Benanav

Verso Live October 29, 2020 Figure out whether automation story: why is there few jobs, look at manufacturing sector. We can look at stats to see how many robots. Claim of industry is that its already happened.

DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION: many countries, Mexico has been de-industrializing, even China has been de-industrializing. If were the case that automation is taking off, you would expect labour productivity to be rising, this is counter-intuitive, but stats, the remaining workers appearing to produce more output per hour, but this isn’t happening. Labour productivity is not increasing.

More and more is being produced with fewer workers. Technology is always transforming, certain jobs are disappearing due to automation i.e. travel agents, but it’s due to OVERCAPACITY and Overproduction, so many suppliers have come online, its hard for producer to expand its output without taking some from others, heightened competition, lots of pressure to hold worker wages down. Hyper competition at the global level is expression of this OVER-capacity.

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Murmur of the indiscernable: Pluth on the event

Pluth, E. (2016) Against Spontaneity: The Act and Overcensorship in Badiou, Lacan, and Žižek International Journal of Žižek Studies, Volume One, Number Two – Žižek and Badiou

Formis, Barbara Event and Ready-Made: Delayed Sabotage. Communication & Cognition Vol. 36, Nr. 1 & 2 (2003)

What we have in these cases is not an internal negation – in which one signifier negates others, which would be entirely an affair of the symbolic. We have instead a signifier as a thing beyond or outside of sense. Again, I think this is consistent with viewing these signifiers as mathemes.

Ed Pluth on the heels of his book in 2004 that I used in my dissertation, has come back with his theory of the signifier in the act. What makes for a signifier in the act and how does one define it? The Act brings something new into the situation, an articulation of new means that signifiers play a crucial role, but not in the standard sense. These signifiers cannot be called “classical” signifiers. The signiers in the Act are different. Here is Pluth:

“What is being looked for in this theory of how acts use signifiers, then, is a use of signifiers that is prior to, or at least beyond and outside of, the difference between sense and nonsense. Considering signifiers in acts as mathemes highlights that side of them that does not even appear to have a sense; and although devoid of sense, as mathemes such signifiers cannot properly be called nonsense either. [..] This notion of a signifier that is outside of sense – a signifier that purely performs, perhaps – has become a central component of Žižek’s discussions of acts.” (11-12)

What Pluth is addressing is a signifier that escapes all signification, but yet present in the Act. He states: “At stake in an act, I am arguing, is a different kind of signifier that, additionally, also resists any conversion of nonsense into sense. In other words, the mathematized signifier in an act does not offer any salvation of its apparent nonsense, and is outside any meaning-effect altogether.” (12)

“Practically speaking, the acts Žižek tends to study do not require anything beyond insistence and repetition: one simply refuses to allow the signifiers in the act to enter into a relationship to any other signifiers. This is crucial to the act’s ability to be an absolute, pure “no!” But Badiou studies how a truth procedure uses signifiers in a matheme-like fashion while also allowing for the signifiers to join to others in the construction of a new situation.” (21)

Resilient the term

Stop asking us to be resilient

by Michael Orsini. Originally published on Policy Options
October 19, 2020

Please, I implore you. Can we just retire the term resilience?

[…] Popularized by developmental psychologists who were trying to understand how children overcame disadvantage, the term “resilience” has penetrated every corner of public discourse. Resilience is that “silver lining,” the positive residue left from trauma and tragedy. We are exhorted to be or become resilient, to summon the inner strength to deal with what life has flung our way. Develop the capacity to deal with adversity and, presto, you can bounce back stronger than ever. Of course, it seems almost silly to oppose resilience. After all, what is the alternative? Getting stuck?

The COVID-19 pandemic has revved up the resilience industry. Kids who were forced out of school and confined to their homes in March are expected to return to class – in whatever form that takes – ready and eager to learn. Their parents are supposed to be resilient, too, there to help them adjust to the new normal, even if those same parents are struggling themselves – working from home if they can, or required to report to work if they are essential workers.

