-
“A beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life”: A review of Daniel Bensaïd’s An Impatient Life
Dougal McNeill wrote a very enthusiastic review of Daniel Bensaïd’s An Impatient Life for the International Socialist Organization (Aotearoa). He calls the book “a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life” that illuminates Bensaïd’s life-long commitment to revolutionary struggle, from post-68 Paris as a leader of the Ligue communiste to Latin America with the Fourth International, from “imaginative, experimental, open thinking” on the role of theory to compelling reflections on his Jewish heritage and on anti-Zionist politics. -
Your country needs you!: Responses to the World War I Centenary
National commemorations of major historical events usually offer an incredible opportunity for the Right to showcase its jingoistic logorrhea about national identity and patriotism. Starting this coming August, the First World War centenary will most likely be no exception.
The Conservatives are battling on two different, though not unrelated, fronts. Contrary to what Max Hastings argues, it is the Right indeed who is “making an ideological argument out of World War I, as it does out of almost everything else in history.”
In a Telegraph article, David Cameron puts particular emphasis on commemorating, and even celebrating the break-out of World War I as a moment of national unity and cohesion, “a fundamental part of our national consciousness.”
-
Costas Lapavitsas Discusses the Financialization of Capitalism
The neoliberal capture of the state has laid the ground for the financialization of capitalism, a stage of capitalism that cannot be reversed without developing new methods of public provision in housing, education, health, pensions and the other sources financialization has used to create profit. This is the crux of the argument advanced in Costas Lapavitsas's latest work, Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All.
With this book, Lapavitsas sheds much light into one of the most misunderstood processes in the evolution of capitalism, correcting in the process the tendency on the part of many "progressive" economists to regard regulation as the ultimate solution to the exploitative nature of finance capital. For Lapavitsas, the struggle against finance capital is simultaneously a struggle against capitalism and for democratic socialism.
Below are some extracts from a Truthout interview with Costas on his theory of financialization of capitalism - you can read the interview in full here.
C.J. Polychroniou: The landscape of contemporary capitalism has been shaped by neoliberalism, globalization and financialization. Your new book deals with the financialization of capitalism. First, what does financialization mean for you, and in what ways does it represent a new feature of capitalism?
Costas Lapavitsas: For me, financialization represents a new historical period in the development of capitalism. Marxist political economy typically recognizes three great periods: laissez-faire capitalism around the middle of the 19th century, monopoly capitalism toward the end of the 19th century and imperialism that lasted perhaps until the Second World War. The 70 years since the war have been very difficult to categorize, not least because of the extraordinary Long Boom that lasted until the early 1970s, with unprecedented growth rates, rising incomes and greater equality. The Long Boom has been followed by four decades of indifferent growth, often stagnant incomes and rising inequality. In my view, financialization is a term that adequately characterizes this period. Its dominant feature has been the extraordinary rise of finance, which has come to penetrate areas of economic and social activity previously relatively distant to it. -
Holocaust Memorial Day: Felix Weinberg
Today, January 27th, is Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, chosen to mark the day in 1945 when the fascist death camp Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union. In 1939 Felix Weinberg, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy from the Sudeten, was captured by the Nazis, and spent almost his entire teenage years in the concentration camps, before being forced on the infamous Blechhammer Death March of 1945. What follows are edited extract from Felix's moving memoir Boy 30529, where he recounts his time in Auschwitz and the cruelty of the march from Blechhammer. Despite losing his teenager years to the camps, Felix went on to become Emeritus Professor of Combustion Physics and Distinguished Research Fellow at Imperial College London. He passed away in December 2012.
-
Mother Tongue, Father Tongue: New Compelling Essay by Ariella Azoulay
After provocatively arguing for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Ariella Azoulay engages with the intersection between linguistics, heritage, and social justice in a searing memoir, Mother Tongue, Father Tongue. Azoulay thoughtfully and provocatively reminisces about her experience growing up as a Mizrahi woman in Israel, addressing the alienation, estrangement, and civil injustice that continues to plague equality in Israeli society.