriers catholiques provinciaux, de jeunesses ouvrières chrétiennes, de CFTC devenue CFDT.
     
    C’était également un milieu d’élection pour la démocratie chrétienne refoulée qui fut se consola un temps au MRP, celui de Jacques Delors, de certains gaullistes dits « sociaux » puis du socialisme mitterandien en même temps que de pas mal de gauchistes « vieillissants »
    Après une enfance troublée, une adolescence chaotique et une socialisation d’adulte problématique, une fois fixé sur son handicap, Daniel a su s’extraire de cette couche sociale et idéologique. Il a repris à 40 ans passés, à ses frais, des études en cours du soir au CNAM.
     
    Après avoir obtenu un master 2 il a décidé de s’engager dans une thèse de doctoratpour laquelle il a lu et assimilé une masse exceptionnelle de documents, ouvrages,informations et entretiens avec des témoins et personnalités de premier plan.
     
    En attendant la soutenance de cette thèse, nous vous livrons son « making of » sous forme de feuilleton d’éducation populaire... européenne, sociale, économique et politique.

    #jacques_delors, #daniel_machlik, #économie_politique, #histoire, #union_européenne, #franc #euro, #SME #ue #monnaie #François_Bloch_Lainé #Poincarré #Charles_De_Gaulle #Raymond_Poincaré #Banque_de_France #traité_de_rome #Bretton_Woods #Robert_Marjolin #Jean_Monnet #Jacques_Rueff #plein_emploi #croissance #inflation #Jean-Marcel_Jeanneney

  • #Cynthia_Enloe

    A propos d’elle, je viens de recevoir ce message d’une amie/collègue...

    Cynthia Enloe signalait que la couverture maladie des #militaires a mis des décennies a intégré le/la gynéco après les premiers #femmes incorporées dans ses rangs. Je crois que c’est dans Maneuvers. Tu connais ses bouquins ? rien que les titres tu te régales

    ... et je me dis que ça peut peut-être intéresser des personnes sur seenthis.

    #armée #assurance_maladie

    Wikipedia dit cela d’elle :

    Cynthia Enloe Holden (née le 16 juillet 1938) est une écrivain et théoricienne féministe américaine1. Elle est surtout connue pour son travail sur le #genre et le #militarisme et pour sa contribution dans le domaine des #relations_internationales féministes.

    En 2015, le International Feminist Journal of Politics, en collaboration avec la maison de presse universitaire Taylor & Francis, a créé le prix Cynthia Enloe « en l’honneur de Cynthia Enloe, féministe pionnière dans la recherche sur la politique internationale et l’#économie_politique et sa contribution significative à la construction d’une communauté universitaire féministe plus inclusive »


    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Enloe
    #féminisme

  • Jaunes de colère : de la trahison macroniste à la révolte populaire, entretien avec Samuel Hayat
    https://grozeille.co/jaunes-de-colere-samuel-hayat

    La #mobilisation peut se faire à deux conditions. D’abord il faut un conflit entre des #principes_moraux différents, ce qui suppose donc qu’un autre principe vienne s’opposer à celui que l’on défend. A propos du XVIIIe siècle, Thompson parle de conflit entre #économie_morale et #économie_politique. L’époque est travaillée par l’apparition des nouveaux principes de l’économie politique : le libre-échange, notamment le libre échange des grains. C’est lorsqu’il y a une confrontation entre les principes de l’économie morale et ceux de l’économie politique que naît la contestation.

    Deuxième chose : il faut qu’on ait l’impression que l’autorité, normalement garante des principes de #justice, les a trahis et a pris parti pour ceux qui s’opposent à ces principes. C’est ce qui se passe aujourd’hui : on a un Président de la République qui met en avant son adhésion à des principes de justice qui ne sont pas du tout ceux des gilets jaunes. Il soutient des principes de justice capitalistes selon lesquels les gagnants doivent gagner encore plus de telle sorte qu’ils tireront tout le monde vers le haut. Selon lesquels, aussi, les #pauvres sont responsables de leur pauvreté puisqu’ils n’ont qu’à traverser la rue pour trouver un travail, qu’à travailler pour s’acheter une chemise et qu’à s’en prendre à eux-mêmes si le monde des gagnants ne leur est pas accessible.

