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…
Today’s cultural, political and ideological debates are imbued with a strange opacity, the result of their remove from the concrete day-to-day experience of the vast majority of people — ordinary citizens, or la gente de a pie, as they say in Latin America. That is especially the case with politics, which is supposed to…
If the debates incited by the 2019 Hong Kong Protest Movement, known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (or Anti-ELAB) Movement, have revolved around conflicting interpretations that favor differently weighted readings of geopolitics and more fundamental questions about the extent to which geopolitics can serve as a reliable index for understanding local insurrection, the bulk…
Throughout the 20th century there were frequent apologies and claims for reparations for the atrocities committed in the context of the relations between peoples and countries, as illustrated by Germany’s initiatives with regard to the Holocaust and by the US response in the case of the Japanese Americans kept under arrest during World War II.…
New data horizons Cyberspace, as a shared dimension but unequal community, is in a moment of unease and alienation over the ways and means of data creation, dissemination and preservation, including methods of storage on- and offline. Communication and circulation of commercial and personal data increasingly occurs amid threats of intermeddling and exposure to varieties…
Like a horrific traffic accident, the 2017 Hurricane season gripped much of the world with a morbid and awe-filled fascination. Through the remarkable advances of technology, Nature’s wrath as viewed from space was presented across all media in highest definition to date. As the first category 5 plus hurricane barrelled into the Caribbean Archipelago, Irma stunned…
Domination rests to such a degree on the society/nature duality that no liberation struggle will ever succeed unless that duality is overcome. In 1845, shortly after he published the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote his Theses on Feuerbach. The Theses were his first attempt at building a materialist philosophy that was…
In a 2013 contribution aimed at influencing the post-2015 development agenda, seventeen UN Special Rapporteurs recommended that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should include a goal on the provision of social protection floors. In April 2015 the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR or the Committee) issued a Statement on ‘Social protection…
This post is an amended version of remarks read at a rally organized by Cornell University’s Black Students United (BSU) on September 23, 2016. Students gathered to protest the recent police shootings of Tyree King, Terence Crutcher, and Keith Lamont Scott. It is reposted here with the kind permission of Black Perspectives. Sisters and brothers: I’m…
Please would you tell me,’ said Alice … ‘why your cat grins like that?’ ‘It’s a Cheshire-Cat,’ said the Duchess, and that’s why. Pig!’ She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice quite jumped… ‘I didn’t know that Cheshire-Cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that cats could grin.’ ‘They all…
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution (RR) and also the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Karl Marx’ Das Kapital. Combining the two historic dates may seem strange because Marx never wrote in detail about the revolution and communist society and, even if he had, it is…
The particular historical juncture in which we find ourselves raises more than obvious concerns with regards to the status of our polities. To be sure, things were never neat and clean, as most things are within the capitalist horizon. Ominous signs of the looming catastrophe were already out in the open for a long time,…
English version of interview with Brenna Bhandar* by Olivier Chassaing, translated by Chayma Drira for Période, the French online journal of Marxist theory, available here. Olivier Chassaing (‘OC’): By studying law, one can explore how capitalist societies rest upon and strengthen different social hierarchies: class, gender, race dominations, as well as persisting colonial structures and…
Tom Slee on Silicon Valley’s anti-regulation revolution It seems like politicians, journalists and pundits are lining up to praise the “innovative” promise of the so-called “sharing economy.” But is there something sinister lurking behind the collaborative facade that so often accompanies rosy assessments of the peer-to-peer online sector? To consider this question, we connected with…
In a post-capitalist world how will we establish a system which provides for the needs of all? The solution to this in a world with mechanized labor is clear: luxury communism The failing of the American liberal lies not in his or her message, which purports to be one that is anti-oppression and anti-capitalism. The…
I have few food-related memories of my childhood in Italy. One of these is certainly represented by my parents nudging me to eat all the food that was in my plate: no questions asked. It was the end of the 80s, and households in the Global North were for the first time seeing pictures of…
The future of the left is no more difficult to predict than any other social fact. The best way to address it is by way of what I term the sociology of emergences, which consists in paying special attention to signs from the present that can be read as trends or the harbinger of whatever…
The defence of capitalism as a system of economic organization often takes the form of strangely pious declarations about how we have strayed from the path. This could involve over taxation, limiting incentives, government takeovers of industry. Crises, it is claimed, emerge from our failure to allow the market to work its miraculous power divorced…
Key ConceptThe whole thing is truly barbarism, and triumphs as such even over its own barbaric spirit. — Theodor W. Adorno Adorno’s use of the term “barbarism” has probably been most often referred to in the context of his much-cited dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1983: 34). While, nowadays, the…
Mark Neocelous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, UK. Author of several books incl. most recently ‘War Power, Police Power’ (2014 EUP), ‘Anti-Security’ (2011 Red Quill Books) and ‘Critique of Security’ (2008 EUP/McGill). Many of his articles can be freely accessed here.This interview was originally conducted in March 2014 for Kampfplatz (a…