I keep a portrait of Machiavelli over my desk at work — an interior design choice that, I have learned, dismays some of my coworkers. Amid a recent mid-afternoon zone out, I received an email from one of them with the title “Who Wants to Serve a Billionaire?” The message contained a link to an article in the Guardian about a growing group of international multi-billionaires, their so-called “superyachts,” and the desperate lower-class Britons and Eastern Europeans who serve them as deckhands.

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For more than a week Brazilian workers have taken to the streets. Yesterday, the country witnessed its biggest demonstrations since the fall of the dictatorship. But the situation on the ground has confounded many international commentators.

Interviewing for Jacobin, Mark Bergfeld sheds light on new developments with Miguel Borba de Sa — a university lecturer at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of Bolívia – Passos das revoluções and has written extensively on indigenous struggles in Latin America.

Mark Bergfeld is a socialist activist in London. He was a leading participant of the UK student movement in 2010.

Mark Bergfeld: How could a twenty-cent increase in bus fares spark protests in more than 100 towns and cities across Brazil?

Miguel Borba de Sa: In his book, The Road To Serfdom the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote that there are two areas that one cannot leave to the competitive principle: transport and the environment. Brazil’s bourgeoisie consistently fails to understand this.

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My first experience with tear gas took place last Tuesday in a rundown bar off of Istanbul’s İstiklal Street where my friend and I had come after visiting Gezi Park.

The Turkish prime minister’s hallucinatory depiction of the composition of the anti-government protests had left me half-expecting to find the park populated by oversized Lithuanian lepers on unicorns. My friend and I detected no such “marginal groups,” however, and the foreign terrorist alcoholic looters alleged to be fueling domestic unrest had apparently succeeded in disguising themselves as civilian non-drunks tranquilly sharing food, conversation, books, and music.

A few minutes after we had relocated from park to bar, riot police attacked the area with water cannons and tear gas, causing protesters to flee down İstiklal and surrounding arteries. Erdoğan has justified tear gas bombardments as the police’s “en doğal hakkı” or “most natural right.”

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What happened next might not sound as familiar. Just two years after gay marriage became legal in Argentina, the Law of Gender Equality was passed. Among other things, the law de-pathologizes trans identity, removing transphobic medical clearance requirements to change gender on their legal documents, and increasing access to gender affirming treatments through the public health system. If passing gay marriage in a heavily Catholic country — with the archbishop of Buenos Aires threatening to wage “God’s war” in opposition — seems difficult, then passing one of the world’s most progressive laws for trans rights would seem an impossible accomplishment.

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All of this is to say, I empathize with the urge to duck a fight. They’re ugly things, fights. But despite what you’ve heard, there’s the personal and then there’s the political, and they’re not always one in the same. A conflict-averse person is OK; a conflict-averse politics is not.

Take Obamacare, for example. With its full implementation inching ever closer to the here and now, there’s a rising chorus of anxiety on the Left, and glee on the right, over what’s looking like a rocky transition. Time will tell, of course, but if these fears prove justified, the Democrats’ recurrent fear of conflict will be in large part to blame.

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The case, decided in the District Court for the Central District of California, concerns a group of lawyers engaged in a particularly egregious form of copyright trolling. Their strategy was to file a large number of lawsuits accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single porn video, the copyright for which was apparently assigned to one of the lawyers’ groundskeeper on the basis of a forged signature. The basis for these lawsuits was quite flimsy, but the firm had no real intention of winning the lawsuits in court. Instead, they would offer to settle — and as the court decision notes, the offer was “for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense.” This, combined with the embarrassment of being publicly linked with downloading porn, was apparently enough to extort money from a significant number of people.

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Who is this guy? Is he really doing what people are saying he did? Even in the weird world of bourgeois politics in this neoliberal era, isn’t this sort of thing, well … different?

Who is Rob Ford?

Rob Ford is the right-wing populist mayor of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America. With almost three million people, it’s also one of the most culturally diverse urban spaces in the world.

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It’s a bit disjointed, but we discuss the future of print publishing, left regroupment, electoral politics, among other topics. Damn, look at all that foreshadowing.

Bhaskar Sunkara: What’s going on with New York’s home for 9/11 conspiracy theories and alternative medicine [and thankfully Behind the News with Doug Henwood], WBAI?

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Or, at least, one of them does: Luhrmann’s indulgent, over-the-top adaptation misreads Fitzgerald’s novel, whereas Korine’s self-aware, sexed-up critique of a generation is, while unrelated plot-wise, a more faithful extension of the spirit of Gatsby.

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Two gang members assaulted the woman who was later evicted by Chau in order to make way for the Forbidden Ones and their biker parties. Although the building once housed an Occupy Wall Street film collective who documented the Zuccotti Park evictions, the Post’s two writers reassure their readership that all of this is simply the latest chapter in the place’s “colorful history.”

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But not all skilled (and deeply exploited) laborers go to work with a hardhat and a lunch pail. And just like their union brothers and sisters in warehouses and factory floors across the country, the struggle for real union representation is every bit as radicalizing.

Eliza Skinner has spent the past year writing jokes for the E! television show Fashion Police. Skinner pens about 200 jokes per episode (almost a full work week’s as far as ‘hours worked’), pitching them at a weekly meeting with the host, Joan Rivers, and the show’s producers. For this, she is paid roughly $500 a week.

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For critics of American foreign policy, it’s all but axiomatic that the designation of a violent act as “terrorism” says as much about the accuser as it does about the accused. The U.S. government itself can’t decide on a single working definition of the term, but a standard one denotes unlawful politically-motivated violence designed to intimidate a government or civilian population. Put pressure on any part of this definition and it starts to buckle.

“Unlawful”? Why can’t terrorists — as per the word’s original meaning — be state actors? “Civilian population”? The category becomes meaningless if individuals can be retroactively subtracted from it for the crime of being struck by an American drone.

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But the development of rentism entails not just a change in the laws, but in the way the economy itself is measured and defined. Since capitalism is rooted in the quantitative reduction of human action to the accumulation of money, the way in which it quantifies itself has great economic and political significance. To relate this back to my last post: much was made of the empirical and conceptual worthiness of Reinhart and Rogoff’s link between government debt and economic growth, but all such disputations presume agreement about the measurement of economic growth itself.

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In short, the original Reinhart-Rogoff paper had three significant problems, ranging from cherry-picking data, to dubious weighting schemes, to —most embarrassing of all — an Excel spreadsheet error that accidentally left out several crucial data points.

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At least the dead generations took Marx seriously. At least they had a powerful labor movement and center-left parties that believed in the welfare state. And at least Ralph Miliband, the dead leftist whose son is the living leader of Britain’s Labour Party, would never have answered a question about capitalism with a grudging obeisance to the creative power of BlackBerry.

It’s easy to get nostalgic.

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Since Youssef’s arrest, nearly every story about the incident labels the heart-surgeon-turned-TV-star as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart.” But Youssef — who continues to risk his freedom and career to ridicule Egypt’s political elite — has little in common with Stewart, a man who’s built a comedy empire on an unwarranted reputation for prophetic humor and moral integrity. And even while Youssef himself cites Stewart as an influence, the Egyptian humorist far outshines his American counterpart in his willingness to challenge political and social taboos.

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The early Internet was certainly a different place. It seemed a time of unlimited potential, when the old barriers to communication and information were said to melt away like so much butter in the microwave. People would be linked in ways never seen before, all in a purely public and noncommercial space. Early analysts claimed that the old media conglomerates were going to be swept aside by a coming Digital Age. For those looking to the future, the Internet would be the democratic space since its underlying principle, the networked sharing of data, was inherently leveling, free, and transparent.

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Between torrents of memes and legal commentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s skim milk analogy, Samuel Alito’s rusting Burkeanism, and Elena Kagan’s “batting average,” another item, a report about adults turning to cooperative households to save money, passed without remark in liberal circles.        

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