Jodi Dean: The Communist Horizon (2012)

“Rising thinker on the resurgence of the communist idea.

In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In an age when the malfeasance of international banking has alerted exploited populations the world over to the unsustainability of an economic system predicated on perpetual growth, it is time the left ended its melancholic accommodation with capitalism.

In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organize on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.

An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.”

Publisher Verso Books, London, 2012
Pocket Communism series
ISBN 1844679543, 9781844679546
256 pages

Author’s lecture (video, 79 min)
Interview with author (New Left Project)
Reviews: Samuel Grove (review31).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-5-31)

Stephen Harper: Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (2012)

Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1846949769, 9781846949760
114 pages

review (Laura Cooke, Socialist Review)

publisher
google books

PDF

Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, No. 1 (2012)

“LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.”

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License
250 pages

authors

PDF
PDF (2-page version)