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

J.S Tan - Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry 

As tech bosses fall in line with the right, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement and the way it spawned an anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers and CEOs alike joining mass mobilizations against the new president’s anti-immigrant policies. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration.

In response, tens of thousands of tech workers protested against their own employers for betraying the progressive values that once defined the industry including organizing against military contracts, walking out to protest sexism, and even launching a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, these workers had sparked what observers were calling the tech worker movement, one that seemed capable of checking the industry’s reckless growth and reactionary drift. But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among tech's billionaire owners. Hell-bent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them and replacing the good tech jobs of the 2010s with incessant layoffs, grind culture, and a management style that treats workers as disposable. Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring workers' movement and the rise of the hostile labor politics that define Silicon Valley today.

Lorna Stefanick - Controlling Knowledge. Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection in a Networked World

Digital communications technology has immeasurably enhanced our capacity to store, retrieve, and exchange information. But who controls our access to information, and who decides what others have a right to know about us? In Controlling Knowledge, author Lorna Stefanick offers a thought-provoking and user-friendly overview of the regulatory regime that currently governs freedom of information and the protection of privacy.Aiming to clarify rather than mystify, Stefanick outlines the history and application of FOIP legislation, with special focus on how these laws affect the individual. To illustrate the impact of FOIP, she examines the notion of informed consent, looks at concerns about surveillance in the digital age, and explores the sometimes insidious influence of Facebook. Specialists in public policy and public administration, information technology, communications, law, criminal justice, sociology, and health care will find much here that bears directly on their work, while students and general readers will welcome the book’s down-to-earth language and accessible style.

Intended to serve as a “citizen’s guide,” Controlling Knowledge is a vital resource for anyone seeking to understand how freedom of information and privacy protection are legally defined and how this legislation is shaping our individual rights as citizens of the information age.

Toril Moi - Fredric Jameson as Reader

Fred’s own archive was extensive. It included history, theory, literature, film, philosophy, politics. He seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. Why focus on Fred as a reader? My sense is that his influential theorising about modernism and postmodernism, his insights into the dialectics of ideology and utopia and the nature of neoliberal global culture, may have obscured not just his originality as a theorist of interpretation and as a reader, but the way his work in that field allowed him to write all the books that came after. Fred made his way to cultural theory through a long engagement with literary works. Literature, and above all the novel, remained central to his thinking, from his first brilliant pages on Sartre’s Age of Reasonin 1961 to the novels discussed in Inventions of a Present in 2024. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/toril-moi/fredric-jameson-as-reader

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.