Stephen J. Collier: Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (2011)

The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken–casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book’s basic finding–that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity–lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2011
ISBN 0691148317, 9780691148311
320 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Georgios Papadopoulos: Notes towards a Critique of Money (2011)

The analysis in Notes towards a Critique of Money highlights the functions of money both in the organization of the capitalist symbolic order and in the constitution of subjectivity in the market.

Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and Baudrillardian structuralism, the book creates a universe where price and sign are entangled, giving rise to the dominant organizing form of capitalism. The fantasmatic management of desire enforces this structural principle on the subjective level and encourages the libidinal investment in the dominant representations of social reality as they are produced by the combined principles of signification and economic valuation. Here, money signifies the particular content that hegemonizes the universal ideological construction of capitalism providing a particular and accessible meaning to economic value, which colours the very universality of the system of prices and accounts for its efficiency.

Being conscious of the limitations of the theoretical analysis, the book employs along with rational arguments a series of artworks that are used both to illustrate the argument and to challenge the unconscious links between the market and the subject, as it is mediated by money and ideology. Notes towards a Critique of Money does not only aspire to raise a theoretical challenge against capital and to open up possibilities of emancipation, but to point towards a new aesthetic of political analysis.

Contributing artists: Société Realiste, Yuko Kamei, Nikos Arvanitis, Zachary Formwalt, Jean-Baptiste Maitre, Valentin Ruhry, Kay Walkowiak, Shogo Matsushiro, Axel Loytved, Post Tenebras Luxe / Donatella Bernardi, Hervé Graumann, Hadrien Dussoix, Wolfgang Fütterer, No Wonder.

Afterword by Yannis Stavrakakis
Published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789072076649
142 pages

publisher

PDF
View online (Scribd.com)

David Harvey: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (2012–) [EN, ES]

“Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people?

Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.”

Publisher Verso Books, London, 2012
ISBN 1844679047, 9781844679041
216 pages

Reviews: Owen Hatherley (The Guardian, 2012), Ruth Lorimer (Socialist Review, 2012), Lewis Beardmore (Open Democracy, 2012), Justin McGuirk (Art Review, 2012), more.

Publisher

Rebel Cities (English, updated on 2020-11-28)
Ciudades rebeldes (Spanish, trans. Juanmari Madariaga, 2013, added on 2020-11-28)