COVID-19 has led to renewed interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, but it has also revealed that this concept is widely misunderstood. Too many commentators have relied upon an overly broad definition of biopolitics as a ‘politics of health’ or a ‘politics of life.’ Panagiotis Sotiris’ popular recent article ‘Is Democratic Biopolitics Possible?’ exemplifies…
The words that come to mind the most are astonishment and perplexity. The Brazilian government has slipped into the abyss of absurdity, into an absolute trivialization of abuse and aggression, into a gross violation of the most basic rules of democratic coexistence — not to mention the law and the Constitution —, while spewing hatred…
What should we understand under neoliberalism in the context of the university? Anderson (2016:735) argues that neoliberalism should not be seen as something ‘singular, coherent … with a simple origin point. … New hybrids are formed as neoliberal styles of reasoning and techniques encounter diverse political-economic forms and logics of governing’ (2016, p. 735). He…
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…
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…
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 response to the election of Donald Trump has been sweeping and swift. Massive and continual protests have taken place in a number of cities across the United States. Students have led walkouts and called for the creation of sanctuaries on many university campuses. A petition calling on the members of the Electoral College to…
Trump comes as the deranged savior, channeling all the frustration and spite towards the ruling class, a sort of dark Angel of political retribution. But if anything, he will intensify the Washington Consensus, he will govern for the Davos people, with the Davos people in a world tailor-made by the Davos people. He incarnates savage…
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. — Antonio Machado I. Introduction The referendum on whether or not Britain should remain within the European Union (EU) is now fully underway. This debate confronts socialists with a series of pressing tactical and strategic challenges,…
As I sat down to write this piece on some of the less credited and understood sonorous movements in the UK and their affecting encounters with law, snippets of David Cameron’s pronouncements on ‘blitzing poverty’ and ‘bulldozing the UK’s worst sink estates’ transmute my rainy January Sunday a few weeks ago, and immediately there exists…
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…
A victory for OXI would not just help restore a sense of dignity to Greece; it would strengthen the ground for anti-austerity struggles across Europe. Today, Greece has an opportunity to make history. The brave decision by Prime Minister Tsipras to call a referendum on the creditors’ inhumane ultimatums has turned the tables. The government’s…
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a stark example of how the proliferation of international economic law during the past three decades is an essential part of the neoliberal agenda and therefore ‘part of the problem’.In 1954 the ordo-liberal economist W. Roepke was invited in the Hague to deliver a paper on the…
An eerie sense of calm pervaded the bustling streets of Buenos Aires as local Porteños calmly went about their daily business. It was 31st July 2014 and the clock had just run out on the deadline for Argentina’s government to make a $539 million interest payment to the 93 percent of its bondholders which had…
A guest feature first posted on openDemocracy that provides a preview of the issues and problems to be discussed at the conference, Politics in Times of Anxiety, University of Manchester, June 9 – 11, 2014. Politics in Times of Anxiety springs from the 9/11 attacks, when public safety and security turned into a central concern across…
Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination. One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. The NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the Job Centre, the privileges system in the prisons, the constant examination and classification of the youngest schoolchildren. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace. We need to think about the ways in which a neoliberal idea of success inculcates these surveillance mechanisms inside the subjectivities and life-stories of most of the population.
It is possible that after the rise and the fall of the Keynesian governmentality, the neoliberal model of governance and legality reaches its apogee in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis.Whom would you ask in order to check if the milk you are drinking is fresh? This trivial question can be answered in multiple ways.…
Can we use the disturbance of the nation-state that neoliberalism is generating to create space for other kinds of state paradigms?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.…
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…