Now the party’s over

Reivew of Paul Clements, The Creative Underground
Paul Clements, The Creative Underground: Art, Politics and Everyday Life (New York and London: Routledge, 2017). 232 pp., £110.00 hb., 978 1 13888 686 5 As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the creative process is an event or ‘festival’ which demands a break with linear time, a de-temporalisation of modernity; a […]

189 Reviews

REViEWS Heaven knows I’m miserable now Pier Paolo Pasolini, St Paul: A Screenplay, translated and introduced by Elizabeth A. Castelli, with a Foreword by Alain Badiou and an Afterword by Ward Blanton, Verso, London and New York, 2014. 240 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78168 288 3. There are many reasons to welcome this translation […]

67 Reviews

Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice Bob Brecher Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy David Macey Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Alan Duiant Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English […]

66 Editorial

EDITORIAL – . =.. .:’1._”it!!!! • =:-= -=111 .,-. · ~-1-. 1 …. – -= – -:. I — ..-. 1=1 .– 11 I . -• • -~-EE A letter recently leaked to The Observer (10.10.93) revealed that government scientists are privately extremely concerned about the problem of long-term nuclear waste storage. Behind the facade […]

Response to Sayers

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57 Editorial

EDITORIAL The recent death of Louis Althusser revived the sharp but usually unproductive exchanges over the value and nature of his intellectual legacy. Andrew Collier’s piece should enliven the controversy. He situates his ideas about the way the social and natural environment provides an extension of individual human agency within an Althusserian framework. His stance […]

48 Reviews

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

43 Reviews

REVIEWS Reconstructing Structural Marxism Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism; Althusser and his Influence, Macmillan, London, 1984, 259pp lI8.00 hc, 1.6.95 pb Benton’s book has many facets: it is an introductory text, a re-evaluation and reconstruction of Structural Marxism, an argument for theoretical progress lying through the synthesis of Structural Marxism with […]

42 Editorial

EDITORIAL l 1 i 1 J j j This issue of RP focusses on social theory and contains three analyses of issues which are central to different areas of debate on the left. Istvan Meszaros presents a new and important perspective on the prospects for a transition to social.ism. Couched not in terms of the […]

Women’s Philosophy Network; Peace Research Forum; Royal Institute Lectures; Radical Philosophy Conference

NEWS Women’s Philosophy Network Moves are underway to set up a network for women phllosophers in the UK to promote feminist phllosophy. The main functions of the network wlll be: the provision of contact lists of women philosophers and their special interests the provision of speakers’ lists for debates, conferences, etc. the setting up of […]

38 Reviews

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

36 Reviews

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

33 Reviews

REVIEWS Marxism and the Problem of Needs Kate Soper, On Human Needs, Harvester, 1981, £18.95 h.c. It is a commonplace of socialist politics that socialism must be a society ‘based on need, not on profit’. And in that famous aphorism, Marx’s communism was to be one which inscribed on its banner, ‘From each according to […]

31 Reviews

REVIEWS Philosophies of African Liberation Journal of African Marxists, Issue No.l, November 1981, Zed Press, London, twice yearly, Sub: £2. This ·new and attractive journal aims to provide a forum for progressive African intellectuals, and all those committed to African liberation, to discuss the struggle against neocolonialism and racism. The allAfrican editorial board, supported by […]

Ideology is everyday; Fractured community

Letters Ideology is everydayJohn Kraniauskasʼs ʻGlobalization is Ordinaryʼ (RP 90), on cultural studies and the recent Media, Culture and Identity series (OU course D318), provides a welcome synopsis of the trajectory of cultural studies, particularly in its emphasis on the problematic nature of a critical idea of culture. It is, however, difficult to understand why […]

Compulsory downshifting

News Compulsory downshiftingThe landmark case of the Open University v. its part-time staff is grinding its way through the courts towards likely victory for the associate staff on pro-rata fulltime employment benefits. Whilst this highlights a particularly bad case of handme-down employment conditions in the HE sector (one recent estimate puts pay at £8.00 per […]

Exchange on ‘Fixing meaning’: Where does meaning get its fix? A response to Rachel Malik’s ‘Fixing meaning’ & Reply

Letter Where does meaning get its fix? A response to Rachel Malik’s ‘Fixing meaning’ The questions of pragmatic and intertextual accounts of communication raised in Malikʼs ʻFixing meaningʼ (RP 124) are not answered by suggesting a kind of complementarity between them or their complexification via the ʻhorizon of publishingʼ. This is arguably because, as the […]

130 Reviews

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life John Kraniauskas Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice Françoise Vergès Alessandra […]

The dispute at LMU

News The dispute at LMU The current unprecedented polarization between lecturers and executive management at London Metropolitan University (LMU) is due to a bullying management style that culminated in the imposition of a new employment contract that is probably the worst in the HE sector. Recent action has included a weeklong strike in May, timed […]