40% off all our Brecht reading until June 11
"I am a city still, but soon I shan’t be –
Where generations used to live and die
Before those deadly birds flew in to haunt me:
One thousand years to build. A fortnight to destroy."
Bertolt Brecht's War Primer is a terrifying series of short poems by one of the world’s leading playwrights, set to images of World War II.
Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth support the migrant families resisting inhumane housing conditions in Southwark and Lambeth.
No one denies there is a housing crisis in London. Well, no one apart from Southwark council, who instead have chosen to blame some of their most vulnerable residents for their housing situations. Members of Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, living in statutorily overcrowded housing, were shocked to receive letters from the council telling them that their housing conditions had been caused by a 'deliberate act' by the families. Because the overcrowding was deemed a 'deliberate act' the council would not be giving them priority on the housing waiting list that they should be eligible for.
What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? The decline of the public intellectual has to do with intellectual labor being absorbed into the production process. General Intellects argues we no longer have such singular figures, but there are, instead, general intellects whose writing could, if read collectively, explain our times. McKenzie Wark presented the idea behind General Intellects at a recent lecture at Virtual Futures in London. This is the first half of his talk.
General Intellects, along with McKenzie Wark's other books Molecular Red, The Beach Beneath the Street, and The Spectacle of Disintegration are all 40% off until Sunday, June 11 at midnight UTC. All discounts will be taken at check out.
This week marks the 50th Anniversary of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, fought from 5-10 June 1967. Israel’s decisive victory included the capture of east Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories – the West Bank and Gaza – as well as the Golan Heights and Sinai. The end of the war marked the beginning of what has become a 50-year military occupation of the West Bank. In Ten Myths About Israel, Ilan Pappe describes ‘The June 1967 War Was a War of “No Choice”’ as a core myth of Israel.
Photo: Bex Wade
"Abolitionist feminism is a response to the carceral feminism of the past. This project will help to create greater insight, and hopefully more action against the prison industrial complex." Angela Davis speaking about the reclamation of Holloway Women’s Prison, 2017
Capital could not just abolish the gains of the postwar period. It was necessary to preserve social peace. The "trick" in the 1970s consisted of using inflation to defuse the emerging conflict between labour and capital over redistribution. The money machine was used to compensate for the loss of income which resulted from the reduction in capital’s contribution to the welfare state… Evidently, that could not last. So from the late 1970s inflation was replaced with public debt, and states borrowed (rather than tax) in order to be able to keep up the level of services. Then, in the 1990s, when states began to worry about the growing weight of debt servicing as part of their budgets, and reduced their spending (and thus social services) we took recourse to private debt. In other words, we made it easier than ever for households to take on debt so that they could preserve their purchasing power, which was being cut back by these budget consolidation measures. And that led us to the 2008 catastrophe.
An excerpt from Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) by Perry Anderson.
The fact that Macron adopts this position is a reflex, it is not something he has thought about doing. Everyone is the child of their own time and the circles they move in. That is the cost of his youth: for this generation has known nothing other than the hegemony of American visuals, an unconscious domination that has become like second nature. And the Finance Inspectorate, or banking is also a mental ecosystem in which the United States, the parent company, takes the code name "globalisation."
Perry Anderson probes Edward Thompson's work on William Morris and his defense of utopianism.
This text is excerpted from Considerations on Western Marxism, written in 1974 as the introduction to a reader on Western Marxism whose publication was ultimately delayed before appearing as a standalone volume in 1976.
In any case, what sticks out amidst this mass vote is a feeling of absurdity. The absurdity of a mechanism that brings to power a man we know nothing about, and who has grounded his success precisely in his capacity to say nothing (the back cover of his book Révolution has not one line of text, but just a full page photo of Macron himself). The absurdity of a system that gives a crushing majority to such a man, in order to avoid a danger that is largely imaginary. Most of all, the absurdity of a focus on elections that we all feel have nothing to do with our lives, and which we all feel are playing out on a sort of flying carpet, above our heads.
The capture of the postmodern by Jameson has set the terms of subsequent debate. It is no surprise that the most significant interventions since his entry into the field have likewise been Marxist in origin. The three leading contributions can be read as attempts to supplement or correct, each in its own way, Jameson's original account. Alex Callinicos’s Against Postmodernism (1989) advances a closer analysis of the political background to the postmodern. David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity (1990) offers a much fuller theory of its economic presuppositions. Terry Eagleton's Illusions of Postmodernism (1996) tackles the impact of its ideological diffusion. All these works pose problems of demarcation. How is the postmodern to be best periodized?