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

Sebastián Carassai - The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies

In The Argentine Silent Majority, Sebastián Carassai focuses on middle-class culture and politics in Argentina from the end of the 1960s. By considering the memories and ideologies of middle-class Argentines who did not get involved in political struggles, he expands thinking about the era to the larger society that activists and direct victims of state terror were part of and claimed to represent. Carassai conducted interviews with 200 people, mostly middle-class non-activists, but also journalists, politicians, scholars, and artists who were politically active during the 1970s. To account for local differences, he interviewed people from three sites: Buenos Aires; Tucumán, a provincial capital rocked by political turbulence; and Correa, a small town which did not experience great upheaval. He showed the middle-class non-activists a documentary featuring images and audio of popular culture and events from the 1970s. In the end Carassai concludes that, during the years of la violencia, members of the middle-class silent majority at times found themselves in agreement with radical sectors as they too opposed military authoritarianism but they never embraced a revolutionary program such as that put forward by the guerrilla groups or the most militant sectors of the labor movement.

Austerity: 12 Myths Exposed

Belt tightening austerity policies have been the path for most countries shaken by the financial crisis more than ten years ago. The deep spending cuts were often justified based on questionable grounds. Austerity: 12 Myths Exposed debunks commonly held beliefs by the advocates of austerity as the solution to overcome an economic crisis.

Jason Hackworth - The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism

The shift in the ideological winds toward a "free-market" economy has brought profound effects in urban areas. The Neoliberal City presents an overview of the effect of these changes on today's cities. The term "neoliberalism" was originally used in reference to a set of practices that first-world institutions like the IMF and World Bank impose on third-world countries and cities. The support of unimpeded trade and individual freedoms and the discouragement of state regulation and social spending are the putative centerpieces of this vision. More and more, though, people have come to recognize that first-world cities are undergoing the same processes. In The Neoliberal City, Jason Hackworth argues that neoliberal policies are in fact having a profound effect on the nature and direction of urbanization in the United States and other wealthy countries, and that much can be learned from studying its effect. He explores the impact that neoliberalism has had on three aspects of urbanization in the United States: governance, urban form, and social movements. The American inner city is seen as a crucial battle zone for the wider neoliberal transition primarily because it embodies neoliberalism's antithesis, Keynesian egalitarian liberalism. Focusing on issues such as gentrification in New York City; public-housing policy in New York, Chicago, and Seattle; downtown redevelopment in Phoenix; and urban-landscape change in New Brunswick, N.J., Hackworth shows us how material and symbolic changes to institutions, neighborhoods, and entire urban regions can be traced in part to the rise of neoliberalism.

Jacques Rancière - What Times Are We Living In?: A Conversation with Eric Hazan

In this short book, Jacques Rancière takes stock of the state of contemporary politics and examines current developments in the light of his writings. Rancière takes issue with what he sees as the consolidation in recent years of an increasingly oligarchic class of professional politicians within the system of representative democracy, while simultaneously objecting to leftist animosity towards electoral politics. He discusses a wide range of contemporary political movements and figures, from Nuit debout and Marine le Pen to Occupy, Trump, Syriza and Podemos, and he offers a trenchant critique of a variety of ideas and thinkers associated with radical politics, such as the ideas of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism and the concept of insurrection put forward by the Invisible Committee. But above all he talks about the time in which it makes sense to talk about all this, a time for which history has made no promises and the past has left no lessons, only moments to be extended as far as possible. In politics, there are only presents. It is at every moment that the bonds of unequal servitude are renewed or that the paths of emancipation are invented.