After the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library" was brutally dismantled by the police, Paolo Mossetti of Through Europe asked some of his favourite writers, activists, and academics to help him compile a list of books that would recreate, though only virtually, the library's shelves.
Here is the third part, with contributions from Gar Alperovitz, Mike Davis, Enrico Donaggio, Ann Ferguson, Shabnam Hashmi, John Holloway, Sandro Mezzadra, Douglas Rushkoff, Felix Stalder.
The fourth part of the reading list will be online next week.
Marx Reloaded is a documentary on the political relevancy of the economic and political philosophy of Karl Marx in the light of the global financial crisis, featuring insight and interviews from such figures as Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière and Peter Sloterdijk. As the film hits cinemas next week, we asked its director, Jason Barker, a few questions.
French political philosopher and leading intellectual Jacques Rancière has postponed a visit to Israel, where he was due to speak at Tel Aviv University, after receiving an open letter from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
PACBI, in a letter published online, wrote to Rancière urging him "in the strongest terms" to cancel his visit to the university which they claim "is complicit in maintaining a regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid." The letter went on to explain that Rancière's decision to ignore the letter would "violate the Palestinian call for boycott," and, "constitute a blunt rejection of the appeal from over 170 civil society organisations that comprise the Palestinian BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement."
Rancière was invited to Tel Aviv by, among others, Ariella Azoulay director of the Photo Lexic Research Group at the Minerva Humanities Center. In response to the letter from the PACBI, Rancière, who was due to give a lecture on 25 January, explained why he initially agreed to speak in Israel,
I accepted the invitation to contribute to the debate on the image, of a research group whose work on photography is closely related to the exposure of violations of the rights of the Palestinian people since the birth of the State of Israel.
In his rigorous review of The Idea of Communism for Libcom, Alasdair Thompson walks us through the main themes of this collection of essays by some of today's most important political thinkers. Edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, The Idea of Communism was developed in the wake of a 2009 conference of the same name at Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities. Thompson's review looks at a number of these texts in relation to each other, including work by Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou and Alberto Toscano.
Slavoj Zizek in an interview for Germany's Deutsche Welle television, talking about Occupy, communism and the need for a reinvention of democracy.