Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category
The poetry and prose of the Russian elections
RP 173 Svetlana Stephenson
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
RP 173 Gary Hall
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%
RP 172 Gordon Lafer
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
RP 171 Jason Adams
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
RP 171 Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott
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
RP 171 Andy Merrifield
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?
RP 171 Nick Dyer-Witheford
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
RP 170 Kathryn Yusoff
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
RP 169 Alexander García Düttmann
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
RP 169 Christopher Newfield
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
RP 169 Grégoire Chamayou
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 [...]
Vélorutionary?
RP 168 Martin Ryle
The Montreal cyclists who in the mid-1970s formed an advocacy group known as Le Monde à Bicyclette also referred to themselves as vélo-Quixotes and vélorutionaries.1 The bicycle, in its surprising persistence through the twentieth century, became an emblem of alternative ideas, and chronologies, of progress: how many other complex machines that approached their mature form [...]
‘New Providers’
The Creation of a Market in Higher Education
RP 167 Andrew McGettigan
At the end of 2009, the Labour government commissioned a review panel, led by John Browne, formerly chief executive of the London-based oil and gas multinational BP, to report on the financing of higher education in England. Its basic remit was to devise a funding scheme that would open up more undergraduate degree places without [...]
The Smell of Power
A Contribution to the Critique of the Sniffer Dog
RP 167 Mark Neocleous
On 8 July 2005, the day after the London bombings, the International Association of Chiefs of Police issued its new guidelines on the detection and prevention of suicide bombings. The IACP is the primary organization through which senior police executives across the globe try to coordinate their powers and practices, and it does this through [...]
A tale of two worlds
Apocalypse, 4Chan, WikiLeaks and the silent protocol wars
RP 166 Nicolas Mendoza
There is something eerie about the WikiLeaks logo. It works as a sort of graphic manifesto, an image of dense political content stating a notion of ample consequences…
Alternatives to austerity
The need for a public utility finance system
RP 165 Robin Blackburn
The Great Credit Crunch of 2007–10 was, it is almost universally agreed, brought about by the irresponsibility and greed of bankers. But the huge public deficits needed to prevent a meltdown of the financial system are to be paid for by slashing public spending and shrinking social protection for many decades to come. The welfare [...]
David Cameron’s Tea Party
RP 165 Richard Seymour
While ‘Tea Party’ rebels agitate for the return of ‘Austrian’ principles in the USA, the Conservative Party under David Cameron is actually implementing these principles in the UK. Without prefacing their agenda with the hysterical red-baiting characteristic of the Tea Party, the Tories argue that their spending reductions are not ideologically driven but are necessary [...]
The global capital leviathan
RP 165 William I. Robinson
The money mandarins of global capitalism and their political agents are utilizing the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a [...]
Roar so wildly
Spam, technology and language
RP 164 Finn Brunton
The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I am a machine. I work, and work, and work with- out end; I am busy, and busy, and busy at all time. For what? and for [...]
What’s so great about timeless?
Architecture and the Prince, again
RP 163 Victoria McNeile
Whoever succeeds in redeveloping the Chelsea Barracks site will probably produce a small book to mark its completion. This will include an account of the site’s history, illustrated with maps and engravings, rather furry black-and-white photographs and a selection of press cuttings. There will be timelines charting the schemes produced, the matings and divorces within [...]
Longing for a greener present
Neoliberalism and the eco-city
RP 163 Ross Adams
In recent years, architects have found themselves increasingly commissioned to design entire new cities: a phenomenon that has been accompanied by a commitment to those terms of ‘sustainability’ which now seem inseparable from the urban project itself. While ‘sustainability’ remains a vague concept at best, it nonetheless presents itself with an urgency similar to that [...]
Inside a charging bull
Iceland, one year on
RP 162 Haukur Már Helgason
After Iceland’s three banks collapsed in October 2008 – a bankruptcy bigger than Lehmann Brothers’ in a republic of 300,000 inhabitants – the public overthrew a neoliberal government through mass protest, precipitating a general election. On election day, 25 April 2009, the conservative head of Iceland’s public radio newsroom sighed his relief: ‘Judging from the [...]
Feminism did not fail
RP 161 Lynne Segal
‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized [...]
The myth of preparedness
RP 161 Claudia Aradau
Look at this place! It’s buzzing… [Bomb explosion. People screaming. Chaos] Were you caught off-guard? That’s the problem. Can you imagine life without the places where we congregate? These are convenient places, places where we want to go, are free to go. In airports and stadiums you can monitor access, they are contained. Public spaces [...]
Hey! Can’t you smile!
Women and status in philosophy
RP 160 Babette Babich
Babette Babich proposes that respect for woman philosophers should – like for their male counterparts – extend to a toleration and admiration for them as social misfits.
The Question of Caster Semenya
RP 160 Mandy Merck
Sex and gender issues in the case of intersex runner Caster Semenya
The global movement
Seattle, ten years on
RP 159 Rodrigo Nunes
On the tenth anniversary of the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle, Rodrigo Nunes considers the legacy of the so-called “global movement” and argues it was only ever a global moment.
Rentier capitalism and the Iranian puzzle
RP 159 Dariush M. Doust
Dariush M. Doust considers the relation of the Green Movement to the Iranian Revolution and to rentier capitalism in Iran
Neither theocracy nor secularism
Politics in Iran
RP 158 Ali Alizadeh
On Saturday 13 June this year, hours after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Ministry of the Interior announced his landslide victory as Iran’s president and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the religious head of state, prematurely and unconstitutionally embraced these results, Tehran and several other major cities became the stage for spontaneous, sporadic and widespread protests. Despite the government’s arrest [...]
