The ‘Lawful’ Political Killing of Bogotá’s Mayor: Gustavo Petro

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Gustavo Petro (holding mic) at a rally

One of the longest living myths in Latin America is that Colombia is one of its most stable demo­cra­cies. Of course, form­ally, the country has not suffered a mil­itary dic­tat­or­ship in the last fifty some years and all the in­ternal clock­work of a re­pub­lican system seems to work har­mo­ni­ously; a con­sti­tu­tion packed with rights and guar­an­tees, reg­ular, open elec­tions; a neat and clean di­vi­sion of powers; and the list goes on. Yet this ap­parent in­sti­tu­tional sturdi­ness con­ceals a civil war that has been on­going for more than sixty years. This war has al­most bled rural Colombia to death and has made urban areas a bizarre col­lage of wealth and poverty. It is a tale of two coun­tries: on one side Colombia has now sur­passed Argentina as the third…

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Ukraine Crisis Timeline

If the state isn’t a corporation, what might it become?

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Enrique Chagoya. The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America, 2006

That British and other states are be­coming in­creas­ingly privat­ised is the sad litany of our age. So too is the way states in­cor­porate market prin­ciples of price and com­pet­i­tion within their own in­ternal gov­ernance struc­tures. And now, with com­panies run­ning public ser­vices, owning public as­sets, and providing a model for how state bodies should in­teract, the state it­self is being re-​imagined: as a public cor­por­a­tion — form­ally ac­count­able, at in/​decent in­ter­vals, to its share-​holders (the elect­orate); sub­stant­ively ac­count­able to its stake-​holders (that chan­ging array of sec­toral in­terests). The cor­porate state It is not dif­fi­cult to de­velop this cor­por­atist line of thinking. Repeatedly, we are told states com­pete with each other, in a mar­ket­place of states, for in­vestors, cus­tomers and cli­ents, that’s why levels of corporation…

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“We are not from another planet”: Justice 4 Cleaners Campaign and the Struggle for Recognition

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Subaltern Speak

The on-​going struggle of the SOAS Cleaners for ac­cept­able working con­di­tions and equality in the work­place has re­ceived some media at­ten­tion since its in­cep­tion in 2007 – 2008. For a thor­ough and en­ga­ging ana­lysis of the his­tory of cleaners’ la­bour act­ivism across the city, in­cluding the massive con­tri­bu­tions they have made to the London Living Wage Campaign, see Robert B’s piece “Crisis in the Cleaning Sector”, pub­lished in December 2013. Employed by the out­sourced com­pany ISS since 1993, SOAS cleaning staff are de­prived of ad­equate sick pay, pen­sion be­ne­fits, and hol­iday pay. In other words, they are denied the same con­trac­tual be­ne­fits, job se­curity, and working con­di­tions that those em­ployed dir­ectly by SOAS cur­rently have. Working in a de facto se­greg­ated en­vir­on­ment, SOAS cleaners…

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(K)not Politics: Thoughts on Ukraine and Protest

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Freedom and Kiev central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti.

The events in Ukraine have caused many to wonder what sparked the protests in November and why things un­folded into such vi­ol­ence this February. How do we un­der­stand European and Russian in­terest in this country, and what media, what sources of in­form­a­tion can be trusted? Ukraine has once again raised the ques­tion of the polit­ical; the ques­tion of Europe; the spectre of Cold War Empires. Perhaps un­like the many other horrid, vi­olent dic­tat­or­ships that are con­tinuing to op­press people (DRC) or up­ris­ings that im­min­ently threaten more blood­shed (Venezuela), Ukraine en­cap­su­lates twen­tieth cen­tury polit­ical myth­o­logy. Onto Ukraine, the fantasies of the Cold War con­tinue to be pro­jected. It is the country bor­dering Russia, the European Union and the Black Sea. It…

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Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO

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Xanti Schawinsky, Shakespeare Die beiden Veroneser, Räuberballett, 1925Xanti Schawinsky Estate © Xanti Schawinsky Estate

The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (MAP) opens by noting the depth of the cur­rent crisis – “cataclysm” – and a neg­a­tion of the fu­ture by “coming apo­ca­lypses”. No need for alarm how­ever: there is nothing political-​theological here what­so­ever, so those who came looking for that might as well stop reading now. Absent, too, is the usual re­frain about the im­minent break­down of the plan­etary cli­matic system. Or rather, it is men­tioned, its im­port­ance, but it is wholly sub­or­din­ated to in­dus­trial politics, and can be ad­dressed only through the cri­tique thereof. What is es­sen­tial is in­stead “the in­creasing auto­ma­tion of pro­ductive processes” – including “in­tel­lec­tual labour” – which is presented as evid­ence of the crisis of cap­it­alism. Catastrophism? Improper use of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to…

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What’s Going on in Venezuela?