    Macron a d’emblée pris position contre les principes de l’économie morale des classes populaires. Et le fait qu’il ait été aussi ouvert et explicite, surtout dans sa moquerie des principes de l’économie morale, a clairement été perçu comme une trahison. Trahison qui a rendu possible le mouvement, ou en tout cas l’a focalisé sur les principes moraux dont nous parlions.

    A côté de ces deux éléments qui me semblent nécessaires à une mobilisation sur le fondement de l’économie morale, il y a évidemment d’autres choses, plus spécifiques au mouvement actuel. Il y a bien sûr une cause plus structurelle qui tient aux quarante années de politiques néolibérales que nous venons de vivre. Enfin, et c’est sûrement ce qui fait que la mobilisation s’est faite autour des taxes sur le carburant et pas autre chose, il y a le discours soi-disant écologiste des gouvernants qui consiste à dire à toute une série de personnes que leur mode de vie est dangereux pour la planète. Il faudrait le vérifier par une véritable enquête, mais il me semble qu’il y a quelque chose d’inédit dans ce discours de responsabilisation écologique individuelle , quand bien même il serait fondé scientifiquement et politiquement. En gros, avec cette augmentation des taxes sur le carburant, on voit le chef de l’Etat rejoindre la mise en accusation écologique généralisée pour déclarer que non seulement les gens doivent payer plus, mais qu’ils ont intérêt à se taire et à dire merci, parce qu’on les fait payer plus du fait qu’ils sont en train de détruire la planète, ces salauds, et que c’est au nom de la transition écologique qu’on les fait payer plus. Tandis qu’à côté de ça, le gouvernement recule sur le glyphosate, ne taxe pas les gros pollueurs, etc.

    Il faut bien saisir l’ampleur de la trahison que cela représente et l’hypersensibilité que ça peut créer chez les gens : le modèle qu’on nous a vendu depuis un siècle, celui de l’#individu qui s’accomplit en étant propriétaire de sa maison et de sa voiture, qui a un #travail décent et qui vit bien sa vie en se levant tous les matins pour aller bosser, ce modèle-là sur lequel Nicolas Sarkozy a beaucoup surfé avec sa France des gens qui se lèvent tôt et sa politique d’accession à la propriété, tout ce modèle-là on déclare tout à coup qu’il n’est plus possible économiquement et qu’il est dangereux écologiquement, qu’il faut donc se sentir coupable d’être à ce point écologiquement irresponsable, d’avoir suivi des décennies d’incitation à suivre ce modèle. Vrai ou pas vrai, l’effet de ce discours est terrible.

    Je pense néanmoins qu’entre toutes ces raisons, le point fondamental reste la trahison. C’est en cela qu’Emmanuel Macron est complètement différent de Nicolas Sarkozy et François Hollande. La délectation naïve avec laquelle il trahit tous les codes moraux habituels de fonctionnement d’une société inégalitaire est une raison essentielle de la haine dont il est l’objet. Les #sociétés_inégalitaires ont besoin d’être tenues ensemble, soudées, justifiées par autre chose que la pure économie, quelque chose qui donne le sentiment que les gagnants ont une certaine #légitimité à être les gagnants, que les perdants ne sont pas complètement laissés en-dehors de la société, que les gagnants doivent payer leur impôts et que l’#Etat joue un rôle un peu neutre dans tout ce système. Or voir un Président afficher de manière aussi ostensible la culpabilisation de ceux qui ne réussissent pas, c’est une #violence extrême dont les gouvernants ne se rendent visiblement pas compte.