And the Trudeau government’s recent speech from the throne – titled “A Stronger and More Resilient Canada” – was all about “building back better,” borrowing a phrase from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. In August, the federal government even announced its “Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program,” which allows provinces and territories to access funding for “pandemic-resilient infrastructure projects.” This would include supports for schools, hospitals, and walking paths – programs that would be worthy of public support in non-COVID-19 times.

What if resilience is just another way of saying “get over it”? What if a positive attitude is not enough to pull you out of poverty? What if dealing with hatred and racism is not made better by just not letting it get to you? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? It might not kill you, but it can harm you in ways that might make you feel like you would be better off dead.

Julie Lalonde, Ottawa author of the aptly titled Resilience is Futile, describes being stalked for several years by an ex-boyfriend. She says sexual assault survivors are ensnared in the “double bind” of resilience: “The few women who decided to report to police lived in a double bind. They had to look bad enough for their trauma to be taken seriously, but not be too much of a mess or else risk being seen as crazy and unstable. It wasn’t enough that women were subjected to discrimination, violence, and neglect, I realized. We also had to perform our trauma in a very precise way in order to get any semblance of justice.”

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Interview with Alenka Zupančič

Philosophy or Psychoanalysis? Yes, please!
Agon Hamza & Frank Ruda Crisis and Critique Volume 7 Issue 1.

Here is a talk by Zupančič at Freud Museum June 2019

Download here

At the moment when philosophy was just about ready to abandon some of its key central notions as belonging to its own metaphysical past, from which it was eager to escape, along came Lacan, and taught us an invaluable lesson: it is not these notions themselves that are problematic; what can be problematic in some ways of doing philosophy is the disavowal or effacement of the inherent contradiction, even antagonism, that these notions imply, and are part of. That is why, by simply abandoning these notions (like subject, truth, the real…), we are abandoning the battlefield, rather than winning any significant battles.

The Clinic should not be considered as a kind of holy grail providing the practitioners with automatic superiority when it comes to working theoretically, with psychoanalytic concepts.

Psychoanalysis is not a science, or “scientific” in the usual sense of this term, because it insists on a dimension of truth which is irreducible to “accuracy” or to simple opposition true/false. At the same time the whole point of Lacan is that this insistence doesn’t simply make it unscientific (unverifiable, without any firm criteria…), but calls for a different kind of formalization and situates psychoanalysis in a singular position in the context of science. And here philosophy, which is also not a science in the usual sense of the term, can and should be its ally, even partner. They are obviously not the same, but their often very critical dialogue shouldn’t obfuscate the fact that there are also “sisters in arms”.

My claim is that the Freudian notion of sexuality is above all a concept, a conceptual invention, and not simply a name for certain empirical “activities” that exist out there and that Freud refers to when talking about sexuality. As such, this concept is also genuinely “philosophical”. It links together, in a complex and most interesting way, language and the drives, it compels us to think a singular ontological form of negativity, to reconsider the simplistic human/animal divide, and so on…

One of the fundamental claims of my book is that there is something
about sexuality that is inherently problematic, “impossible”, and is not
such simply because of external obstacles and prohibitions. What we have
been witnessing over more than half a century has been a systematic obliteration, effacement, repression of this negativity inherent to sexuality
– and not simply repression of sexuality.

I’m not interested in sexuality as a case of “local ontology,” but as possibly providing some key conceptual elements for the ontological interrogation as such.

What we have been witnessing over more than half a century has been a systematic obliteration, effacement, repression of this negativity inherent to sexuality – and not simply repression of sexuality.

Sexuality has been, and still is, systematically reduced, yes, reduced, to a self-evident phenomenon consisting simply of some positive features, and problematic only because caught in the standard ideological warfare: shall we “liberally” show and admit everything, or “conservatively” hide and prohibit most of it? But show or prohibit what exactly, what is this “it” that we try to regulate when we regulate sexuality? This is what the title of my book tries to ask: What IS this sex that we are talking about? Is it really there, anywhere, as a simply positive entity to be regulated in this or that way? No, it is not. And this is precisely why we are “obsessed” with it, in one way or another, also when we want to get rid of it altogether.

this is probably the most daring philosophical proposition of the book. Namely, that sexuality is the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology. If there is a limit to what I can know, what is the status of this limit? Does it only tell us something about our subjective limitations on account of which we can never fully grasp being such as it is in itself? Or is there a constellation in which this not-knowing possibly tells us something about being itself, its own “lapse of being”?