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venezuela-uprising-2

It’s dif­fi­cult to briefly ex­plain the situ­ation in Venezuela right now. The dif­fi­culty lies in the fact that it is com­plic­ated, like most things. No matter how various polit­ical prot­ag­on­ists, human rights groups and news media would like to paint things as simple, black and white, they are not. To un­der­stand one has to dig down, deep. A par­tic­u­larly galling video on YouTube ex­plains that mil­lions of stu­dents took to the street to protest about crime and the se­curity situ­ation. The com­ments by Venezuelans on said video are telling. In fact, what English-​speakers hear about Venezuela is one of the biggest prob­lems – if a Venezuelan speaks English, chances are that they are part of the small minority of the (re­l­at­ively) ultra-​rich who’ve been fighting to…

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Racism as Excessive Legalism

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Queue

We rightly cel­eb­rate that we live in a so­ciety where law and order pre­vail. The ca­pa­city to follow es­tab­lished rules al­lows for the smooth op­er­a­tion of the many ne­ces­sary trans­ac­tions that make up our everyday life. And the law, among other things, guar­an­tees that we as cit­izens can ac­cess cer­tain goods and ser­vices by right rather than at the whim of someone who is in a po­s­i­tion of power over us. As those of us who have lived in so­ci­eties where law and order is min­imal know, without law and order, even a small trans­ac­tion like get­ting a driver’s li­cense can be­come so­cially and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally ex­hausting: a circus of going up and down build­ings, beg­ging people, ex­plaining to them what should be ob­vious, seeing people…

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#Accelerationism: Remembering the Future

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Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 1936. Gelatin silver print.

For the last forty years the vision of our so­ci­eties as pro­gressive and heading in a better dir­ec­tion has been sys­tem­at­ic­ally eroded. Under the per­muta­tion of cap­it­alism that began in the 1970s, gained trac­tion in the 1980s, ap­peared vic­torious in the 1990s, and faced ser­ious prob­lems in the late 2000s — the fu­ture has been can­celled. Today, it is common sense to pre­sume that cli­mate change and its ef­fects will wreak havoc on the en­vir­on­ment, that real wages will con­tinue to stag­nate, that jobs will be­come more pre­carious, that re­tire­ments and pen­sions will be elim­in­ated, and that in­equality and the ex­ploit­a­tion of society’s weakest will only worsen. This is the fu­ture offered by the vari­ants of neo­lib­eral polit­ical eco­nomy that dom­inate the developed…

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The Insecurity of Public Interest: Criminal Law and Dumpster Diving

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Paul May outside Iceland

The idea of in­sec­urity seems to have an ever in­creasing hold on our con­tem­porary so­cial ima­ginary, a tend­ency which is now reg­u­larly used by the au­thor­ities in order to le­git­imise a spe­cific no­tion of public in­terest. Last week, this no­tion came to the fore when the Guardian news­paper re­vealed that three men were ar­rested, de­tained and very briefly charged for taking food from a dustbin be­hind one of the Iceland su­per­mar­kets. Paul May, Jason Chan and William James were ar­rested on 25 October last year, just be­fore mid­night, for climbing over a wall at the back of Iceland in Kentish town and taking some to­ma­toes, mush­rooms, cheese and Mr Kipling cakes that were destined for a land­fill. Initially ar­rested for burg­lary, the three men were…

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For a Theory of Destituent Power

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Kelesidi_Bliss_Watercolour-on-paper_40x40-24ddadf7

