[Peace] AWARE reading group, fall semester 2015

Sat Aug 15 00:57:20 EDT 2015

Members and friends of AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of C-U, are invited to participate in the AWARE reading group, which will meet weekly during the fall semester. (AWARE replicates the spontaneous growth of the university in the 12th century as an association of students, as the academic boycott of UIUC continues, owing to the neoliberal university's casual disregard of academic freedom*: <http://coreyrobin.com/2014/09/29/is-the-boycott-of-the-university-of-illinois-illiberal/ <http://coreyrobin.com/2014/09/29/is-the-boycott-of-the-university-of-illinois-illiberal/>>.)

The group considered Thomas Piketty’s CAPITAL IN THE 21ST CENTURY over the summer - a vigorous recreation - and discussions are now underway for a text (or texts) for the fall. Suggestions so far (many more are welcome) include the following - a ba(n)ker’s dozen: 

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[1] ~ Marx, CAPITAL, volume 1 
An easier - and wittier - read than rumored; Marx read everything and wrote well.

[2] ~ Robin Blackburn, ed., AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION: KARL MARX AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN (2011)
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War, with Marx writing on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association … they agreed on the urgency of suppressing slavery and the cause of “free labor.” In his introduction Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln’s response to the IWA was a sign of the importance of the German American community as well as of the role of the International in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy. The International went on to attract many thousands of supporters in over fifty regions of the US, and helped to spread the demand for an eight-hour day—enacted by Congress in 1868 for Federal employees. Blackburn shows how the International in America—born out of the Civil War—sought to radicalize Lincoln’s unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign–born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war. It inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades. In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes Raya Dunaevskaya’s assessment of the impact of the Civil War on Marx’s theory and a survey by Frederick Engels of the progress of US labor in the 1880s.

[3] ~ Sam Gindin & Leo Panitch, THE MAKING OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM (2012)
“Lucid and indispensable guides to the history and practice of American Empire.”
—Naomi Klein, author of THE SHOCK DOCTRINE (2010) and THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE (2014)
“It’s the best left look at the U.S. empire I’ve seen. The picture of the U.S. as having the long-term dynamism and coherence of the global system ‘front of mind’, as the biz types say, makes far more sense than, say, the Chomskyism that pervades much of the left. They have few rivals and no betters in analyzing the relations between politics and economics, between globalization and American power, between theory and quotidian reality, and between crisis and political possibility.”
—Doug Henwood, editor and publisher of Left Business Observer 
“Combining the ferocity of investigative reporters, sophisticated skills in interpreting the historical archive, and a profound grasp of theory, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin provide an astonishingly illuminating account of the making of global capitalism through the organization of a global financial system under US hegemony since World War II. If we are, as it seems, destined to live under the dictatorship of the world’s central bankers then it is vital for everyone to know how this came about and what the current fault lines might be that hold out prospects for strong anti-capitalist struggles to emerge. A must read for everyone who is concerned about where the future of capitalism might lie.”—David Harvey, CUNY Graduate Center, author of A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM (2005)

[4] ~ David Harvey, SEVENTEEN CONTRADICTIONS AND THE END OF CAPITALISM (2015)
"What I am seeking here is a better understanding of the contradictions of capital, not of capitalism. I want to know how the economic engine of capitalism works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced, and with what." --from the Introduction

[5] ~ Ha-Joon Chang, ECONOMICS: THE USER’S GUIDE (2014)
“In his bestselling 23 THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM (2010), Chang claimed that "the washing machine has changed society more than the Internet.” The Cambridge economist brilliantly debunked many of the predominant myths of neoclassical economics. “Now, in an entertaining and accessible primer, he explains how the global economy actually works—in real-world terms, writing with irreverent wit, a deep knowledge of history, and a disregard for conventional economic pieties…” 

[6] ~ Shakespeare, HAMLET (1589)
—to be read politically, against the Romantic/psychological playing tradition that reached its nadir in the film by Olivier, brilliant as he is elsewhere - e.g. the film of HENRY V. See now “'It Started Like a Guilty Thing': the Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics” <http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/24/it-started-like-a-guilty-thing-the-beginning-of-hamlet-and-the-beginning-of-modern-politics/>. Hamlet, whom the author wrote about in several versions all his life, was a self-portrait (as were other Shakespeare characters, e.g. Bertram, in All's Well that Ends Well). These autobiographies led a poet from a quite different back ground, Walt Whitman, to recognize that, “conceived out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism—only one of the 'wolfish earls' so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works.”

