CLC Dundee: undeed and duende.

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Had the virus not intruded, I, and many of CLT’s readers, would be in Dundee right now, for the annual Critical Legal Conference, an event that has happened every autumn since the mid-1980s. The CLC has often proclaimed its non-existence for all but three days of the year, leaving no permanent institutional structures or office holders in place in the 362/3 days between events, convening on the first day and dispersing on the third, by courtesy of the efforts of that year’s temporary organising committee; this year it has surpassed itself, achieving non-existence for the entire year. Instead, the Dundee organising committee tells us on their website, ‘to help maintain the ongoing vitality of the CLC and the communities that…

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An Escape Route for Brazil

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Brazil is at an existential crossroads, the magnitude of which we can only begin to imagine. This is a country where the pandemic has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. With only about 2.8 percent of the world population, Brazil accounts for 13.9 percent of deaths from COVID-19. This is a country that experienced two grave attacks on democracy and the rule of law in a short period of time: the 2016 legal- political coup against President Dilma Rousseff, and the grotesque judicial- political machinations that led to the sentencing without evidence, in 2018, of former President Lula da Silva, the most popular president in Brazilian history. This is a country ruled by a president, Jair…

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A Second Manifesto for the World Social Forum? From an Open Space to a Space for Action

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Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to reach a conclusion. We, Frei Betto, Atilio Borón, Bernard Cassen, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Federico Mayor, Riccardo Petrella, Ignacio Ramonet, Emir Sader, Boaventura Santos, Roberto Savio, Aminata Traoré, are the signatories of the Declaration of Porto Alegre, in the WSF of 2005. We have lost since then wonderful friends (Samir Amin, Eduardo Galeano, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, Francois Houtart, Josè Saramago, Immanuel Wallertsein). But we have shared a lot with them, and we…

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Sharing Myth (A Critique of the Sharing Economy)

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In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores how wine functions not only as France’s national emblem, but also as a myth that helps grasp the ambiguity within French capitalist society. Wine, he argues, is a defining part of France’s experience because it structures the “environment”, serving as the core piece in almost all ceremonies of French life. On the other hand, Barthes also notes that the production of this magical fluid was deeply intertwined with French imperialism, as a seemingly innocent myth that moves away exploitation from the public eye. Unsurprisingly, French wine and many other local symbols have been globalized and have effectively transcended national barriers. They now evoke some of these patriotic sentiments to a cosmopolitan elite…

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What Kind of Justice for a ‘Global New Deal’?

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Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently set out a wide ranging critique of the current global order, characterised by pervasive, institutionalised inequality, and failed, nationalistic responses to the global Coronavirus crisis. In response he has called for the reform and reshaping of global governance structures, for a ‘New Social Contract’ and a ‘Global New Deal’. But what kind of justice is presented in the call for a Global New Deal? In sharp contrast to the incompetence and the right wing populist bluster of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson the intervention by António Guterres is refreshing. Guterres presents the Coronavirus crisis not in terms of a ‘security emergency’, or a ‘war on…

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After Open Access

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We are a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice journal editors. We reject the narrow values of efficiency, transparency and compliance that inform current developments and policies in open access and platform publishing. Together, we seek further collaboration in the development of alternative publishing processes, practices and infrastructures imbued with the values of social and environmental justice. Open access is not – yet – open The dominant model of open access is dominated by commercial values. Commercial licenses, such as CC-BY are mandated or preferred by governments, funders and policy makers who are effectively seeking more public subsidy for the private sector’s use of university research, with no reciprocal financial arrangement. Open access platforms such as academia.edu are extractive and exploitative. They…

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Denise Ferreira da Silva: Analytics of Raciality

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Key Concept In the glossary to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), you won’t find raciality under the letter ‘R’. Instead reference to the term is found under ‘A’; analytics of raciality. Before proceeding to explore this term it is important from the offset that we not forget analytics is inextricable to raciality. Failure to consider the analytics that is of raciality would lead to mistaking the term as merely a discursive concept (e.g. another way of saying ‘racialised’ or ‘racial thinking’) instead of recognising it as a politico-juridical programme, a production and mode of (transcendental) consciousness. It may help to begin with an image for us to visualise the analytics of raciality. Often in…

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Marxist Legal Theory: The State

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Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking. There has been no shortage of debates and controversies within Marxist political and legal thought concerning the state. Part of the difficulty stems from the fragmentary character of Marx’s writing on the topic. In his notebooks from the late 1850s, posthumously published as the Grundrisse, he indicates that “the concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state” would be part of the larger systematic critique of political economy he was pursuing at the time. However, only…

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The Statues of our Discontent

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Statues look a lot like the past, which is why, whenever they are called into question, we turn to historians. The truth is that statues are a thing of the past only as long as they stand quietly in squares, as indifferent to us as we are to them. At such times, which may actually last centuries, they are visited more intentionally by pigeons than by humans. But when statues come under assault, they leap from the past to become part of our present. Otherwise, how could there ever be any dialogue between us and them? Of course, there are statues that never come under assault, either because the past to which they belong is just too remote for them…

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Postcolonial Liberalism’s Double Binds

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“We need Covid Trials. In an international court,” is Arundhati Roy’s “post-lockdown reverie”. She wants the Indian government to be held accountable for its treatment of migrant workers as refuse and the ongoing assault on the civil rights of dissenters in the wake of Covid-19. Roy’s wishful faith in an international justice delivery mechanism to establish state accountability captures the double bind (à la Spivak) of postcolonial liberalism well: relying on the perceived “rational universality” of international law’s (and by extension common law’s) promises of protecting the human rights to liberty, freedom and equality, when a postcolonial state—especially its judiciary—fails to do so, despite a progressive constitution. It is a double bind because this reliance operates with the awareness of international…

