Earlier this month, BBC economics editor and author of Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere Paul Mason, took part in two conversations in New York, which are now available online.

On April 11, Mason talked to NYU students about his journalism. A video of the talk—which includes his film about the neo-fascist party España 2000—can be viewed here.

Last week, Mason spoke to American labor journalists Sarah Jaffe and Josh Eidelson about Margaret Thatcher, austerity resistance in Europe, and the end of the neoliberal era, for the second episode of Dissent magazine’s new podcast, Belabored. To listen, click here and to subscribe, search “Belabored” in iTunes.

By Natasha Lewis / 24 April 2013 / post comment

 
"Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance."
 
Henry Kissinger
 
Reading Vijay Prahad’s The Poorer Nations is like witnessing the history of a chess game between giants. Sides are composed along geo-political interests: players in the Global North in “a fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of dominance” and emerging formations in the Global South, attempting to establish economic and political weight beyond or within US led global market conditions. Yet all the time at the fringes of this game are the movements and ideas which occasionally storm the chessboard and challenge the sovereignty of both sides – this is the ‘possible history’ of the Global South.

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By Lewis Bassett / 22 April 2013 / post comment

The first years of the third millennium, captivated by a spectacular, if ambiguous, resurgence of religiously motivated violence, have seen the revival of a charged term in the Western political lexicon: fanaticism. Societal upheavals, revolutionary periods, religious wars, crises of legitimation, imperial projects – in the past five centuries, all have provided occasions for invoking fanaticism to stigmatise incorrigible enemies, whose disproportionate convictions and intractable beliefs put them beyond the pale of negotiation. Millenarian German peasants, anti-colonial ‘dervish’ rebels, terrorising Jacobins, anarchist bombers, anti-slavery ‘immediatists’, and eschatological Stalinists are just some of the figures thrown up by an investigation into the adversarial uses of this powerful idea. Exploring the historical semantics and polemical deployments of fanaticism reveals, among other things, its impressive plasticity. Cultic superstition and unbridled rationality, the refusal of progress and its immoderate celebration, intransigent particularism and expansive universality have all been the targets of the accusation of fanaticism.

This is partly accounted for by the closeness of fanaticism to extremism as a term of political abuse: as long as otherwise incompatible positions take sufficient distance from a standard of moderation or normality, they can be tarred with the same brush. Centrist denunciations of the excesses of Right and Left often take this form, as in the doctrine of ‘opposed convergent extremisms’ that was applied by Christian Democrats to Italian terrorism in the 1970s. Yet among political smear-words fanaticism has its own pedigree, which crucially includes two elements arising from its association with political theology and theological politics. First, fanaticism defines an ethic of conviction that abhors compromise. Second, fanaticism results from a politics of abstraction in which disembodied principles override pragmatism and mediation. In the fraught and discontinuous history of fanaticism, it was the reaction to the French Revolution’s egalitarian dictatorship of abstract reason that foregrounded these distinctive features. In particular, it was then that the reactionary trope of a ‘fanaticism of reason’ – mostly alien to the Lumières’ insistent condemnation of religious fanaticism – came into its own. It is not difficult to grasp how intransigence and abstraction, whether in religious or secular garb, could be associated with a certain ‘fatal purity’ – to quote the title of a recent biography of Robespierre. Twentieth and twenty-first century attacks on political fanaticisms continue to borrow from the arsenal of counter-revolutionary thought (be it liberal, conservative or fiercely reactionary, as in De Maistre), for which the Revolution’s frenzied attempt ‘to abstract and equalize’ society – to purify it of its stratifications, hierarchies, customs and differences for the sake of the ‘monstrous fiction’ of equality and human rights – was foredoomed to tyranny and catastrophe.

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By Alberto Toscano / 16 April 2013 / post comment

Translated for Verso by David Broder. The orginal article appeared in Le Monde on 30 March 2013

The first Latin American pope, Francis, appears to want to distinguish himself from the ideas and practices of his predecessor, harking back to St. Francis of Assisi and placing the question of poverty at the centre of his pontificate. But, being of South American origin, is he close to liberation theology? There’s reason enough to doubt it…

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By Lewis Bassett / 11 April 2013 / post comment

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By Lewis Bassett / 11 April 2013 / post comment