Key Concept Shortly after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the English translation of Hannah Arendt’s essay was published under the title ‘The Rights of Man: What Are They?’ This essay was later incorporated in Chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism and became known as one of the…
It was a sunny afternoon in early March. We were a small group of about twelve and the event was a teach-in I was leading on the topic ‘Is it Useless to Revolt? The Strike as Counter-Conduct’ (part of a month of Sussex Strike events).[1] We quickly agreed that ‘is it useless to revolt’ is…
One hundred years ago today, the British judiciary presented the Empire’s most expressly and egregiously racist justification for the land dispossession of indigenous peoples. As Zimbabweans go to the polls next week, no matter which way they turn, they continue to pay the price for it. On 26 July 1918, the Judicial Committee of the…
We are thrilled to be working with Law and Critique, the primary critical legal studies journal. In the coming months we will be featuring blogs from some of their most recently published authors, these will include links to open-access read-only versions of their journal articles. Our first blog comes from Kay Lalor. The full text…
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,…
On work, theft and the age of automation through a reading of Johnny Cash’s classic song Johnny Cash’s One Piece at a Time is a song about how he makes his own dream Cadillac by smuggling out all the parts from the factory over twenty years. It’s essentially about stealing from work but that’s not…
Paul O’Connell recently argued that human rights are not a trap for emancipatory and radical projects. They can be productively placed with different discourses like anti-capitalism, anti-racism or queer politics, generating productive moments of resistance. He argues against what he calls a ‘monolingual’ idea of struggle where movements can only engage with one discourse at…
Homosexuality is not a criminal offence in Russia — since 1993. In 1999 it ceased to be regarded as a mental illness. Indeed, Russian history has many famous homosexuals — the poet Alexei Apukhtin; Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes; and of course the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The younger brother of…
This text is written by a group of people living in the United Kingdom who are migrants, students and workers. In the last few weeks alone we have witnessed the deaths of hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and we have mourned Pinakin Patel who died in detention in Yarl’s Wood. This, as we…
When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.The air is taken away from us; “we cannot breathe”. This is a commentary which draws inspiration from an evocative piece of writing by Jerome Roos which appeared earlier in Reflections on a Revolution. The…
The American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once observed that if you find out ‘just what any people will quietly submit to … you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them’ and that such injustices ‘will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with…
Costas Douzinas delivering this year’s annual talk of Post-structural and Critical Thought Cluster at the University of Manchester. Professor Costas Douzinas delivered this year’s annual talk of the Post-structural and Critical Thought Cluster at the University of Manchester. This event also officially launched a 2-year cluster run project entitled Politics in Times of Anxiety. The…
At worst, the 2011 ruling in Waller v City of New York makes the First Amendment rights of public protest subject to the ‘police power’ of repressive, legislative and judicial power which collectively governs in the name of ‘security’.Waller v City of New York, 2011 At approximately 1:00 am on the morning of November 15,…
Birkbeck Annual Law lecture, London 25 October 2013. This is an unofficial transcription from an audio recording available at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle. They say that freedom is a constant struggle, O Lord, we’ve struggled so long we must…
Each generation of “human rights” has its origins in revolutionary struggle, and that is why they remain, unlike black-letter law, so powerful and so scandalous.David Renton’s thoughtful and trenchant article in SL64 [Ed: republished 18 Nov 2013 on CLT] has done us all a great service, opening up questions of crucial importance to the Haldane Society. That…
Socialists should demand what is absolutely incompatible with the conditions of capital and the State: the right not to be exploited.An obvious starting point is Karl Marx’s position on human rights. We can begin with his response in 1844 to Bruno Bauer’s pamphlet The Jewish Question, in which Bauer opposed Jewish demands for political liberation…
In its traditional conception, the constituent is a power that constitutes and reconstitutes the state. This is a dangerous, though important salve for the problem of corruption in the body politic. The people or their representatives may overthrow the constituted order when it loses its authority, when the monarch or polyarch becomes tryannous. However, our…
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…
A short piece to mark just one example of the continuing intellectual hegemony of the banking/Thatcherism/Murdoch triad that infests British politics. Listening to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, give an interview this morning to Evan Davis of the BBC, we heard him proclaim: If they [the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks] have any shred of…
1. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, Marxist intellectuals, shaken by the Gulag revelations and the collapse of the communist states, started welcoming human rights. Claude Lefort, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière amongst others participated in this move. It coincided with the ‘end of history’ bragging of liberal capitalists and the revisionist histories…