Commentary Archive
Citizens’ agora
The new urban question
by Andy Merrifield / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013)
What would Rousseau, who penned his classic Discourse on Inequality in 1755, have made of things today? Had he still been around, had he travelled around the globe a bit, he’d have doubtless despaired of how little ‘civilized’ society had ameliorated the ‘artificial’ inequalities that derive from the conventions that govern us. Maybe he’d have [...]
Global carcass balancing
Horsemeat and the agro-food network
by Emma Roe / RP 179 (May/Jun 2013)
The discovery by European forensic science laboratories of horse DNA in food labelled as beef meat products has brought renewed public scrutiny and interest to meat supply network activities and associated politics and policies. These have included concerns about food safety, horror from national and religious communities who have been sold food that contained meat [...]
Resisting Resilience
by Mark Neocleous / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013)I’m 24, in a horrible relationship, feeling stuck and alone. I met my boyfriend three years ago while I was struggling to find work after graduating. He was not only charismatic, ambitious and gorgeous, but supportive, too. I became infatuated. By the time I found out about his angry rages and subtle bullying, I had [...]
What the frack?
Combustible water and other late capitalist novelties
by Imre Szeman / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013)
There is a reason why oil gets the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the global game of petrocarbon extraction. Through the multiple products into which oil is refined, most important of which are gasoline and diesel, oil is the blood that animates the body of capitalism. It is a substance necessary for [...]
Lines in class
The ongoing attack on mass education in England
by Matthew Charles / RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012)
Andrew McGettigan’s analysis of the financial transformations of higher education (‘Who Let the Dogs Out? The Privatization of Higher Education’, RP 174) is important for comprehending the complexity of the changes universities are undergoing and their implications. As he argues, ‘it is mass higher education in England’ that is now under attack and adequately responding [...]
What is Pussy Riot’s ‘Idea’?
What is Pussy Riot’s ‘Idea’?
by Maria Chehonadskih / RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012)
It goes without saying that the Pussy Riot trial was an even more obscene performance of power than the punk prayer in the church itself. But the most ‘avantgarde’ and cynical part of this ‘power performance’ started not today, not a year ago, and probably not just in Russia either. If we refresh our [...]
Euro-Keynesianism?
The financial crisis in Europe
by Engelbert Stockhammer / RP 175 (Sep/Oct 2012)
Financial collapse is haunting Europe. The most immediate fear is that a small European state might default on its government debt, but several large European banks might go bust because of a deflated real-estate bubble in Southern Europe. Brutal austerity policies have been imposed on countries that are already in recession, but in most cases [...]
Who let the dogs out?
The privatization of higher education
by Andrew McGettigan / RP 174 (Jul/Aug 2012)
In April last year, I framed my article on ‘New Providers’ in relation to the delay surrounding the publication of the government’s White Paper for Higher Education (HE). That was caused by a combination of factors, but chiefly the need to fix a hole in the proposals for student loan financing; and additional preparation for [...]
Moving Borders
The Politics of Dirt
by Peter Nyers / RP 174 (Jul/Aug 2012)
Who can move? Who can speak? Who can act politically? The struggles of refugees and migrants have problematized conventional answers to these questions in a profound manner. Their struggles have demonstrated that, despite the considerable risks and dangers, new political subjects are being formed within securitized sites and border zones. Struggles by refugees and migrants [...]
The poetry and prose of the Russian elections
by Svetlana Stephenson / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012)Between 10 December 2011, the day of the first mass protest against fraud in the recently held Russian parliamentary elections, and 4 March 2012, the day of the presidential vote, Moscow was a transformed place. The suffocating atmosphere of Putin’s rule was disturbed as if by a sudden breath of fresh air. People came onto [...]
Pirate Radical Philosophy
by Gary Hall / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012)Pirate … from the Latin pirata (-ae; pirate)… transliteration of the Greek piratis (pirate; πειρατής) from the verb pirao (make an attempt, try, test, get experience, endeavour, attack; πειράω). … In modern Greek… piragma: teasing [πείραγμα] …pirazo: tease, give trouble [πειράζω].1 Much has been written about the ‘crisis of capitalism’ and the associated events known, for short, as the [...]
Class warfare in the USA
Anti-unionism and the legislative agenda of the 1%
by Gordon Lafer / RP 172 (Mar/Apr 2012)
The past year has brought an unprecedented series of attacks on public employee unions in state legislatures across the United States. The most dramatic such assault came in Wisconsin, where newly elected governor Scott Walker pushed through legislation that effectively eliminated the right to collective bargaining for his state’s 175,000 public employees.1 Yet while Wisconsin [...]
Occupy Time
by Jason Adams / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012)Until recently a casual observer might have thoght that Occupy had developed a time-management problem: it was increasingly managed by movement a static, essentially timeless image of space. While Occupy Wall Street initially began with the declaration that 17 September would be the starting date and that it would continue for an unspecified period, the [...]
The Chilean winter
by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012)Since the beginning of 2011, student mobilizations in Chile have occupied the centre of public debate. On the one hand, most of the population, along with most of the political parties currently opposed to Sebastián Piñera’s government, agree on the crisis of secondary and higher education in a country that has been widely praised for [...]
Ideas are bulletproof
by Andy Merrifield / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012)With the emergence of the worldwide ‘Occupy’ movement, at last there seems something we can write home about, something we can celebrate, salute, support. We can even don the mask ourselves, join in, grin that mischievous and devilish Guy Fawkes grin and affirm our own phantom-faced defiance of big money and big business. Behind the [...]
Net, square, everywhere?
by Nick Dyer-Witheford / RP 171 (Jan/Feb 2012)Since hackers led digital systems on a line of flight from their military origins the Internet has had an ambivalent political virtuality. In the mid-1990s the emergenceof the anti- or alter-globalization movement coincided with growing access to the Internet, open source software and creative commons production. The digital dissemination of the Zapatista call for resistance [...]
The Valuation of Nature
The Natural Choice White Paper
by Kathryn Yusoff / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011)
How to value biodiversity and the mutable thing called nature, in the context of biodiversity loss in the UK and elsewhere, is a question that has been vexing biologists, conservation groups, environmental lawyers and indigenous groups. The question is posed in the context of that modestly named ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the Holocene Event, and [...]
Euphemism, the university and disobedience
by Alexander Garcia Duttmann / RP 169 (Sep/Oct 2011)Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered the fact that they seem to contradict each other and bring about a ‘euphemism of [...]
Devolving public universities
Lessons from America
by Christopher Newfield / RP 169 (Sep/Oct 2011)
It is easy enough to be fatalistic about the current funding situation in higher education. US public universities have locked themselves into a model that has led to the slashing of public funding off and on for thirty years and that has been forcing public universities towards an ever-growing dependence on private money. This funding [...]
The manhunt doctrine
by Gregoire Chamayou / RP 169 (Sep/Oct 2011)George W. Bush had warned us early on: the United States has launched itself into a new kind of war, a ‘war that requires us to be on an international manhunt’.1 It would be wrong to believe that Barack Obama’s ‘justice has been done’, echoing Bush nearly ten years later, will close what was merely [...]
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