There is, I believe; it is the constellation that Freud conceptualized under the name of the unconscious. Sexuality is not simply the content of the unconscious, understood as a container of repressed thoughts. The relationship between sex and the unconscious is not that between a content and its container. Or that between some primary, raw being, and repression (and other operations) performed on it. The unconscious is a thought process, and it is “sexualized” from within, so to say. The unconscious is not sexual because of the dirty thoughts it may contain or hide, but because of how it works. If I keep emphasizing that I’m interested in the psychoanalytical concept of sexuality, and not simply in sexuality, it is because of the fundamental link between sexuality and the unconscious discovered by Freud.

Sexuality enters the Freudian perspective strictly speaking only in so far as it is “unconscious sexuality”. Yet “unconscious sexuality” does not simply mean that we are not aware of it, while it constitutes a hidden truth of most of our actions.

Unconsciousness does not mean the opposite of consciousness, it refers to an active and ongoing process, the work of censorship, substitution, condensation…, and this work is itself “sexual”, implied in desire, intrinsic to sexuality, rather than simply performed in relation to it.

Žižek on Hegel Interview

Visiting Hegel at Dusk: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek (Interview by Hisham Aqeel) Rethinking Marxism, 2020

https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2020.1750193

Mao has this formula: One divides into Two. But I nonetheless correct Mao:
One is from the very beginning divided into Two. The One emerges through division.

You start with a confused field of multiplicities and then One emerges through division. One always means: “I am this and I am not that”—One is always a division.

[…] What Hegel means by “absolute recoil,” and the German term is absoluter Gegenstoß, is this closed circle when there is a cause which is generating effects, but, at some point, cause is only a retroactive effect of its effects. Let me give you a simple idea. We can say that—taking an extreme example —communists are inspired by the communist idea; the communist idea is their cause but at the same time this communist idea is only alive through the activity of communists. If you kill all the communists, there will be no communist idea.

So, you see, for Hegel it is the same with Subject. Subject expresses itself (it does something or says something), but there is no Subject prior to this expression. It is only through expressing itself that Subject emerges. In this sense you can link this to retroactivity—but very radically. Let me give you another example of retroactivity. Today we do not know what will happen; maybe there will be a new world war: Iran, Saudi Arabia, America, or China. We do not know what will happen, but if the war happens it will appear as if the war had to happen; that we were just postponing it. But if it doesn’t happen, we will be telling ourselves a story of how it was clear that it was a “false danger,” “the war couldn’t happen,” “we are not so stupid to ruin civilization,” and so on. I think that this is the deepest Hegelian insight: things become what they are only retroactively. My favorite example here is falling in love. You contingently fall in love, but once you are in love, it appears to you that all your life was moving to this point.

[…] The only thing I mean by communism is to somehow limit the market logic of capital. Capitalism works at a certain level, and very well so; look at what China has achieved through controlled capitalism. But I think capitalism must be controlled by some strong agency; we need to develop some kind of an international cooperation or agencies which are strong and have such power to coordinate not only how to fight global warming but also, for example, the problem of immigrants—this cannot be solved by nation-states. We need an international approach, where problems shouldn’t just be a humanitarian one, such as: “Will we allow more immigrants to come to Western Europe?” No! We should ask deeper questions: Why are immigrants leaving their countries? Who is responsible for those wars? Isn’t it clear that without the American intervention in Iraq, or the horrors today in Yemen and Syria (or Africa), we wouldn’t have had so many immigrants? So we should approach it in a different way, not just in a humanitarian way, such as, “Should we accept immigrants or not?” The problem is to tackle the situation which creates immigrants. You cannot do this in the level of capitalism and sovereign states.