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The Winter of Absolute Zero: Interview with Shaj Mohan

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The silent 20th century consensus was that philosophy was Western, which then was split into ‘continental’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’. In recent decades we have seen the assertive presence of non-White philosophers including Achilles Mbembe, Anthony Appiah, Divya Dwivedi, and Shaj Mohan. Shaj Mohan is the philosopher who has been “forsaken”[i] by philosophical traditions as his work is characterized by the irreverence towards both European and ‘Indic’ traditions. Instead through what Robert Bernasconi called rigorous and radical interpretations, his work appropriates scientific, mathematical, technological and metaphysical resources to create new concepts for our time. Recently, Mohan has been participating in the now famous “Coronavirus and Philosophers”[ii] debate with Agamben, Nancy, and Esposito. In these interventions the same irreverence to philosophical traditions as…

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Complex Back Stories: Feminism, Survivor Politics and Trans Rights

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On June 10, author JK Rowling published an article on her website, ‘JK Rowling Writes About her Reasons for Speaking Out about Sex and Gender Issues’ which offered a rationale for her public interventions opposing legislation in the UK designed to legally recognise transgender rights and identities. While the article began by minimising Rowling’s interventions, which she claimed boiled down to an ‘accidental like’ of a tweet by a prominent campaigner against transgender rights, and emphasising the vitriol directed against her, it’s primary purpose was to explain her reasons ‘for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up’. Rowling mentioned her work in charities safeguarding vulnerable women and children, her commitment to free speech…

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Roland Barthes: Myth

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Key Concept Human communication is multi-layered, as our language relies on complicated systems of signification; for example uttering a given statement using specific terminology might indicate the ideological tendencies of the speaker. And like any other communicative system, law is also multi-layered. This multi-layered nature is born at the moment of drafting or passing a judgement, and reconfigured through interpretation, application and even communication throughout the lifetime of the rule or the judgement. For example: the rule that forbids stealing infers an understanding of a given sanctity of property. Such sanctity was presumed at the moment of drafting and resumed further meaning and depth as the rule was implemented, transplanted, and developed. Roland Barthes is a French theorist (1915–1980) whose…

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Marxist Legal Theory: Security

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Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking. The concept of security has significant implications for a Marxist theory of the state, law, and political economy, offering conceptual resources for linking all three in a renewed critique of capitalism. In “On the Jewish Question”, Marx makes the weighty contention that “security is the supreme social concept of civil society”, adding that it is “[t]he concept of the police”. Until rather recently, Marxist scholars have left this pronouncement largely unexamined, focusing instead on the administrative…

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Remembering Peter Fitzpatrick (II)

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I read for a PhD under Peter’s inimitable supervision at Birkbeck from 2005 until late 2008, at which point I told him that I had to return to Australia to finish the dissertation because the birth of my first child, Phoebe, was imminent. It sounds like I took drastic evasive action to avoid the difficult run-in to the end of the PhD (stories were legion in the Gower Street bunker about Peter’s pernicketiness in the final days, making weary candidates redraft their abstract for the seventh time just days before submission). But in truth those years at Birkbeck were the most enjoyable, provocative and intellectually formative of my life. A huge part of that experience was Peter’s supervision. Of course,…

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Institutional Vandalism: The University & Covid-19

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The Guardian’s 29 May article (‘Soas to slash budgets and staff as debt crisis worsens in a pandemic’) has brought attention to a worrying development, which risks seeing losses of livelihoods and expertise at a unique and world-renowned institution. The danger is that framing SOAS’s financial difficulties in isolation obscures the fact that this is a sector-wide crisis that will only be resolved by a turnaround in government policy. In a highly marketized education sector, speculation about a university’s future can impact student numbers, the institution’s lifeline. This is the Catch-22 that university sector workers are now trapped in: to name a crisis is to make it worse. Higher education institutions across the UK are seeing shrinking budgets, restructurings and…

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Universities, Finance Capital and Impact of COVID-19

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  Republished with permission from Discover Society. A number of vice chancellors have claimed that they are constrained in how they can approach the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by financial agreements. This means that they wouldn’t be able to cover losses using existing reserves because the University was prevented from doing so by legal agreements with its financiers to make a financial surplus each year. The existence of these finance agreements and the restrictions they impose should not come as a surprise. I, among others, wrote during the 2018 strike of the increasing use of commercial bank financing by universities such as Portsmouth and UCL to fund capital expenditure on new buildings. Now, however, we see the consequences of credit…

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The System Was Never Broken (it was built this way)

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The unravelling developments in the United States of America (USA) amid the death of George Floyd are unsettling. The terminology ‘public order’ is used by popular political narrative to host and then employ a variety of techniques to deflect from the justified concerns surrounding social and racial justice. Frantz Fanon said: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer’ breathe”.[1] The capitalist structure reproduces an illusion of uniformity, while it actually benefits and operates from emphasising and racialising difference. Property, against this background, is the dominant factor for the capitalist society. Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating. For this to unfold, it depends on structural…

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Beyond Brutality

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I write this at great distance from the uprisings now taking place across the US sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. I am thousands of miles distant and witness police repression, and the anger of the protestors, via old and social media. I am a white Oxford professor, whose efforts at understanding events flow neither from experience nor grounded observation. I take seriously the idea that this is a moment that demands listening, not speech. Yet there are things to be said – things that, in my case at any rate, are driven by a commitment to grasp what’s at stake politically when policing is contested and to articulating ideas that can help shape the struggle for a…

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