For our October discussion we will be reading the first two chapters of ‘Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts‘ by Max Haiven (You can order it from Pluto Press.)
For our November discussion we’ll be reading the third and fourth chapters, and for our December discussion we’ll read the final chapters and closing material.
Join us – all are welcome!
Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of ‘ordinary’ structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life.
In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of ‘surplus populations’ worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts – both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression.
Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.
Max Haiven is Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University, Canada. His books include Art after Money, Money after Art (Pluto, 2018), Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power (Zed Books, 2004), Cultures of Financialization (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) and the Radical Imagination (Zed Books, 2014).
The EU welcomes the agreement reached on 10 October on a humanitarian ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The EU urges the sides to strictly abide by this agreement and calls on all actors, including external parties, to refrain from any actions that may lead to further casualties. In this respect, we note with extreme concern the reports of continued military activities, including against civilian targets, as well as civilian casualties and urge the sides to ensure full respect of the agreement on the ground.
The EU calls upon the sides to engage in substantive negotiations without delay under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, without preconditions and on the basis of the agreed upon principles.
The EU continues to support the work of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs in seeking a negotiated political solution to the conflict and will remain engaged in efforts towards lasting peace in the region.
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1 Habit Press Publisher, Steven Samblis Announces the Launch of the Largest Book Published on Entrepreneurial Habits – Book Publishing Industry Today – EIN Presswire
From a very tender age, 32-year-old Devene Sutherland learnt the art of fortifying her mind with wholesome content, speaking life into her circumstances and putting in the work, so the successes she seeks can be manifested.
Her brain is wired to see no task as too great, but as elements that can be broken down and managed.
Not only is Sutherland a high school teacher and university lecturer, she is also a single mother of two boys, business owner, a dance instructor, a debate coach, drama coach, a motivational/public speaker and a recent graduate of the St Mary University, where she received her master of science degree.
“I manage my schedules daily by starting and ending the day with prayer, which has become a habit and a part of my lifestyle, exercising proper time management, discipline, and being consistent to the point that sleep has never been my best friend. I usually have a planner to track my day-to-day progress and see what I could accomplish and what I couldn’t get done, and push hard to get it done,” she noted.
Anyone who knows the work of a teacher understands that one is never truly off the clock, but Sutherland says her passion and her choice was influenced by a need to help students reach their full potential.
“Although my mother was not a teacher by profession, her calm demeanour and approach was one reason I wanted to go into the teaching profession. I remember I was sitting in a math class one day, and I didn’t understand the lesson. Given my history of being aggressive, many of my teachers were not fond of me. The teacher said I would never amount to anything, and that day I decided to become a teacher to have a positive impact on children’s lives.”
“My love for my students goes beyond the realms of the classroom. One can achieve the best results from students by being kind, caring, empathic, and passionate. These are the key ingredients that I believe every great teacher should possess.”
But how does she truly manage all she has on her plate?
“It can be a rather difficult task to juggle being a mother of two very active boys, being a teacher from 8 a.m. to 2:40 p.m., and being a lecturer from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and trying to complete my thesis and completing orders. My business House of Deva Bandeau that specialises in hair accessories is known both locally and globally for its product durability and impeccable customer service. I consider myself extra blessed to have a stable and united family unit that comprises my mother, father, and brother.”
This family support, Sutherland says, is the reason for her very existence, as without it, she would have crumbled under pressure.
“Some nights I would cry as I was not able to pray with my children, help them with assignments, and tuck them into bed. Both of my parents, along with my brother, would help me these nights. I would ensure that I would stay up that said night to go through my son’s assignments and classwork thoroughly and wake him early in the mornings to make any necessary corrections. I am so blessed to have my mother help me with completing the orders. We work as a mother-and-daughter team. Had it not been for my mom, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Pressing On
As a human being, Sutherland said there were many times that she felt like giving up when the pressure consumed her, but she pressed on.
“There was one particular day, I broke down. I got wet in the rain and the only pair of shoes I had wearing every occasion for more than a year was soaked. I couldn’t afford to miss my tuition or my son’s tuition payment, so I sacrificed. As I was using the blow dryer to dry the shoes that night I cried out,” he said.