Slavoj Žižek Sept 2020, International Philosophical Conference in Ljubljana

Implicit model of a future society Philosophy of Right. Marx thought Hegel got it right, the scheme of alienation, Hegel got it right for Fukuyama, liberal democracy. I disagree with Judith Butler, where Butler provides a vision of “we are not yet there Hegel.” Butler says about Hegel in a speech, we are not solitary creatures, though Hegel says that sometimes we see ourselves in this way. Who exactly is that idiot that says we are not solitary creatures disconnected from one another. What does Butler miss here: It’s not that if we are vulgar materialists, Hegel says we have to make the wrong choice, this is the immanent temporality. Hegel’s critique of Terror after French Revolution, its not French went too far, NO. His point is not usual critique of French Revolution, you HAVE to GO THROUGH TERROR. That is the only way we can get to reconciliation. NO, at the end the whole history is a succession of horrors. It’s totally wrong to read Hegel as nice world at the end totally reconciled. NO. At the end of Phil of Right you get the necessity of War.

Puerto Rico, Rosio Zambrana, with reference to Adorno, proposed a nice reading of Hegel, and rejects the notion of IMMANENT CRITIQUE. She sees in Hegel an ongoing critique which remains vigilant of the reversions of normative criteria. She knows Habermas, like you need normative criteria to criticize, but she says even the normative criteria have to FALL.

Robert Brandon’s The Spirit of Trust. Political Correct critiques, never see the evil in their own gaze. Say one work you are out forever. Forgiving Recollection. Our castigation of Hitler should be a reflexive determination of the evil in ourselves. Brandon’s take, he moves into this spurious infinity, our judgement is limited in the future they will recollectively forgive..

We have to introduce logical temporality of WILL HAVE BEEN. The meaning of your act can be determined retroactively. Somebody does something with the highest intentions and everything goes wrong. Bernard Williams, MORAL LUCK. you do something and it depends on the outcome of how it will be judged. For example KANT: every revolution is to be condemed, because you overthrow a legal power, but if the revolution is successful, you have to follow it.

An event retroactively become necessary, it retroactively contains its own presuppositions. The Hegelian motto, is the spirit of distrust. His basic procedure, something begins well with the best intentions and then everything goes wrong. One thing you can be sure with Hegel is don’t trust any ethical project. The only thing we can gain is the failure and the reaction to the failure.

Hegel is never a guy of happy endings. Fukuyama is the greatest anti-Hegelian. Because for Hegel,when a certain movement wins, its self-divides. Hegel offers the best way to think COVID. Hegel is much more autonomous in sense of admitting autonomy of nature.

Oren Cass on Ezra Klein

Review of Cass’s book The Once and Future Worker This review appeared in french in Paris, and has been translated by Emmanuel Todd

In a world without manufacturing, based uniquely on the tertiary economy, one sees neither gains in productivity nor increases in purchasing power. As Cass reminds us in a felicitous formulation: “Everyone can’t just serve each other coffee.” The production of tangible, exportable goods remains indispensable.

Cass on the Ezra Klein podcast

The Ezra Klein Show, July 16 2020

Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

But then he launched an insurgency. Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets.

What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policy making, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy.

Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.

In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.

References: The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass “Removing the Blinders from Economic Policy” by Oren Cass. Book recommendations: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom The Value of Everything by Mariana Mazzucato Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Aggregate GDP: Pay less attention to this indicator. We do a lot of analysis at aggregate level, but any given group or place isn’t looked at, need to focus in at those not doing as well. Measure consumption, increases in consumption when it is size of your television isn’t correlated with healthy families and communities through to the next generation.

Are people being able to achieve self-sufficiency, creating stable families

Basket of Indicators: Savings rate, not aggregate savings rate. Savings rate of typical household with children. Not reliant on transfer payments, but are net economic contributors.

Median Wage. Family Status. Divorce rate is not the way to look at it .. its families not being formed in the first place, instead marriage rate and fertility rate. Share of kids being raised in stable households.

Look at the health of local economies and communities. NY Times looked at county by county and share of personal income came from transfer payments. in the 1970s you were at 10 to 20% income from gov’t transfers, now you get 30-40% in some places and up to 50% in others. This shows economy is not working.

