Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power (2007)

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Alain Badiou, Metapolitics

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"Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities. Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision. Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Ranciere's writings on workers' history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice." 

Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism

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This brilliant critique explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought. 

Although Professor Eagleton's view of the topic is, as he says, generally a negative one, he points to postmodernism's strengths as well as its failings. He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed in the first place. In the process his gifts for irony and satire sharpen the reader's pleasure, and his commitment to the ethical and the vision of a just society, inspire engagement and "a refusal to acquiesce in the appalling mess which is the contemporary world".

Cihan Tugal, Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism

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From Stanford University Press,

"Over the last decade, pious Muslims all over the world have gone through contradictory transformations. Though public attention commonly rests on the turn toward violence, this book's stories of transformation to "moderate Islam" in a previously radical district in Istanbul exemplify another experience. 

In a shift away from distrust of the state to partial secularization, Islamists in Turkey transitioned through a process of absorption into existing power structures. With rich descriptions of life in the district of Sultanbeyli, this unique work investigates how religious activists organized, how authorities defeated them, and how the emergent pro-state Justice and Development Party incorporated them. 

As Tugal reveals, the absorption of a radical movement was not simply the foregone conclusion of an inevitable world-historical trend but an outcome of contingent struggles. With a closing comparative look at Egypt and Iran, the book situates the Turkish case in a broad historical context and discusses why Islamic politics have not been similarly integrated into secular capitalism elsewhere." 

[source] 

David Harvey, The Limits to Capital

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"Money represents, after all, exchange value par excellence, and thereby stands opposed to all other commodities and their use values. Money assumes an independent and external power in relation to exchange because, as the universal equivalent, it is the very incarnation of social power. This social power, furthermore, can be appropriated and used by private persons. The significance of this has now to be worked out. Money permits the separation of sales and purchases in space and time."

--David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pg 245

Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, After Globalization

Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, After Globalization

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In lively and unflinching prose, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal flaw: the inability to think '€œan after'€ to globalization. After establishing seven theses (on education, morality, history, future, capitalism, nation, and common sense) that challenge the false promises that sustain this time-limit, After Globalization examines four popular thinkers (Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Paul Krugman and Naomi Klein) and how their work is dulled by these promises. Cazdyn and Szeman then speak to students from around the globe who are both unconvinced and uninterested in these promises and who understand the world very differently than the way it is popularly represented.

Slavoj Zizek - The Year of Dreaming Dangerously

Zizek's latest book, reflecting on the events of 2011. Verso. PDF
http://www.sendspace.com/file/xo8tnt

Capitalist Superheroes Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age

Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age by Dan Hassler-Forest (.mobi)

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'€œIn the same way that Stallone and Schwarzenegger played film heroes who came to embody the values of Ronald Reagans aggressive conservative agenda in the 1980s, the 21st-century film narratives of Batman, Spider-Man and Superman reflect the policies of the Bush Doctrine after 9/11. This book offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship that exists between post-9/11 American politics and the contemporary superhero movie phenomenon. No other Hollywood subgenre was as consistently popular during the George W. Bush presidency, as films such as Spider-Man, Superman Returns, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight embodied the key contradictions that inform the cultural and political life of the post-9/11 years. By combining in-depth analyses of numerous major superhero films from this era with astute readings of contemporary critical theory, this book offers accessible and academically potent insight into the complex interplay between politics, ideology, and entertainment in the 21st century.'€ (x)

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)
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“The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief. It is impossible to conceive of fascism or Stalinism without propaganda – but capitalism can proceed perfectly well, in some ways better, without anyone making a case for it.
It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing these problems—treating them as if they were caused only be chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/or by their family background—any question of social systemic causation is ruled out…Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many—and these are A-level students mind you—will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp—and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension—that the indigestibility, the difficulty isNietzsche….If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism—a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia….Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations, etc). This is one way in which education, far from being in some ivory tower safely inured from the ‘real world’, is the engine room of the reproduction of social reality, directly confronting the inconsistencies of the capitalist social field.
Like Sennett, Marazzi recognizes that the new conditions both required and emerged from an increased cybernetization of the working environment. The Fordist factory was crudely divided into blue and white collar work, with the different types of labor physically elimited by the structure of the building itself. Laboring in noisy environments, watched over by managers and supervisors, workers had access to language only in their breaks, in the toilet, at the end of the working day, or when they were engaged in sabotage, because communication interrupted production. But in post-Fordism, when the assembly line becomes a ‘flux of information’, people work by communicating. As Norbert Wiener taught, communication and control entail one another.
Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you where you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or ‘precarity’, as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.”

ALSO RECOMMENDED: The Privatisation of Stress (Mark Fisher)

A Collection of David Harvey

A Collection of David Harvey

Books Available (.PDF)

Castree - David Harvey Reader.pdf David Harvey - A Brief History of Neoliberalism.pdf
David Harvey - Companion to Marx’s capital.pdf
David Harvey - Condition of post-modernity.pdf David Harvey - Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom.pdf David Harvey - Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference.pdf
David Harvey - Paris, Capital of Modernity.pdf David Harvey - Social Justice and the City.pdf David Harvey - Spaces of Capital Towards a Critical Geography.pdf David Harvey - Spaces of Hope.pdf David Harvey - spaces of neoliberalization.pdf David Harvey - The Enigma of Capital.djvu David Harvey - The Limits to Capital.pdf

Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)

Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008)

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In this provocative and brilliantly argued work, philosopher Zizek takes readers on an intellectual and artistic tour—drawing upon Picasso’sGuernica, Alfred Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan’s films, Michel Houellebecq’s novels, jokes, Lacanian psychology and a Kantian analysis of Hurricane Katrina—to demonstrate how societies understand, obscure and deny the sources of violence. His is not an examination of offenses but an argument that violence can perhaps be best defined by the bystanders and not by its perpetrators or victims. Zizek enumerates the varieties of violence (subjective, objective, systemic) and how it inheres in language, economics and religion, urging readers to discern the violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance. In meditations on the events of 9/11, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the 2005 Paris riots, the book turns numerous familiar arguments on their ear (he proposes that the guards at Abu Ghraib represent the true underside of American society). His unrelenting scrutiny and host of cultural and literary references dazzle, and this bracing and rewarding read will challenge anyone unwilling to recognize his or her complicity in systems of institutional and interpersonal violence.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche

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The works of Friedrich Nietzsche have fascinated readers around the world ever since the publication of his first book more than a hundred years ago. As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world’s leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, “Few writers in any age were so full of ideas,” and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted. The Portable Nietzscheincludes Kaufmann’s definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche’s four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche’s development, versatility, and inexhaustibility.
—Edited and Translated by Walter Kaufmann