[7] ~ Shakespeare, HENRY V (and other plays)
On HENRY V and modern politics, see the brilliant John Sutherland et al., “HENRY V, WAR CRIMINAL? AND OTHER SHAKESPEARE PUZZLES (2000). On the possibly relevant politics of the era, see, e.g., Perry Anderson, “The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution” (1976) and discussion such as Neil Davidson, HOW REVOLUTIONARY WERE THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS? (Haymarket Books, 2012).

[8] ~ Gustavo Gutierrez, A THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION (1971)
By an indigenous Peruvian distrusted by the Vatican and rehabilitated by Pope Francis, this book is the most important text on Christian theology and politics from the last half of the 20th century, when Christianity migrated form Europe and America to the Global South - as significant in its way as its migration from Palestine to Rome in the first centuries of he Common Era.

[9] ~ Herbert McCabe, THE GOOD LIFE: ETHICS AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (2005)
Posthumous summary of the work of the Oxford philosopher who was my principal intellectual mentor, a Wittgensteinian-Marxist-Thomist and a man of infinite jest. RIP.

[10] ~ Perry Anderson, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS (2015)
“Like everything Anderson writes, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers deserves careful reading. He’s one of the world’s great historians, unrivaled in his ability to master and synthesize vast historical literatures (often drawing on many languages).” —Jeet Heer; “A powerful and lucid intelligence.” —Eric Hobsbawm
Anderson, former editor of the New Left Review, is “deeply engaged with foreign policy ‘realism’ … Anderson’s account shows American statecraft to be amazingly plastic: malleable, discretionary, vertiginously unconstrained both in its fashioning of national interest and the obverse, the invention of threats. In Anderson’s account, U.S. foreign policy is subject less to rigorous laws and systemic pressures than in thrall to domestic whims, pathologies and electoral cycles…” [Chase Madar]

[11] ~ Noam Chomsky, MASTERS OF MANKIND: ESSAYS AND LECTURES 1969-2013
For more than historical interest, I’d add 
(1) Chomsky’s programmatic lecture "Government in the Future” (1970), which is available as a note on my fb page: <https://www.facebook.com/notes/carl-g-estabrook/noam-chomsky-government-in-the-future-1970/10150535189192474>, and 
(2) now that we’re using the term again, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism” (1986), <http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm>.

[12] ~ Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, THE SPIRT LEVEL: WHY GRETER EQUALITY MAKES SOCIETIES STRONGER (2009)
Wilkinson and Pickett make an eloquent case that the income gap between a nation's richest and poorest is the most powerful indicator of a functioning and healthy society. Amid the statistics that support their argument (increasing income disparity sees corresponding spikes in homicide, obesity, drug use, mental illness, anxiety, teenage pregnancies, high school dropouts—even incidents of playground bullying), the authors take an empathetic view of our ability to see beyond self-interest ... Wilkinson and Pickett do not advocate one way or the other to close the equality gap. Government redistribution of wealth and market forces that create wealth can be equally effective, and the authors provide examples of both. How societies achieve equality, they argue, is less important than achieving it in the first place. 

[13] ~ Paul Mason POSTCAPITALISM: A GUIDE TO OUR FUTURE (to be published in 2016)
Ecological crisis signals the death knell for an economic system that was already profoundly failing us, as Paul Mason mercilessly illustrates in these pages. Building on a remarkable career's worth of reporting on the frontlines of global capitalism and worker resistance, this book is an original, engaging, and bracingly-articulated vision of real alternatives. It is sure to many spark vigorous debates, and they are precisely the ones we should be having. (Naomi Klein)
After postmodernism and all other fashionable post-trends, Mason fearlessly confronts the only true post-, postcapitalism. While we can see all around us ominous signs of the impasses of global capitalism, it is perhaps more than ever difficult to imagine a feasible alternative to it. How are we to deal with this frustrating situation? Although Mason's book is irresistibly readable, this clarity should not deceive us: it is a book which compels us to think! (Slavoj Žižek)

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* (Wikipedia has not a bad note on academic freedom: "An important idea in the definition of a university is the notion of academic freedom. The first documentary evidence of this comes from early in the life of the first university. The University of Bologna adopted an academic charter, the Constitutio Habita, in 1158 or 1155, which guaranteed the right of a traveling scholar to unhindered passage in the interests of education. Today this is claimed as the origin of "academic freedom". This is now widely recognised internationally - on 18 September 1988 430 university rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum, marking the 900th anniversary of Bologna's foundation. The number of universities signing the Magna Charta Universitatum continues to grow, drawing from all parts of the world.”)

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