Commentary archive

Universities Who let the dogs out? The privatization of higher education Andrew mcgettigan 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 […]

Commentary The poetry and prose of the Russian elections 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 […]

Comment Pirate Radical Philosophy 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 […]

Commentary Class warfare in the USA Anti-unionism and the legislative agenda of the 1% 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 […]

Commentary occupy! Net, square, everywhere? 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 emergence of the antior alter-globalization movement coincided with growing access to the Internet, open source software and creative commons production. The digital […]

these struggles, which must rather be constructed as a project of political articulation. This is the task of communist organization. The important radical formations of the future will be those that bring to this old task a new fusion of networked and terrestrial connection to actualize the aspiration emblazoned on the banner carried at the […]

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 […]

3 Thanks to Anustup Basu for his generous help in the preparation of this article. See, in particular, Carlos Ruiz, De la república al mercado. Ideas educacionales y políticas en Chile, LOM Ediciones, Santiago, 2010. 4. ^ José Joaquín Brunner, Hernán Courard and Cristián Cox, Estado, mercado y conocimientos: políticas y resultados de la educación […]

Commentary The valuation of nature The Natural Choice White Paper 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 […]

Commentary The manhunt doctrine 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 […]

Universities Devolving public universities Lessons from America 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 […]

Euphemism, the university and disobedience 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 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 […]

COMMENTARY Globalization? Simon Bromley , Forecast: global gales ahead.’ Thus were BBC Radio 4 listeners warned by Paul Kennedy of coming storms in the world economy. Their size and vigour, he predicted, would endanger the prosperity, the social contracts, and possibly even the political democracy of the advanced capitalist world. And Kennedy is not alone […]

( COMMENTARY Players Public service broadcasting: politics and policy Mandy Merck The media is an industry unlike any other. It informs, influences and engenders public debate. Debate and discussion over the airwaves has become a central feature of our culture and way of life. In an advanced democracy such as ours, it is important that […]

COMMENTARY Bertrand Russell’s brainchild Analytical philosophy: its conception and birth Ray Monk ‘Just arrived from Germany, a Fine Consignment of Assorted Weltanschauungen.’ s o ran an announcement on the back of a spoof edition of Mind edited by F.C.S. Schiller in 1901. Below it was a message from a satisfied customer: ‘Your latest “Immoralist” Weltanschauung […]

COMMENTARY Scarlet and black The Italian revisionist controversy Tobias Abse T he consequences of the gradual loss of a collective historical memory in those parts of the European continent most closely integrated into the circuits of global capital and most subject to cultural Americanization grow increasingly threatening. As those of us opposed to postmodernism have […]

COMMENTARY ‘Woman’ as theatre United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing 1995 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak T he United Nations is based on the unacknowledged assumption that ‘the rest of the world’ is unable to govern itself. In fact, of course, no state is able to govern itself, in different ways. And, in the current conjuncture, the […]

COMMENTARY Red alert in cyberspace! Paul Virilio One of the major problems now facing political as well as military strategists is the phenomenon of immediacy, of instantaneity. For ‘real time’ now takes precedence over real space, now dominates the planet. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over space is an accomplished fact, and it […]

COMMENTARY Transnational dialogue in times of war The peace movement in ex-Yugoslavia Nikolai Jetts F aced with the prospect of continuing war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the West is still fumbling for an adequate response. The choices on offer seem to be scant: withdrawal or more active intervention. It is scarcely surprising that Western pleas […]

COMMENTARY Clause 4 Ted Benton , C o m e on lads – we all prefer nice things to nasty’: this desperate moral appeal, delivered above the chaotic mania of classroom rebellion, was the habitual resort of an old schoolmaster of mine. For those of us close enough to hear, it evoked peals of derisive […]