A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm).

Quali strategie dovrebbero adottare i socialisti democratici statunitensi affinché le loro lotte sortiscano effetti politici rilevanti e a quali insidiosi ostacoli propri dell’architettura dello stato dovrebbero porre maggiore attenzione? Su Jacobin Magazine, il giornalista Ben Tarnoff prova a rispondere a queste domande passando in rassegna il pensiero di Nicos Poulantzas, sociologo greco di ispirazione marxista morto suicida, a soli 43 anni, nell’ottobre del 1979.

Capitalism keeps creating socialists, despite its best efforts. When people are dominated, they tend to resist: they build networks of mutual aid and find power in collective action. They begin to imagine a world organized along different lines, one where the wealth they make in common is held in common rather than hoarded by the few. This is why you can’t kill socialism: because it’s not just a set of ideas about how to interpret and change the world but a tendency produced by the very system it seeks to replace. When Marx and Engels called communism a specter, they captured this undead quality. Socialism is the ghost in the machine, haunting capital wherever its circuits appear. If socialism can’t be killed, however, it can be suppressed. And few countries had suppressed it more successfully than the US at the turn of the twenty-first century. American socialism, never as strong as its counterparts in other parts of the world, had become nearly invisible by the end of the 1990s.

Su The Atlantic, la recensione a firma di J. C. Pan del nuovo libro dello scrittore inglese Michael Rosen dal titolo Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories From Great Britain, una raccolta di fiabe e racconti di ispirazione socialista comparsi nel Regno Unito tra la fine del XIX e l’inizio del XX secolo.

Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, some progressive parents (and savvy publishers) have turned to children’s books as a kind of palliative political education for the young during uneasy times. Among the recent offerings in this vein, there’s Jill Twiss’s A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a defense of same-sex marriage and a satire of the children’s book written by Charlotte Pence, the vice president’s daughter, about the Pence family’s pet rabbit. There’s All Are Welcome, by Alexandra Penfold, a gentle and yet pointedly utopian portrait of a school day when children of all races and religious backgrounds assist one another in their tasks with kindness and tolerance. And of course, there’s Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted, an illustrated homage to glass-ceiling shatterers such as Sally Ride, Sonia Sotomayor, and Hillary Clinton, the author’s mother. Oppositional politics, in other words, is now available in colorful, digestible tracts for even the youngest readers.

Immagine da Wikimedia.