“My son said to me, ‘You are doing so good, Mommy. You can’t give up now’, and it dawned on me that I was doing an excellent job despite all I was doing.”
With a dream to opening her own literacy centre that will help children in and around her community become efficient readers and writers, Sutherland is also looking forward to writing her book and sharing her story of how she overcame the odds to living a happy life.
“… During my experience, many have done me wrong and hurt me. But, I realised if you do not love, you cannot forgive, and when you forgive someone, you can compromise, and the cycle begins again with love.”
The late Christopher Chitty started a dissertation titled “Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System” while he was a PhD candidate. Writer, editor and friend Max Fox took on Chitty’s workand it was recently released as a book.
Chitty earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. In 2008, he went on to the history of consciousness doctoral program at the University of California ( UC ), Santa Cruz. It was at Santa Cruz during Fox’s undergrad junior year where the two met as they participated in the UC Student Occupation Movement.
“It really made me feel like it was a possibility to take part in something larger than myself that could actually have an impact on the world,” said Fox, describing Chitty as a close friend. “I met all these brilliant people, and learned about certain kinds of bravery and inventiveness.”
“Chris was really huge for me in that way and I met him at a very formative moment, but he made a big impact on everybody,” Fox said, adding Chitty had a charismatic ringleader type of personality. “He was this really brilliant, beautiful, generous, intense person who was a community fixture.”
Fox described Chitty’s dissertation as basically complete at the time of his death in April 2015 and as was something he had spoken with Fox about many times.
“He was generating this really powerful, exciting theory and I was very impatient for him to finish writing the PhD so I could have it to point to when I wanted to explain what something was that I thought was going on with these questions because I thought he was someone who was really influential on me and my thinking,” said Fox.
When Chitty died, Fox was devastated. Ultimately, taking on this book as the editor, Fox said, was more than a way to grieve.
Friends and teachers were able to gather materials to get the school to award Chitty a degree posthumously, but with Fox’s attachment he did not want it to end there. Using his experience as an editor and time as a freelancer he decided to take it a step further.
“I was like I need to do this, I have the capacity and I really need this book to exist and I don’t know for sure that if I don’t do it someone else will,” Fox said, explaining how he discussed it with Chitty’s family and friends.
“Why I took this on I think was because I had to find a way of working through my feelings of loss of this person who meant so much to me and preserving him at some level and sharing him with people at some other level,” Fox explained. “It’s his work and it’s the possibility of totally new inventive uses of what he was working on that I probably won’t be able to foresee.”
Sexual Hegemony is a narrative of the centuries of capitalism’s effects on sexual relations, specifically studying class dynamics of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to regulate homosexuality ( sodomy, in particular ). Fox detailed it also lays out “the intellectual foundations or blueprints for a new way of thinking about sexuality through a recognition that it’s intimately tied up with the social form of property, which is a hallmark of class society, which means that you have to take in account the entire history of what comes through the capitalist world that we live in.”
“It’s a reflection on why and how sexuality has to have a history in the first place,” Fox explained. “Why do we think that you need to kind of justify a certain way of living in the present by making the claim that is has a lineage or past.”
“Unavoidably, the following text is limited to a reconstruction of what this work could have been,” Fox wrote in the book’s forward. He details that this book was a long time in the making and took much effort to release what he thought Chitty would have submitted.
Christopher Nealonprofessor at Johns Hopkins University and author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewallwrote the book’s introduction. He also served on Chitty’s dissertation committee.
Fox explained Chitty was a close reader of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and was definitely trying to do something new when writing Sexual Hegemony. Fox added that he thought Chitty wanted to intervene and point out “there’s much more going on than what people take from Foucault.”
“I think he thought [The History of Sexuality] was a very important book, or attempt or preliminary version of a crucial history that he thought wasn’t told in the right way or wasn’t complete,” said Fox of Chitty’s writing. “So I think Chris was trying to fix what he saw as the omissions or errors.”
“He was trying to say there’s a lot that’s valuable that’s introduced in the past, in the decades since the queer liberation movement forced the academy to open itself up to taking sexuality and queer studies seriously. That’s very valuable. And there’s something very valuable still in the kind of Marxian understanding of history as a process without a subject that is driven by collective action taken by the global proletariat to liberate itself, but the two traditions certainly don’t talk to each other very much. They have been the last couple of years and I’ve been really grateful to see it.”