    #gilets_jaunes #écologie #écologie_punitive #culpabilisation #responsabilité_individuelle

    • G – Peut-on voir ce rejet du politique, ni droite ni gauche comme le miroir inversé de ce que propose la vision macroniste d’un contrôle technicien qui ne serait pas politique, mais strictement expert ?

      H – Ces mouvements citoyens ne sont en effet possibles que parce qu’ils viennent répondre comme en miroir à ce processus de dépolitisation de la politique. Cette dépolitisation experte et technicienne appropriée par les forces néolibérales, Macron en est une sorte de symbole. Macron est celui qui trahit le pacte mais c’est aussi celui qui rejette la politique, qui rejette l’idéologisation de la politique. Et en ce sens-là il y a une affinité très forte entre ces mouvements et le monde de Macron dans lequel il y a simplement des citoyens et l’Etat, mais plus aucun des dispositifs de médiation conflictuelle qui existaient et étaient légitimes jusque-là. Dans lequel il n’y a donc plus aucun affrontement partisan qui viendrait diviser le social. Le clivage se fait entre d’un côté les forces de la modernité technicienne et de l’autre les ringards, les Gaulois réfractaires.❞

  • YouTube’s top creators are burning out and breaking down en masse
    https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/1/17413542/burnout-mental-health-awareness-youtube-elle-mills-el-rubius-bobby-burns-pe

    Three weeks ago, Bobby Burns, a YouTuber with just under one million subscribers, sat down on a rock in Central Park to talk about a recent mental health episode. One week ago, Elle Mills, a creator with more than 1.2 million subscribers, uploaded a video that included vulnerable footage during a breakdown. Six days ago, Rubén “El Rubius” Gundersen, the third most popular YouTuber in the world with just under 30 million subscribers, turned on his camera to talk to his viewers about the fear of an impending breakdown and his decision to take a break from YouTube.

    Burns, Mills and Gundersen aren’t alone. Erik “M3RKMUS1C” Phillips (four million subscribers), Benjamin “Crainer” Vestergaard (2.7 million subscribers) and other top YouTubers have either announced brief hiatuses from the platform, or discussed their own struggles with burnout, in the past month. Everyone from PewDiePie (62 million subscribers) to Jake Paul (15.2 million subscribers) have dealt with burnout. Lately, however, it seems like more of YouTube’s top creators are coming forward with their mental health problems.

    Constant changes to the platform’s algorithm, unhealthy obsessions with remaining relevant in a rapidly growing field and social media pressures are making it almost impossible for top creators to continue creating at the pace both the platform and audience want — and that can have a detrimental effect on the very ecosystem they belong to.

    #travail_immatérielle #économie_politique_du_signe #neurocapitalisme #YouTube #youtubers #burnout

  • L’économie politique européenne
    http://www.laviedesidees.fr/L-economie-politique-europeenne.html

    « #euro », « budget européen », « dette commune »… Le récent ouvrage de deux économistes restaure patiemment la signification politique et sociale de ces « gros mots » de l’Union économique et monétaire, renouant avec le projet trop longtemps laissé en friche d’une #économie_politique européenne.

    Livres & études

    / #Europe, euro, #institutions, économie politique

    #Livres_&_études

  • La politique n’est pas la solution !
    Avec #Anselm_Jappe pour Nuit Debout à Paris

    Même si beaucoup refusent encore de comprendre la logique inexorable qui a conduit à un état du monde si sombre, la conviction se répand que l’économie capitaliste a mis l’humanité devant de grands problèmes. Presque toujours, la première réponse est la suivante : « Il faut retourner à la politique pour donner des règles au marché. Il faut rétablir la démocratie menacée par le pouvoir des multinationales et des Bourses ».
    Mais la politique et la démocratie sont-elles, vraiment le contraire de l’économie autonomisée, sont-elles capables de la ramener dans ses « justes bornes » ?

    http://ekouter.net/la-politique-n-est-pas-la-solution-avec-anselm-jappe-pour-nuit-debout-a-par

    http://ekouter.net/audio/Anselm%20Jappe-La%20politique%20n'est%20pas%20la%20solution-Nuit%20Debout-0

    #ordre_marchand #critique_de_la_valeur #économie_politique #émancipation

  • Peter Temin: Economic Mobility Requires the Nearly Impossible - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/economic-inequality/524610

    After divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass #incarceration, housing #segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin writes.