Finance: cut up and merge companies or go on to work and make real things in the economy

Culture and economics and the black community: family breakdown, fleeing of manufacturing from where black people live, economic devastation made it hard for families to remain stable. Now it’s happening to white communities. Divorce rates, drug addiction .. exposed white people to same economic conditions, they followed along the same trends, but treated differently. For instance the way crack and opioid are treated.

Post 2012: Slow recovery from recession. Post-Romney, Pre-Trump… academic research confirming shocks to labour markets deeply damage communities that they have trouble recovering from.

Oren Cass Working Goal

A labour market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy.

For most of the country, and most conversations, ivy league degree and job in investment banking, has very little status value, and is very negatively associated with a lot of things.

Klein: But hold it, what I’m getting at there, is that who holds status in society is important. The professions that attract the most powerful and selective cohorts, I think problem in the economy is that we mis-classify status.

Cass: In every human society you will have status, and positions of authority, that’s why they are high status. We want is a society is that anybody whereever they live can find work, feel they are a productive contributor and support a family that can sustain itself. Stable job paying $40 – $50,000 per year. This is what we should be talking about as policy goals.

Klein: Some of what you’re saying is severed from a power analysis. Wall St. players get their voices in the op-eds. Their voices set policy.

A society is going to have an elite thta exercises power. The 2 most important levers to pull.

1. what is the pool in which they all swim. ideas matter, trace way people opted different policies to get where we are today. Economic Piety Story (get a big pie for all)

2. At end of day, whoever is exercising power, is still subject to the coalition that their power is built on. The way coalition is structured is focused on certain groups and not others, so a realignment is needed.

opposed to any public funding for child care, the household should take care of child care. move toward an economy in which a single earner could earn enough so that both parents don’t have to work to support a household. Even a quite poor paying job that a second earner, is still going to earn more enough to pay child care. what is least affordable is to stay at home.

Adam Tooze

What did you see as the most pernicious, outdated assumption shaping global politics before COVID? And to what extent is the present crisis awakening policy-makers to the obsolescence of that idea?

[] it’s the householder analogy about the limits on deficit spending, which was one of the absolutely key elements of that consensus of the 1990s. This idea that there are hard-and-fast limits to debt sustainability and that governments that spent too much and ran large deficits would face the wrath of the all-powerful bond market. [] For better or worse, though, it just appears obsolete.

in this crisis, it has once again proved possible for large economies with credible central banks to borrow on an epic scale without suffering financial-market disruption. And this is because of a dirty little secret about very large holders of private capital: In moments of crisis, they’ve got to put that capital somewhere. And where they always end up putting it is government debt because that’s the safest port in a storm. [] if 2008 had not already demonstrated that government debt is the only game in town at the moment of maximum crisis, 2020 has really driven it home. And so there is little difficulty in finding financing for government action.

Ed Pluth

On Adrian Johnston’s Materialist Psychoanalysis: Some Questions The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 51, Spindel Supplement 2013

Psychoanalysis can be seen as a science for a specific set of what I would call practical-historical objects, as opposed to natural objects, and one distinctive feature of it is its peculiar relationship to these objects: it is a science that is as dialectical as it is materialist, in that its theories and its effects have real consequences for the objects they are about, in ways that the natural sciences never do and never can for their objects.

What I mean here is that in the case of the natural sciences, the objects do not change with our knowledge of them; it is hard to avoid an asymptotic view of the natural real in such sciences, the assumption that nature is as it always was, and that theory and science approach it more or less well. Whether one is a realist or not concerning the sciences, I think it is hard to avoid such a view of the natural real.

Consider, by contrast, Freud’s remarks about how the unconscious found new ways to hide itself after psychoanalysis was popularized. Consider ongoing discussions about the status of Oedipus in contemporary life; consider feminine sexuality and a host of other topics

All of these controversies are unlike disagreements in the natural sciences, not because there is no basis for determining which theory about them is correct or better—there is, and it is the practice of psychoanalysis itself—but because the changes these controversies introduce into psychoanalytic theory arise in part from effects that psychoanalysis itself has had on its objects. Thus, on my conception, psychoanalysis is not at all an odd dogmatic fetishization of the works of either Freud or Lacan or take your pick, but something that is in constant motion, in need of constant revision, because that is what is happening to its objects as well.