People should read the book, Fox said, “if they are interested in how capitalism produces and is produced by what we understand as sexuality.
“I hope people find a rich roadmap to thinking in a new way about capitalism and sexuality. I think that he did an astounding amount of historical research and reconstruction, but there’s so much more still to do that I think he was hoping to do later. So, what I really hope people get out of this is the inspiration to start thinking about their own relation to structures of class and property and how that informs their sexuality in new ways than they already do.”
celebrations of festivals – A new report warns that the sporting industry is “playing against the clock” and confronts major disruptions due to climate change.
Changing meteorological patterns have already affected the Summer and Winter Olympics, premier football divisions, tennis, athletics, golf, and cricket, according to a report from the Rapid Transition Alliance. However, the worst is yet to come, according to the report.
It warns that within the next three decades, one-fourth of English league football grounds will be at risk of flooding each season, one-third of British Open golf courses will be damaged by rising sea levels, and one-half of previous Winter Olympic host cities will no longer be able to reliably conduct winter sports.
It underscored the fact that climate change has already disrupted a number of prominent sporting events.
Some contests at the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan were canceled due to unprecedented pacific typhoons; the New York triathlon and multiple horse races were also canceled in 2019 due to a heatwave in the Northern hemisphere.
During the 2014 Australian Open, when four days of temperatures above 41C were recorded, over a thousand spectators were treated for heat exhaustion, Caroline Wozniacki’s plastic bottle dissolved, and Wilfred Tsonga’s shoes melted.
Earlier in the year, the tournament was interrupted by haze from devastating bushfires.
Five competitors retired from the 2018 US Open due to heat-related issues. Temperatures on the court reached 49 degrees Celsius, necessitating the first application of the tournament’s extreme heat policy, which calls for extended breaks between games.
Organizers of the 2010 Vancourter Winter Games commented that “the warmest weather on record… hampered our ability to prepare fields of play for athletes at the venues in Cypress Mountains,” whereas competitors in Sochi, in 2014, complained of a dearth of snow.
As for the Summer Games, Tokyo 2020 organizers had to relocate long distance running events nearly 1,000 kilometers north of the capital due to the city’s humid summer climate.
“Sport is not merely a victim of change, but also a significant contributor,” the report states.
“The IOC’s [International Olympic Committee] carbon footprint is comparable to that of Barbados, while global football’s imprint is even larger. “Sporting events are responsible for massive amounts of aviation, carbon-heavy stadium construction, and mountains of non-recycled waste, all of which contribute significantly to the catastrophe we face today,” the report continues.
Andrew Simms, coordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, emphasized that “sport offers some of the most influential role models in society.”
“More will follow if sport can alter its operations with the pace and scope required to halt the climate emergency. If its participants also state that they believe clean air and a stable climate are important, millions more will recognize the potential for change, he added.
The first step for the organization would be to stop accepting sponsorships from fossil fuel companies. It then urges all global sporting federations, professional sports leagues, and tours to sign the UN Sport for Climate Action Framework and demands for the Framework to be more stringent.
It was proposed that by 2030, any global sporting events or excursions that are not carbon neutral should be canceled or postponed until they are, and that carbon-neutral sports federations should be excluded from the Olympics.
In addition, fewer tournaments and competitions may be part of the solution, the report stated.
New Delhi: Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Sunday urged people to stay away from large congregations and diligently follow COVID-19 guidelines during the upcoming festive season, saying no religion or God asks people to celebrate ostentatiously.
Requesting people to celebrate the approaching festivals at home with their loved ones instead of going out to fairs and pandals, he said fighting against COVID-19 is everyone’s foremost “dharma” and as the country’s health minister it is his “dharma” to mitigate the virus and prevent deaths at any cost.
“The Bhagwad Gita condones war for the warrior class. So, there is no need to congregate in large numbers to prove your faith or your religion,” he said.
“No religion or God says that you have to celebrate in an ostentatious way, that you have to visit pandals and temples and mosques to pray”
— Harsh Vardhan
“Extraordinary circumstances must draw extraordinary responses. No religion or God says that you have to celebrate in an ostentatious way, that you have to visit pandals and temples and mosques to pray,” Vardhan underlined.