    #economie_politique #politique #politique_economique #Etats-Unis #classe #race #prison #désavantage

  • Piketty hors classe
    http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Piketty-hors-classe.html

    En dépit de sa référence à Marx, le livre de Thomas Piketty fait l’impasse sur l’exploitation du travail par les classes dominantes. Point de vue nord-américain sur un best seller mondial, publié en partenariat avec la revue Public Books.

    Essais & débats

    / #inégalités, #économie_politique

    #Essais_&_débats

  • Marx et la philosophie, Emmanuel Renault (PUF, Actuel Marx, 2014)
    http://sophiapol.hypotheses.org/15793

    #Marx commença par développer son activité théorique dans le cadre philosophique du Jeune-hégélianisme et il finit par lui donner la forme d’une critique de l’#économie_politique. Au cours de cette évolution intellectuelle, et d’une évolution politique non moins profonde, il s’est essayé à différentes pratiques de la #philosophie et a tenté différentes mises en rapport de la philosophie et de son dehors (la pratique, l’histoire, la politique, l’économie politique). Doit-on se contenter de constater l’existence d’une pluralité de philosophies de Marx et d’une diversité de rapports à la philosophie ? Ou bien est-il possible d’identifier un fil conducteur philosophiquement significatif ? Les études réunies ici retiennent le second terme de l’alternative en décrivant un processus de transformation de la philosophie qui conduit d’une conception maximaliste (celle de la période hégélienne) à une conception déflationniste. Que la philosophie doive abandonner certaines de ses ambitions traditionnelles pour parvenir à atteindre certains de ses objectifs principaux, c’est l’une des principales leçons qui ressort de l’examen des pratiques marxiennes de la philosophie dans Les Annales Franco-Allemandes, les Manuscrits de 1844, L’Idéologie allemande et Le Capital. Une leçon qui n’a rien perdu de son actualité.

  • Les milliardaires : une oligarchie dans la démocratie ? - La Vie des idées
    http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Les-milliardaires-une-oligarchie.html

    Le politologue Jeffrey Winters soutient que l’oligarchie adopte des formes variées selon les époques : le pouvoir politique acquis par les milliardaires ferait ainsi évoluer certaines démocraties vers des « oligarchies civiles ». Cependant l’attention exclusive portée à la « défense des richesses » simplifie l’influence véritable de ces hommes fortunés.


    #Politique #démocratie #économie_politique

  • Un #livre inestimable. A propos de J-M. Harribey, « La richesse, la valeur et l’inestimable » | Contretemps
    http://www.contretemps.eu/lectures/livre-inestimable-propos-j-m-harribey-richesse-valeur-linestimable

    JMH montre que derrière la référence à la théorie de la #valeur, on trouve une question beaucoup plus concrète et légitime : d’où vient le #profit ? C’est d’ailleurs la question que se posaient les pères fondateurs de l’#économie_politique classique et qu’ils n’ont pas réussi à résoudre vraiment. Adam Smith, avec sa référence au « #travail commandé » ne sort pas de cette impasse : la valeur d’une #marchandise dépend du travail dépensé pour la produire, mais permet d’acheter une quantité de travail supérieure à sa valeur. David Ricardo n’a pas quant à lui réussi à sortir de cette autre contradiction : si la valeur d’une marchandise est proportionnelle au travail qu’elle contient, comment son #prix peut-il incorporer un profit proportionnel à l’ensemble du #capital engagé ?