Crisis and Insurrection

CRISIS TO INSURRECTION: NOTES ON THE ONGOING COLLAPSE

A new book from Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen on ongoing crises and insurrections…

Crisis to Insurrection: Notes on the ongoing collapse

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

The crisis runs deep. The economies of the US and Europe are in profound crisis and the developing economies are also beginning to feel its effects. Everywhere it is workers who are paying the price. The crisis is being socialized and austerity is the order of the day; the crisis is used as a pretext for further savings and cuts. In other words, capital has intensified the class war. But the proletariat has started moving. The revolts in North Africa and the Middle East have challenged the neoliberal world order and its division of the world, and the ‘movement of the squares’ in Southern Europe and Occupy in the US have picked up the baton and joined the new protest cycle. Even though dictators have been toppled in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the protests continue. This is also the case in Greece, Spain and Portugal where people reject the austerity programs. There are protests in Bulgaria and Bosnia. In Syria the civil war is raging. In China the number of strikes continue to rise. In Turkey the youth reject Erdogan’s neoliberal ‘success’ and urban restructuring and in Brazil ‘the dangerous classes’ have taken to the streets. There are a variety of protests going on – the ones in the West are defensive, the ones in the rest of the world offensive and reformist – but together they are knocking a hole in the neoliberal world order. The old mole is back.

Bio: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.
PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=678
Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.
Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
www.minorcompositions.info | minorcompositions@gmail.com

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

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Crisis and Critique 1

CRISIS AND CRITIQUE 1

The first issue of Crisis and Critique is now online.
Please, see the table of contents below:

CONTENTS:
Editorial Note, by H.J.Bjerre & Agon Hamza

1) The Impasses of Today's Radical Politics, by Slavoj Žižek

2) Socialist Democracy with Chinese Characteristics, by Roland Boer

3) The Indignant of the Earth, by Frank Ruda

4) Democracy and Revolution on the Internet, by Katarina Peovič Vukovič

5) Alain Badiou and the Aporia of Democracy with Generic Communism, by Panagiotis Sotiris 

6) Climate Crisis, Ideology and Collective Action, by Ted Stolze

7) Lacan and Rational Choice, by Yuan Yao

8) Redemptive Revolutions: The Political Hermeneutics of Walter Benjamin, by Nicolai Krejberg Knudsen

9) The Necessity of Philosophy, by Srdjan Cvjetičanin

10) What is a Party Part of? by Gabriel Tupinambá

11) Communism is Wrong, by Jana Tsoneva

12) The Jews and the Zionists: The Story of a Reversal, by Sina Badiei

Review Articles:

13) H.J.Bjerre: Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, by Adrian Johnston

14) C.Crockett: From Myth to Symptom: the case of Kosovo, by S.Žižek & A.Hamza

15) D.Tutt: Enjoying What We Dont Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, by Todd McGowan

16) A.Ryder: Badiou and the Philosophers, ed.T.Tho&G.Bianco

About the Journal

Crisis and Critique is a philosophical journal. It is dedicated to exploring and critically developing political and social issues from the Marxist perspective, as well as exploring and addressing the emancipatory potential of Marxist thought and tradition. It also discusses the developments within the contemporary currents in philosophy.

Crisis and Critique appears twice a year.

Crisis and Critique: http://materializmidialektik.org/crisis-and-critique/

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'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

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The New Left Book Club: http://rikowski.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-new-left-book-club-call-for-papers/ 

International Conference on Critical Education - IV

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CRITICAL EDUCATION – IV

IV ICCE

23-26 June 2014

Thessaloniki

Greece

Critical Education in an Age of Crisis

Conference website: http://www.eled.auth.gr/icce2014/

CALL FOR PAPERS

IV International Conference on Critical Education

The outbreak of the economic, social, and political crisis is affecting education at a global scale. The crisis, in tandem with the dominant neoliberal and neoconservative politics that are implemented and promoted internationally as the only solution, redefine the sociopolitical and ideological role of education. Public education is shrinking. It loses its status as a social right. It is projected as a mere commodity for sale while it becomes less democratic and critical.

Understanding the causes of the crisis, the special forms it takes in different countries and the multiple ways in which it influences education, constitutes important questions for all those who do not limit their perspectives to the horizon of neoconservative, neoliberal and technocratic dogmas. Moreover, the critical education movement has the responsibility to rethink its views and practices in light of the crisis as well as the paths that this crisis opens for challenging and overthrowing capitalist domination worldwide.

The International Conference on Critical Education, which was held in Athens in 2011 and 2012 and Ankara in 2013, provides a platform for scholars, educators, activists and others interested in the subject to come together and engage in a free, democratic and productive dialogue. At a time of crisis when public education is under siege by neoliberalism and neoconservatism, we invite you to submit a proposal and to attend the IV International Conference on Critical Education to reflect on the theory and practice of critical education and to contribute to the field.

Keynote Speakers:

Ayhan Ural (Gazi University, Turkey)

Dave Hill (Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, UK)

George Grollios (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

Glenn Rikowski (Flow of Ideas) on ‘Education and Crisis’

Grant Banfield (Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia)

Guy Senese (University of North Arizona, USA)

Hasan Huseyin Aksoy (Ankara University, Turkey)

Kostas Skordoulis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)

Lois Weiner (New Jersey City University, USA)

Panayota Gounari (University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA)

Panayotis Sotiris (University of the Aegean, Mitilini, Greece)

Periklis Pavlidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

Ravi Kumar (South Asian University, New Delhi, India)

Tasos Liambas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

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Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Sociology and the Global Economic Crisis

SOCIOLOGY AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Sociology

A journal of the British Sociological Association

Sociology and the Global Economic Crisis

Special Issue Call for Papers

Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2013

Editorial Team:

Ana C. Dinerstein (University of Bath), Gregory Schwartz (University of Bath) and Graham Taylor (University of the West of England)

Brief: As the Editors of the 2014 Annual Special Issue of Sociology (http://soc.sagepub.com), a journal of the British Sociological Association (http://www.britsoc.co.uk), would like to invite you to submit a paper, and extended book review essay, or a theoretical intervention that does one of two broadly defined things: 

·         Explore how sociology can contribute to a better understanding of (the lived experience of) the global economic crisis; and/or

·         Reflect on how social processes and movements confronting the crisis can inspire a new sociological imagination.

Our aim is to bring together contributions that:

·         Bridge disciplines

·         Unsettle conventions

·         Cosmopolitanise epistemologies

·         Renew sociology

We welcome contributions on relevant topics in any field of social science engaging with sociological research, from early career and established academics, and from those outside academia.

Rationale: The Editorial Board of Sociology considered a high number of proposals in response to the tender for the Special Issue of the journal in 2014. Our proposal, titled ‘Sociology and the Global Economic Crisis’ was selected as the successful submission. The Special Issue will address the urgent need todeconstruct and interrogate the formulation and reality of the global economic crisis. Additionally, it will systematically and critically investigate the specifically social processes underpinning its development and intensification.

Our aim in this proposal has been to tackle the challenge confronting the social sciences by the current economic crisis, in that there has largely been a failure to translate a quotidian reality of crisis into adequate forms of knowledge. While there has been discussion of ‘the crisis’, or 'austerity', of growing poverty, precarity, unemployment, and proletarianisation, there have been severe limitations in the disciplines of social science to engage with their object of knowledge in a way that seriously rethinks the epistemological and methodological assumptions of such knowledge. In short, the emergence of the current crisis has tended to highlight serious limits to the sociological imagination. Rethinking the ‘crisis’ could facilitate the renewal of sociology as an intellectual force in the public sphere, and imbue sociology with a critical or radical force that has been missing in recent decades.

With the explicit aims of the special issue to bridge disciplines, unsettle conventions and cosmopolitanise epistemologies, we see the contribution of critical Marxist theorists as paramount. Why? Above all, by asking authors to reflect on how social relations of production are confronted and rethought by various (new) movements and (new) forms of politics, and how modes of protest are not only confronting the political-cultural and class changes, but how social mobilisation itself nurtures epistemological innovation. 

Queries: The full paper should be submitted by the 31 August 2013. The articles will be peer reviewed following the journal's usual procedures. The special issue is to be published in October 2014. To discuss initial ideas, seek editorial advice, or discuss a specific paper, please contact the Special Issue Editors by email on sociology.specialissue.2014@gmail.com

The Full Call for Papers can be viewed at: http://www.britsoc.co.uk/media/48566/Global_Economic_Crisis_SOC_SI_2014_CFP.pdf

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/cfp-sociology-and-the-global-economic-crisis

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Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjxeHvvhJQ (live, at the Belle View pub, Bangor, north Wales); and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo (new remix, and new video, 2012)  

'Cheerful Sin' – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski: http://rikowski.wordpress.com

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Richard Wolff - Capitalism Hits the Fan

RICHARD WOLFF – CAPITALISM HITS THE FAN

A message from Rick Wolff

Dear Friends

You might find interesting and useful (and especially for teaching purposes) an inexpensive ($18 or less if ordered via http://www.rdwolff.com) new book of short, 1000-word essays on the history and dimensions of the current economic crisis as well as government responses and political implications. The essays were published from 2005 through mid-2009 on the Monthly Review webzine and are here edited with new introductions for maximum clarity, brevity, and accessibility to many audiences. The book can already be ordered and will begin shipment Sept 30, 2009.

Rick Wolff
http://www.rdwolff.com

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Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It
Richard Wolff
Published 2009 • 6” x 9” • 256 pages • charts ISBN 9781566567848 • paperback • $18.00

A breathtakingly clear analysis that breaks down the root causes of today’s economic crisis...

“With unerring coherence and unequaled breadth of knowledge, Rick Wolff offers a rich and much needed corrective to the views of mainstream economists and pundits. It would be difficult to come away from this… with anything but an acute appreciation of what is needed to get us out of this mess.” —Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education, City University of New York

Capitalism Hits the Fan chronicles one economist’s growing alarm and insights as he watched, from 2005 onwards, the economic crisis build, burst, and then dominate world events. The argument here differs sharply from most other explanations offered by politicians, media commentators, and other academics. Step by step, Professor Wolff shows that deep economic structures—the relationship of wages to profits, of workers to boards of directors, and of debts to income—account for the crisis. The great change in the US economy since the 1970s, as employers stopped the historic rise in US workers’ real wages, set in motion the events that eventually broke the world economy. The crisis resulted from the post-1970s profit explosion, the debt-driven finance-industry expansion, and the sequential stock market and real estate booms and busts. Bailout interventions by the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have thrown too little money too late at a problem that requires more than money to solve.

As this book shows, we must now ask basic questions about capitalism as a system that has now convulsed the world economy into two great depressions in 75 years (and countless lesser crises, recessions, and cycles in between). The book’s essays engage the long-overdue public discussion about basic structural changes and systemic alternatives needed not only to fix today’s broken economy but to prevent future crises.

Richard Wolff has been a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since 1981. He has been a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs, at the New School in New York since 2007. Wolff’s major recent interests and publications include studies of US economic history to ascertain the basic structural causes of the current economic crisis and the examination of how alternative economic theories (neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian) understand and respond to the crisis in very different ways. His past work involves application of advanced class analysis to contemporary global capitalism. He has written, co-authored, and co-edited many books and dozens of scholarly and popular journal articles. His recent analyses of current economic events appear regularly in the webzine of the Monthly Review. In 2009, Capitalism Hits the Fan, the documentary on the current economic crisis, was released by Media Education Foundation (http://www.mediaed.org). Visit http://www.rdwolff.com for more information.

Olive Branch Press
http://www.interlinkbooks.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I:
Roots of a System’s Crisis
The Political Pendulum Swings, the Alienation Deepens
Dividing the Conservative Coalition
Economic Inequality and US Politics
Reform vs. Revolution: Settling Accounts
Exit-Poll Revelations
Real Costs of Executives’ Money Grabs
The Decline of Public Higher Education
Reversing the American Dream: Old Distributions, New Economy (co-author Max Fraad-Wolff)
Today’s Haunting Specter, or What Needs DoingTwenty Years of Widening Inequality
Neoliberalism in Globalized Trouble
Evading Taxes, Legally
Consumerism: Curses and Causes
Nominating Palin Makes Sense

Part II:
The Economics of Crisis
1 Capitalism as a Crisis-Prone System
Capitalism’s Three Oscillations and the US Today
Financial Panics, Then and Now
Neoliberal Globalization Is Not the Problem
Economic Blues
Capitalist Crisis, Marx’s Shadow
Wall Street vs. Main Street: Finger Pointing vs. System Change
Capitalism’s Crisis through a Marxian Lens
It’s the System, Stupid
GM’s Tragedy: The System Strikes BackCrises in vs. of Capitalism
2 The Role of Economic Theory
Evangelical Economics
Flip-Flops of Economics
3 Markets and Efficiency
Oil and Efficiency Myths
The Rating Horrors and Capitalist “Efficiency”
Market Terrorism
4 Wages, Productivity, and Exploitation
US Pensions: Capitalist Disaster
The Fallout from Falling Wages
Reaping the Economic Whirlwind
Our Sub-Prime Economy
5 Housing and Debt
Personal Debts and US Capitalism
US Housing Boom Goes Bust
What Dream? Americans All Renters Now!
6 Government Intervention in the Economy Bernanke Expectations: New Fed Chairman, Same Old, Same Old Federal Reserve Twists and Turns
As Rome Burned, the Emperor Fiddled
Policies to “Avoid” Economic Crises
Lotteries: Disguised Tax Injustice
7 International Dimensions of the CrisisImmigration and Class
Global Oil Market Dangers
China Shapes/Shakes World’s Economies
Globalization’s Risks and Costs
Foreign Threat to American Business?
US Economic Slide Threatens Mexico

Part III:
Politics of the Crisis
1 Reforms and Regulations as Crisis Solutions
Economic Reforms: Been There, Done That
Regulations Do Not Prevent Capitalist Crises
2 Debates over “Socialist” Solutions
Economic Crisis, Ideological Debates
Socialism’s New American Opportunity
Those Alternative Socialist “Stimulus” Plans
Wanted: Red-Green Alliance for Radically Democratic Reorganization of Production
Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Renewal
3 Anti-Capitalist PoliticsEurope: Capitalism and Socialism
The Urban Renewal Scam for New Orleans
France’s Student-Worker Alliance
Lessons of a Left Victory in France
The Minimum Wage, Labor, and Politics
French Elections’ Deeper Meaning
Mass Political Withdrawal
Capitalism Crashes, Politics Changes

Index

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The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Confronting Capitalism's Economic Crisis

CONFRONTING CAPITALISM’S ECONOMIC CRISIS

Meeting & 4-part Seminar

All events at TRS, 44 East 32nd St., 11th floor, New York, NY, from 7 pm to 9 pm
Sponsored by Marxist-Humanist Initiative

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TUESDAY, JUNE 23: PUBLIC MEETING
"The economic crisis and left responses," a talk by Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx's "Capital": A refutation of the myth of inconsistency
"A new organization for a time of crisis," a talk by Anne Jaclard, National Secretary, Marxist-Humanist InitiativeTalks followed by open discussion. Donation requested.

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SEMINAR SERIES

Tuesday June 30. Introduction: purpose of seminar series; overview of crisis theories; definition of "crisis"; history ofcapitalist crises; why crisis theory? Led by Josh Skolnik

Tuesday July 14. Underconsumptionism: does paying workers more boost profit? Led by Seth Weiss

Tuesday July 21. Marx's law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. Led by Andrew Kliman

Tuesday July 28. The crisis of the free market and the turn to state-capitalist ideology. Led by Anne Jaclard

As the worst economic slump since the Great Depression calls into question the viability of the capitalist system, andas people increasingly doubt whether capitalism is desirable or even necessary, we need to unite theory with practice and an understanding of the current crisis in order to respond effectively. We invite everyone seriously interested in this task to join us in the seminar series. Participants will be expected to have done the readings prior to each session.

Donations are requested, but no one will be turned away because of inability to pay.

Please call us at (888) 579-2245 or write to us at mhi@marxisthumanistinitiative.org in order to register for the seminar series and obtain the syllabus.

Our website contains continuing analysis and discussion of the economic crisis: http://www.marxist-humanist-initiative.org/

You can find a printable flyer on the website, or link to it here: http://marxisthumanistinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/crisis_series.pdf

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The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk
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