So, these are some reasons as to why the status of psychoanalysis is still
problematic. To be clear, I think much of the difficulty psychoanalysis has,
status-wise, is due to the fact that its objects are not identical to naturalscientific objects; so what makes it distinct, one of its defining features, is also what, for many, calls into question its possible status as a science. Moreover, the fact that it is in a dialectical relationship with its objects probably raises the suspicions of many scientists too, making it seem more like the stuff of mythology and folk wisdom.

If my view is correct, it can be asked whether the natural-scientific method is appropriate to, or even informative for, psychoanalytic theory and practice at all. If natural-scientific objects, unlike psychoanalytic ones, do not change with our theories of them—if the natural sciences are necessarily undialectical—then each deals not only with different objects, but each can be considered an entirely different type of science as well.

In light of this, what I am curious about is figuring out what should be said about the relationship between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, or any other science for that matter. Is there even a relationship? And this is why Johnston’s work is so important, because it is addressing this issue directly and taking the position that there is, or should be, a relationship.

If natural-scientific objects, unlike psychoanalytic ones, do not change with our theories of them—if the natural sciences are necessarily undialectical—then each deals not only with different objects, but each can be considered an entirely different type of science as well.

First of all, on my model, notice that there is no need for sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, neurobiology, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other, to even conflict with each other—they may be just noncomparable, maybe not even parallel—in a manner similar to the way in which no one would think that the ups and downs of the stock market can be reduced to or explained by physical laws. Economics has nothing to learn from physics, and no one takes them to be about the same kinds of things.

But, when engaging with the sciences, it is difficult not to open the door to
verificationism—by which I mean a view according to which if the sciences say there is no basis, no material correlate for X, then philosophers are obliged to say there is not really any such thing as X either. Now, Johnston is in the happy position of finding sciences that confirm the existence and possibility of psychoanalytic objects and phenomena—the structure and position of the thalamus, for example, he writes, is potentially “a leading candidate for the neurobiological ground of the splitting of the drive” (62). And earlier he wrote “like Freud before him, [Lacan] presciently anticipates with a welcoming attitude future empirical confirmations of core components of psychoanalytic theory via studies of the brain” (emphasis added).

If we were not to find any neurobiological correlates for psychoanalytic objects I suspect that Johnston would find this to be a serious problem. But putting the neurosciences in the position of confirming psychoanalytic theory (or is it just in that they are in a position to confirm its objects?) almost certainly must degrade the status of psychoanalysis, for does it not make psychoanalysis dependent on another discipline for a large share of its validity?

And even if the neurosciences do not explain anything that really goes on in psychoanalysis, it seems that on this view psychoanalysis is still ontologically dependent on what the neurosciences are finding.

So, it is the reference to confirmation that makes me want to ask some
questions about the scope or extent of Johnston’s nonreductionism as well. For, should it not be true that if what psychoanalysis works on is not reducible to neurobiological objects and events, then there is also no sort of confirmation that the neurosciences can offer psychoanalysis at all?

But putting the neurosciences in the position of confirming psychoanalytic theory… almost certainly must degrade the status of psychoanalysis, for does it not make psychoanalysis dependent on another discipline for a large share of its validity?

The Combahee River Collective Statement

NONAME BOOK CLUB

https://nonamebooks.com/Free-Reading-Program#combahee-river-collective-statement

We are excited to announce the launch of our political education series! Each month we will offer 1 essay as an alternative to our monthly book picks. For #BlackAugust we will read “Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free”.

Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free: Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Reference reading:
The Combahee River Collective Statement
by The Combahee River Collective

Neoliberalism and its discontents

Ezra Klein Show, October 24 2019

Wendy Brown is a professor of political theory at UC Berkeley, author of Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and one of the foremost critics of neoliberalism, not only as a set of economic policies but a “governing rationality” that infects almost all aspects of our existence.

Noah Smith is an economist, a columnist at Bloomberg, and is known for his robust defenses of some (though not all) neoliberal positions, which earned him the prestigious title of Chief Neoliberal Shill of 2018.