Locked Down
Its been a while since I posted.
Work keeps me busy during the day, and messing about with computers distracts me at night.
I've posted a few of these on FB, but will post here to keep them in memory
The Dollar is still a symbol of US Imperialism
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Will-China-s-digital-yuan-vanquish-the-dollar
A more distant view
Sex Positive
"Furthermore, she despairs of the relationship many feminists now have to state power: “In the late 60s, women were rethinking everything. There was this radical exuberance. But over two decades, those energies have been subverted and redirected to politically problematic ends. Suddenly, it’s more cops on the street, more men of colour in prison, foreign wars… the carceral state.” When feminists call – as they did after the murder of Sarah Everard in London last March – for “action” on male violence, they need, or so she believes, better to understand what that might involve in practice; what groups they will end up working against, as well as for. Her feminism is, in other words, the polar opposite of that espoused by writers who go on about the individual, about empowerment and self-kindness."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/08/amia-srinivasan-the-right-to-sex-interview
Enemy of the People
Murdoch is a master at the manipulation of liberal principle to undermine those fundamental structures that provide the fig leaf of legitimacy of democratic enfranchisement. This is the end of the fantasy that a progressive government can be elected in Australia.
Class struggle is always here
https://redflag.org.au/article/irans-new-wave-strikes-and-protests
Practicing Good
"Practicing the Good sets out to show how contemporary leftist theory resists anti-capitalism by dismissing its radical other: the concrete experience of Soviet socialism. In short, Chukhrov analyzes why the capitalist subject never really desires abolishing capitalism. Against this backdrop, Chukhrov argues that even what is aestheticized today as anti-capitalist critique unwittingly affirms the capitalist status quo. Instead of striving for radical transformation, the Western Leftist prefers her bourgeois bubble, narcissistically ‘leading the revolution one Guardian article at a time’, as Adam Lehrer recently put it. Consequently, for the capitalist subject, socialism as radical de-alienation, sublated desire, and the abolition of libidinal phantasmagoria is an uncanny dystopia.
"Chukhrov’s analysis of sexuality in socialism opens with a sharp criticism of Judith Butler’s gender theory. As Chukhrov argues, Butler’s notions of gender, melancholy, performance, and subversion are deeply rooted in the logic of capitalist economy and thus not fully applicable to former socialist societies. Chukhrov’s main criticism is that Butler understands subversive deviation and emancipation from alienation as an individual trouble rather than a collective struggle. A consequence of this ‘lack of commons’ (129) is a fatal atomization of social discourse: rather than a tool for communality, language is misconceived as a ‘Big Other’ (125) hostile to our individualized identity production.
Misreading Foucault
https://lisaduggan.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-michel-foucault