Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Neil Davidson - How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?  
 
Once of central importance to left historians and activists alike, the concept of the bourgeois revolution” has recently come in for sustained criticism from both Marxists and conservatives. In this comprehensive rejoinder, Neil Davidson seeks to answer the question, How revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions? by systematically examining the approach taken by a wide range of thinkers to explain their causes, outcomes, and content across the historical period from the sixteenth-century Reformation to twentieth-century decolonization. Through far-reaching research and comprehensive analysis, Davidson demonstrates that there is much at stake far from being a stale issue for the history books, understanding these struggles of the past can offer insightful lessons for today’s radicals.

Н. Пахсарьян - Мишель Фуко и литература

К 100-летию со дня рождения французского философа

На этой неделе исполняется 100 лет со дня рождения Мишеля Фуко (1926–1984), без работ которого невозможно представить современную мировую культуру. В преддверии этой даты «Горький» публикует статью Натальи Пахсарьян о том, как в работах французского философа отразились его литературные пристрастия и какое влияние на литературоведческую мысль оказал он сам.

https://gorky.media/context/mishel-fuko-i-literatura

Wolfgang Streeck - System Fractures

No need to get ahead of ourselves: it will still be a few years before the AfD takes power. In the five German state elections held this year, while they were the only party to increase their vote across the board, the AfD failed to secure an absolute majority anywhere. Across all five elections, the party averaged 27.3 percent. Its highest result – 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt was more than two and a half times its lowest, 16.3 percent in Berlin. Its biggest gains were in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern states with relatively small electorates (1.7 million and 1.3 million respectively, in a nation with 60.5 million eligible voters), and in which Chancellor Merz’s CDU performed particularly badly. It is hard to believe that so many CDU voters in these two eastern regions could have turned into neo-Nazis over the past five years.

In any case, there were other trends at work in these elections, beyond the rise of the AfD. Regional factors played a role specifically, the relative position of incumbent state premiers (weak in Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin, strong in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania). The Greens stagnated, suffering losses in three of the five states; the CDU made gains albeit modest ones in the two western states (in Baden-Württemberg, with its 7.7 million eligible voters, they came within a hair’s breadth of winning, and in Rhineland-Palatinate, with 2.9 million eligible voters, they actually won); while Die Linke increased its vote in three of the five elections: in the two western states and, above all, in Berlin (2.5 million eligible voters), where it finished nearly ten percentage points ahead of the AfD.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/system-fractures

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee - Lacan’s Lenin

In his discussion of this, Lacan associates knowledge with the jouissance involved in acquiring and exercising it. Such a brief juxtaposition does not constitute an endorsement of Leninism. But it does pose a question which I find more intriguing than an attempt at uncovering Lacan’s politics: What is it to inherit an idea whose implications the author has not exhausted?

https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783559/lacan-s-lenin

Minxin Pei - China’s Crony Capitalism. The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016)
 
When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.

Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly. Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay.