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We're the best judges of the public interests. Therefore, just out of ordinary morality, we have to make sure that they don't have an opportunity to act on the basis of their misjudgments.

If there still is a hegemony of postmodernism in today's leftist academia, and if it can be analysed as the spirit of contemporary capitalism, then this poses a problem for nowadays' leftist academia itself. I start with the premise that the just mentioned hegemony exists and present its analysis in neo-Marxist historical-materialist fashion (1). The argument runs as follows. Throughout the 20th century, there happened a shift from bourgeois to what I call "post-bourgeois" capitalism (2). This led into the agony of the radical kernel of modern-bourgeois values, ranging from humanism's autonomy via enlightenment's rationality to romanticism's individuality or non-identity – ending in the 21st century's "new spirit" of capitalism as the "cultural logic" of post-bourgeois capital (3). That shift towards the post-bourgeois commenced at the threshold from the 19th to the 20th century as a period which moved from terrestrial imperialism (or exo-colonisation) to the colonisation on the plane of culture (or endo-colonisation). Whereas both exo- and endocolonisation are caused by capital's logic to further disembed beyond the confines of its differentiated economic sphere in order to accumulate itself, the shift was necessitated by the saturation of exocolonisation in the late 19th century (4). Yet, for capital to disembed into the cultural dimension, a collapse of the superstructure into the base was enforced, or the collapse of culture into the economy. In this post-dualising process of the economisation of culture and the culturalisation of the economy, culturalised capital-value itself became the prime new cultural meta-value (5). Now, since the radical kernel of bourgeois-modern values remains of prime relevance to resist and tackle the further colonisations by capital, it needs to be defended against a self-fashioned progressive postmodernism that simply mimics the blind progressions of post-bourgeois capitalism (6).

The news is old – neoliberalism is dead for good, but this time, even Financial Times knows it. Obituaries claim that it had died from the coronavirus, as the state, not the markets, have had to save both the people and the economy. The argument of the article is that these academic and media interpretations of 'emergency Keynesianism' misidentify neoliberalism with its anti-statist rhetoric. For neoliberalism is, and has always been, about 'the free market and the strong state'. In fact, rather than waning in the face of the coronavirus crisis, neoliberal states around the world are using the ongoing 'war against the virus' to strengthen their right-hand grip on the conditions of the working classes.

Libya, inspired by the February 17 revolution but devastated by post-revolt challenges, is struggling to build order, as state, non-state, and external actors exacerbate the already fragile security environment. Among these actors, state and non-state actors pose a repeating and paradoxical dilemma. Libya's post-Qaddafi state structure has been formed by non-state armed actors, and at the same time these actors threaten the survival of the state; certain non-state armed groups compete against each other to accumulate more power, while in some cases being legitimized and funded by the state itself. The root causes of this paradoxical situation can be scrutinized by investigating the security culture inherited from Qaddafi's regime, particularly its inefficient and ignored security institutionalization, and the efforts of the competing armed groups to dominate their areas of influence in the absence of a coherent state structure.

V prvním letošním čísle Mezinárodních vztahů vyšel článek Tomáše Profantas názvem Rasizmus v rozvoji a rozvojové spolupráci. Publikování textuspustilo živou diskusi, kterou se redakce rozhodla podpořit oslovenímněkterých dalších autorů a autorek a transformovat do podoby diskusníhofóra. Jednotlivé příspěvky, které na rozdíl od Profantova článkuneprocházely plnohodnotným recenzním řízením, se tak vyrovnávají sargumenty a metodologickými postupy původního textu, rozvíjejí jej alokalizují do místních podmínek či poukazují na empirické příklady, jež jejpotvrzují. Celé fórum uzavírá odpověď Tomáše Profanta na jednotlivévznesené připomínky. Byť fórum reaguje na konkrétní článek, doufáme, žeby i tato diskuse mohla přispět k širší reflexi práce s konceptem rasismu ajejí implikace pro politickou praxi. Věříme, že právě v tomto je tato debata vsoučasném akademickém i politickém kontextu velmi aktuální.