A re­flec­tion on the des­tiny of demo­cracy today here in Athens is in some way dis­turbing, be­cause it ob­liges to think the end of demo­cracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hy­po­thesis I would like to sug­gest is that the pre­vailing gov­ern­mental paradigm in Europe today is not only non demo­cratic, but that it cannot either be con­sidered as polit­ical. I will try there­fore to show that the European so­ciety today is no more a polit­ical so­ciety: it is some­thing en­tirely new, for which we lack a proper ter­min­o­logy and we have there­fore to in­vent a new strategy. Let me begin with a concept which seems, starting from September 2001, to have re­placed any other polit­ical no­tion: se­curity. As…

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Regulatory exceptionalism: the EU short selling ban

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dollar's flow in black hole

A much re­marked upon fea­ture of the Global Financial Crisis (‘GFC’) has been the re­course of gov­ern­ments to per­manent states of ex­cep­tion, pur­portedly jus­ti­fied by the need to pro­tect fin­an­cial sta­bility. We have seen everything from prime min­is­ters being heli­coptered in (Romano Prodi), to mon­et­arist central banks buying up bonds and even gilts, to the de­cision to guar­antee private banks with public rev­enues (funded by aus­terity). A small but not in­sig­ni­ficant event in this ex­cep­tion­alist march oc­curred on 22 January 2014 when the European Court of Justice went against the opinion of its Attorney-​General and up­held a power to in­ter­vene in mar­kets to pre­vent short selling that had been granted to a re­l­at­ively new agency in Europe’s fin­an­cial su­per­visory ar­chi­tec­ture (Case C-​270/​12). The con­cern is…

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Guantanamo is still there … and the number of Guantanomos is multiplying.

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by Banksy

One of the reasons why President Obama’s man­date has fallen many miles short of ex­pect­a­tions is his clear lack of will — let’s dis­pense with eu­phem­isms — to de­liver his promise to close the six dif­ferent camps making up the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay. This is where pris­oners with links to the war against ter­rorism, primarily to Al-​Qaeda, have been held since the U.S. in­ter­ven­tion in Afghanistan, pris­oners sub­ject to dif­fering de­grees and types of co­er­cive meas­ures. For ex­ample, in the harshest camp, Camp 6, with ca­pa­city for 178 pris­oners, in­mates are held in win­dow­less in­di­vidual steel cells for 22 hours a day. It is common know­ledge that, over the years, re­ports and testi­monies have shown that in all of these camps, pris­oners who — from…

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The Five Extraordinary Features of the Sochi Winter Olympics

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Circassians March for No Sochi 2014

Introduction On 7 February 2014, the Sochi Winter Olympics will com­mence. It is es­tim­ated that these games will cost at least US$51 bil­lion — the most ex­pensive in his­tory — costing Russia more than the $40 bil­lion that China spent on the 2008 Summer Olympics. The UK spent some US$15 bil­lion on the Summer Olympics in 2012. Sochi was se­lected as the host city in July 2007, during the 119th International Olympic Committee Session held in Guatemala City. At that time the games were es­tim­ated to cost US$12 bil­lion; the cost of these ex­tra­vagant games has there­fore quad­rupled. The offer of US$12 bil­lion from Russia dwarfed the bids of the other fi­nal­ists from South Korea and Austria. The Sochi Winter Olympics have five ex­traordinary features,…

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Touch: Notes on the Thought of Luce Irigaray

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Image by Mojo Wang

Touch is at the heart of Luce Irigaray’s dia­lectic of re­la­tions with the other. It is a ges­ture that re­sponds to the call of the (m)other.1 The dia­lectic of touch is based upon the ges­ture of re­spect and rev­er­ence to­wards the source or the ges­ture of vi­ol­ence if it seeks to ap­pro­priate the sub­jectivity of the other.2 To quote Irigaray, ‘Touching or being touched concern(s) an in­timacy that cannot be ap­proached with the hand.’3 It is a ques­tion of in­timacy and one can de­velop in­timacy through touching each other in­tern­ally or in­ter­sub­ject­ively. Touch also im­plies being in con­tact tact­fully. It sets cer­tain bound­aries and limits in human re­la­tion­ships. It re­quires mu­tual con­sent. To borrow from Irigaray, ‘To touch one an­other in intersubjectivity,…

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Badiou’s Jurisprudence II: ‘We Have Become Simulacra’

