Rosa Luxemburg: A Legacy for Feminists?

Reprinted with permission from the NYC Rosa Luxemburg Siftung

Vertical integration and firm boundaries : the evidence

Since Ronald H. Coase's (1937) seminal paper, a rich set of theories has been developed that deal with firm boundaries in vertical or input–output structures. In the last twenty-five years, empirical evidence that can shed light on those theories also has been accumulating. We review the findings of empirical studies that have addressed two main interrelated questions: First, what types of transactions are best brought within the firm and, second, what are the consequences of vertical integration decisions for economic outcomes such as prices, quantities, investment, and profits. Throughout, we highlight areas of potential cross-fertilization and promising areas for future work

Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital

Vaporwave is dead, long live vaporwave!

Popular music subcultures have acknowledged, engaged with, or rejected digital platforms to varying degrees; their relationship to it is often made fraught, ambivalent and ironic by projections of the Internet as inauthentic or impersonal and their inheritance of Romantic-influenced countercultural aesthetics. The genre vaporwave offers a key example of this, especially given that it emerged and exists almost exclusively on digital platforms. Vaporwave addresses its own digital nature and historicity in sound and image, as recent scholarship on it has observed. Its life online represents not an abandonment of traditional formulations of the relationship between culture, technology and authenticity, but a new arena in which to negotiate them

Improving healthcare empowerment through breast cancer patient navigation: a mixed methods evaluation in a safety-net setting

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer mortality rates in the U.S. remain relatively high, particularly among ethnic minorities and low-income populations. Unequal access to quality care, lower follow up rates, and poor treatment adherence contribute to rising disparities among these groups. Healthcare empowerment (HCE) is theorized to improve patient outcomes through collaboration with providers and improving understanding of and compliance with treatment. Patient navigation is a health care organizational intervention that essentially improves healthcare empowerment by providing informational, emotional, and psychosocial support. Patient navigators address barriers to care through multilingual coordination of treatment and incorporation of access to community services, support, and education into the continuum of cancer care. METHODS: Utilizing survey and qualitative methods, we evaluated the patient navigation program in a Northern California safety-net hospital Breast Clinic by assessing its impact on patients’ experiences with cancer care and providers’ perspectives on the program. We conducted qualitative interviews with 16 patients and 4 service providers, conducted approximately 66 hours of clinic observations, and received feedback through the self-administered survey from 66 patients. RESULTS: The role of the patient navigator at the Breast Clinic included providing administrative assistance, psychosocial support, improved knowledge, better understanding of treatment process, and ensuring better communication between patients and providers. As such, patient navigators facilitated improved collaboration between patients and providers and understanding of interdisciplinary care processes. The survey results suggested that the majority of patients across all ethnic backgrounds and age groups were highly satisfied with the program and had a positive perception of their navigator. Interviews with patients and providers highlighted the roles of a navigator in ensuring continuity of care, improving treatment completion rates, and reducing providers’ workload and waiting time. Uncertainty about the navigator’s role among the patients was a weakness of the program. CONCLUSIONS: Patient navigation in the Breast Clinic had a positive impact on patients’ experiences with care and healthcare empowerment. Clarifying uncertainties about the navigators’ role would aid successful outcomes

O SOCIALISMO COMO AUTO-EMANCIPAÇÃO

No seu "Prefácio" de 1872 ao Manifesto comunista, 25 anos após sua primeira edição, Engles declarou que seus princípios gerais permanecem tão corretos como antes[...

Karl Marx : en quoi peut-il contribuer à comprendre le genre ? La grande absence des questions de reproduction

« Je ne suis pas marxiste » répondait Karl Marx face aux interprétations rigides et stéréotypées de son œuvre par les « marxistes » de son époque, un problème considérablement exacerbé par la montée du stalinisme en Union soviétique et la défaite des mouvements marxistes démocratiques révolutionnaires ailleurs. Le marxisme fut transformé en formules doctrinaires statiques acceptées par la majeure partie du monde comme incarnant le marxisme. Cependant, comme le montre son démenti chargé de frustration, nous devrions comprendre la théorie de Marx d’une manière toute différente, c’est-à-dire comme une méthode ou un programme de recherche ouvert et créatif visant à appréhender le changement historique et les sociétés particulières, principalement le capitalisme. C’est dans cet esprit que je propose d’examiner les ressources que peut offrir le marxisme pour appréhender correctement la question du genre, mais aussi de déterminer quel développement ou quelle révision il faudrait lui apporter afin qu’il remplisse cet objectif

For a Sustainable Future: The Centrality of Public Goods

While the Pentagon has said repeatedly that climate change is a national security threat, what they have in mind is that climate change is likely to destabilize some countries, threatening US military installations and leading to mass migration, intra-state conflicts, and terrorism, thus threatening ‘national security’. So the concept of security is still understood in these warnings simply as protection against intentional threats by other people. While we used to worry about intentional threats only from criminals, now more and more people have to carry, even to wear, ID cards, big concrete blocks line the sidewalks of many of our streets, and our access to countless public buildings is tightly controlled by phalanxes of security guards and video monitors. But most people pay little attention; the possibility of terrorist attacks has been normalized. The left’s most urgent ideological task in the face of this, as well as the environmental crisis itself, is to make people see the world and themselves in broader and more inclusive terms. As Dr Robert Bullard, often called the father of environmental justice, once put it: ‘There’s no Hispanic air, no African American air, or white air, there’s just air. … if you’re concerned about the quality of that air, I would consider you an environmentalist … you just might not know it.’ Essential to the task is a fundamental rethinking of property and rationality and a renewed commitment to and struggle around public goods/commons

Identities, States, And The Mind-body Problem.

Ph.D.PhilosophyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127326/2/7115181.pd

Socialist-feminist strategy today

Women have entered the global political stage in an astonishing array of movements. Sparked by the current capitalist war on the working class as well as the ongoing struggle around patriarchal relations, these movements provide an important arena for socialist-feminist politics. Today, unlike the past, feminist ideas are part of many anti-capitalist movements, although bringing those ideas to the centre of anti-capitalist politics is still an uphill struggle. In this essay we discuss how socialist feminist activists are shaping demands and campaigns, how they organize on the ground, how they build the leadership of working-class, indigenous and rural women, how they work within mixed gender groups and movements. In order to do justice to the diversity of socialist-feminist strategies, we posed a set of questions to socialist-feminist scholars and activists engaged in different struggles. This essay is based on their insights. As a group, they are diverse in terms of age and political generation, social location and nationality. Susan Dirr and Giselda Gutierrez are activists in the Occupy movement in Chicago and Houston, respectively, and Esther Vivas is an activist in Spain’s Indignado movement, as well as a journalist and sociologist. Martha Ojeda, a former maquiladora worker, has been Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras since 1996. Rosemary Hennessy, a theorist of Marxism and sexuality, also writes on gender and labour struggles in northern Mexico. Eleni Varikas is a political theorist based in Paris and connected to researchers and activists in Greece. Valentine Moghadam is an expert on women in the Middle East and on Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) that provide crucial support and solidarity in struggles against capitalism and patriarchy worldwide. With their collaboration, we have drawn a picture of socialist-feminist strategy that leaps from place to place and hardly presents a comprehensive view. Still, these instances of struggle reveal key aspects of contemporary socialist-feminist organizing