During the fifth episode of ‘Sunday Samvaad’, the health minister’s virtual interaction with people on social media, Vardhan also discussed the possibility of increased novel coronavirus transmission during the coming winter season as transmission of respiratory viruses is known to increase during the colder weather.
These viruses are known to thrive better in the cold weather and low humidity conditions. In view of these, it would not be wrong to assume that the winter season may see increased rates of transmission of the novel coronavirus in the Indian context too, he noted.
He stressed that if people congregate in large numbers to to celebrate festivals, “we may be heading for big trouble”.
“Lord Krishna says concentrate on your goal…our goal is to finish this virus and save humanity. This is our religion. The religion of the whole world,” he said.
“Viruses are known to thrive better in the cold weather. In view of these, it would not be wrong to assume that the winter season may see increased rates of Coroan transmission”
— On Spread of Virus in Coming Winter Season
Answering questions on the efficacy of AYUSH formulations in the treatment of COVID-19, Vardhan explained the concept of Salutogenesis and how these formulations target holistic recovery of patients.
Pointing to in-depth study of literature and scientific evidence generated from in silico studies, experimental studies, and clinical studies, he said, Guduchi, Ashwagandha, Guduchi and Pippali combination and AYUSH 64 have a substantial number of studies which prove their immuno-modulatory, anti-viral, antipyretic and anti-inflammatory properties. These interventions have also shown a good binding affinity with COVID-19 virus in in-silico studies.
He further informed that scientific studies have been initiated with the aforesaid remedies to assess their impact in the prophylaxis, secondary prevention and management of COVID-19 afflicted cases on the recommendations of the Interdisciplinary Task Force set up by the government.
On the benefits of Chyawanprash, the health minister said information available through clinical studies have shown that individuals who consume it regularly for a definite period of time show improvement in overall health status and immunity and while sugar is an essential component, customers can opt for sugar-free versions available in the market.
“Studies have shown that individuals who consume it regularly for a definite period of time show improvement in overall health status and immunity”
— On Consuming Chyawanprash for Immunity
The minister requested people to not share any content related to health and safety without double-checking its veracity. He added that as more is learnt about the novel coronavirus and more vaccine candidates start their phase 2 and 3 trials, there is bound to be a lot of fake and incorrect news on social media that is perpetrated by people with vested interests.
He said the COVID-19 Fact Check Unit in the Press Information Bureau (PIB) under the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has been regularly scanning social media platforms for fake news and requested his followers to report such fake news to the PIB’s fact check unit.
Vardhan also detailed the steps taken to prevent occurrences of COVID-19 infection among healthcare workers.
States are thoroughly supported in terms of PPE Kits, N-95 masks and HCQ for the protection and prophylaxis of healthcare workers managing COVID cases, he said.
He also said in the first phase, the Government of India has released Rs 3,000 crores to states and UTs to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Almost all, except three states and UTs, have utilized the complete grant given to them. Maharashtra has used only 42.5 pc of the grant followed by Chandigarh at 47.8 pc and Delhi at 75.4 pc, he stated.
Responding to calls for medical attention to people in isolation, Vardhan said there was sharp increase in acceptance of telemedicine services in India which have not only enabled the government to provide the right care to patients during the pandemic, but also helped to contain the transmission of the dangerous virus.
He exhorted citizens to join Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to take a pledge and join the massive country-wide awareness campaign and “Jan Andolan for two months including the winter season so that the pandemic does not spread further.
Adhering to COVID-appropriate behaviour of wearing masks or face covers especially when in public places, regularly washing hands and maintaining respiratory etiquette will help contain the spread of the disease, he firmly reiterated.
Upon learning of the various difficulties faced by his constituents in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, he shared his contact details on the public platform as a response and assured that all issues faced by people in his constituency would be resolved on priority.
… finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction.
Millet, … by the National Book Foundation, the National Book Award is the … most prestigious honor in American literature. Publishers … a finalist for a National Book Award. She first heard …
… has written more than 30 books, including poetry and children… her distinguished career. Her latest book of poems and prose, … this month’s Wisconsin Book Festival.
Q: What inspired … your favorite poem in the book and why?