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Untitled

If freedom, as Deleuze claims, is to en­gage in jur­is­pru­dence, do we not en­counter a paradox in the al­li­ance between Alain Badiou and Jacques Vergès? A paradox that strikes at the heart of the co­lo­nial and jur­idical situ­ation of a col­on­ized people? If Vergès in­sti­tutes a rup­ture within jur­idical reason ren­dering the judg­ment of an Algerian National Liberation fighter im­possible, is it not the case that this is pos­sible be­cause the sub­ject on trial cannot be rep­res­ented on the terms of the trial it­self; that Djamila Bouhired in no way ‘re­sembles’ any­thing but a ter­rorist and traitor? Thus, the Badiouean Event, which is Vergès’ de­fense, already re­lies on an­other con­cep­tion of the simu­lacrum ar­tic­u­lated by one of Badiou’s main rivals: Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s un­der­standing of…

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Patrick McAuslan, or the Yes

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Untitled in Tanzania, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Professor Patrick McAuslan passed away on the 11th of January, 2014. I do not know the de­tails of his ap­par­ently de­teri­or­ating health, or of his death for that matter. I know very basic things about the whole event, and I have chosen to keep it like this. This is be­cause I do not want to close the biggest ques­tion of my life. I do not want to round it up with the final event. I want the ques­tion mark to linger. Let me tell you a couple of things about my re­la­tion with Patrick be­fore I ex­plain what the ques­tion mark is about. I met Patrick, or in­deed Professor McAuslan for me at the time, when I started my LLM de­gree at the University of London. His course was the…

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A Generation Gaining its Voice

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Yes_we_scan

I ended 2013 listening to Glen Greenwald’s key­note ad­dress at the Chaos Computer Club’s 30c3 con­fer­ence in Hamburg. Though Greenwald was con­vinced that change is pos­sible, he was cer­tain it would not arise through polit­ical de­bate or demo­cratic pro­cesses. Instead his op­timism is vested in the skills of his peers, and in en­cryp­tion tech­no­lo­gies such as the Tor browsers, PGP and OTR being put to use on the tech­no­lo­gical bat­tle­field to re­claim the sanc­tity of our private com­mu­nic­a­tions. Not being an act­ivist, hacker or se­cur­ities spe­cialist, this dis­turbed for me for three reasons. It’s not only the sanc­tity of our com­mu­nic­a­tion that we have lost, but also faith in our gov­ern­ments, whom we are now forced to as­sume hate us.…

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What the Duggan Inquest Teaches us about Fear and Sovereignty

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Crowds hurl abuse at Assistant Commissioner Rowley after a jury ruled that Mark Duggan was lawfully killed.

After the Met Police killed Mark Duggan in 2011 it had felt like London took a col­lective breath and had been waiting to ex­hale, hoping that the in­quest into his fatal shooting would up­hold some sense of justice. This hope was sadly ex­tin­guished this week. When I read the news of the jury’s ver­dict I was struck by two things: a pro­found con­fu­sion over how they could reach the de­cision that his killing was lawful and a (sur­pris­ingly) com­plete lack of shock at their ver­dict. It is this second re­sponse that I had which I would like to think about here. I could read this ver­dict as just an­other ex­ample of sys­tem­atic ra­cism in London (the im­mig­ra­tion man­hunts being the most vis­ible ex­ample) and the growing schism…

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Badiou’s Jurisprudence: The Event of Law and The Law of The Event

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Verges 3

In a lec­ture pub­lished in the Cardozo Law Review in 2008, Alain Badiou ar­tic­u­lates his un­der­standing of Being, Event, and Simulacrum in re­la­tion­ship to Logic and Law. With an in­cred­ible power of pre­ci­sion, Badiou re­minds his audi­ence of Aristotle’s three main pil­lars of the pro­cess of thought (Identity, non-​contradiction, and the ex­cluded middle), which he then uses to de­lin­eate the three kinds of neg­a­tion he un­der­stands to be at work: clas­sical, in­tu­ition­istic, and para­con­sistent. With these “three kinds of neg­a­tion,” Badiou aims to un­der­score how Events tran­spire in a world; and what the im­pact of an Event, ac­cording to each kind of neg­a­tion, ac­tu­ally means. In Classical logic, neg­a­tion obeys Aristotle’s prin­ciples of non-​contradition and the ex­cluded middle. That is to say, the…

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