A standard justification for the cuts to public services, the policy of prioritising the repayment of private speculator debts over funding for hospitals and schools, the policy of converting private speculator debt into sovereign debt, is that ‘we’ have lost our sovereignty, or, in a more refined version, ‘we’ have lost our ‘economic sovereignty’, as though…
The Silent Voice of a New Beginning was a talk given by Slavoj Zizek at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on the 20th November 2011. Upon recently hearing a recording, it struck me as an incredibly rich session in terms of political substance — what is to be done? — and the quality of the interventions. The following are some notes,…
Like an empty vessel, an abstract practice floats aimlessly in suspense of its navigator. Once boarded, it acquires a direction, an intention – the first instance of its ethical contamination. The navigator harnesses the vessel’s potential for something, injecting it with purpose, and sets sail. Then, there is the matter of its handling, how it is steered, by…
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations in Spain, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests of the power elites that conserved their position when the transition from dictatorship to democracy…
Is history a coherent story? This is not the sort of question that is likely to be either asked or answered in the milieu I normally inhabit. In the universities of Europe and North America (and much of the rest of the world as well), the agenda has veered away asking such big questions. Academic attention is…
Law and juridical discourse play a central role in the configuration of power relations. In order to impose a programme of social cutbacks, a police action and even a protest mobilisation, force is needed. But so too is the ability to appeal to the law as a source of justification. The legality or illegality of an act does not make…
The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity. The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running out…
Call me a sissy, but I’ve never particularly cared for being referred to as cisgender. Still, the work of transgendered activists within Occupy Wall Street has been one of things that keep me optimistic. At a November 13th teach-in at Zuccotti Park, just days before the brutal eviction, trans activists took over the people’s mic for an…
Spain has been the theatre of a prolonged speculative wave that ended abruptly in 2007, having been one of the world leaders in the cycle of real estate-financial accumulation. Spanish capitalism took advantage of an intensive use of the territory that guaranteed strong profit rates, with the support of large masses of capital acquired on global…
Occupy Wall Street, for all its talk of horizontality, autonomy, and decentralized process, is recentering the economy, engaging in class warfare without naming the working class as one of two great hostile forces but instead by presenting capitalism as a wrong against the people. It’s putting capitalism back at center of left politics — no wonder, then, that…
The elections came, that far off dance, and some voices are wondering what that whole commotion in the squares was about. they look for concrete facts, transformed realities, immediate horizons to get one’s bearings in the economic and social state of exception that is on the way. What they find is not enough for them,…
The German writer Nemeitz published, in 1718, a book about Paris with “faithful instructions for travellers of standing”. One of his pieces of advice is as follows: “I do not advise anyone to walk through the city amid the dark night. Because, although the round or the guard on horseback might patrol the whole of Paris…
Vince Cable in yesterday’s Guardian accepted that the City is a ‘source of systemic instability, unfettered greed and industrial scale tax dodging’ but blamed the problem on a small number of rogue institutions. The task it seems is to find the “few rotten apples” that somehow manage to bring an entire system into disrepute. The reliance…
The mysterious sequence of these seemingly unconnected words made up the title of my presentation for this year’s Critical Legal Conference. It took me a good few days after the conference, however, to fully grasp what I might have had in mind when I decided to assemble these random words into something. To understand what that something was,…
Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of private education and the implicit commodification of learning. However, this emergent trans-continental rights-demand is not…
I have been critical of the consensus-based, horizontal practices associated with contemporary anarchism. My criticism has been based on what I’ve viewed as an underlying individualism – no one has the right to speak for any other, each person must speak for themselves, etc. Graeber sometimes describes the virtues of anarchism in terms of an underlying individualism…
Given the massive student demonstrations of last December in the UK, it is perhaps surprising that more coverage has not gone to the recent events in Colombia. In early October the Santos government sought to introduce a law (Ley 30) that would, among other thing, privatize the remaining public universities. In an immediate and powerful response,…
In the wake of yet another austerity addled budget, a strident chorus of our political leaders and self-proclaimed media statespersons, backed by a broad range of public comprador/organic intellectuals are echoing the sentiments if not the exact words of that great ‘reformer’ Margaret Thatcher — that ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) to the policies of austerity that have and…
The Ballyhea Bondholder Bailout Protest, now in its 40th week and joined with Charleville (their 25th week) is about one issue, and one issue only – the transference of private debt to the public purse. In one word, and very pure, very simple, it’s wrong. History On a fateful weekend in September 2008 Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Finance Minister…
A year after all of the head-shaking and nay-saying assurances that ‘negotiations’ with the IMF and EU were mere ‘fiction’, the sense of betrayal that Irish people experienced about the then Government’s denial that the Irish nation was about to lose its economic sovereignty is still palpable. This psychological process of denial – the refusal to acknowledge…