What is living and what is dead in Swedish social democracy?

...ion to a piecemeal social engineering conception. As a result of this, the crisis of the 1970s was not, as in the trade unions, interpreted as a crisis of capitalism, but as a falsification of Keynesian ideas, which verified the ʻnull hypothesisʼ of monetarism. This shift in the epistemic form of economic policy discourse, as opposed to content, corresponds to the period in which the Swedish social democrats established themselves as the managerial...

The African intellectual: Hountondji and after

...African Universities Face a Looming Shortage of PhDs’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 May 2008; also Silvia Federici, ‘The Recolonization of African Education’, p. 19. 72. ^ Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p. 134. 73. ^ Ibid., p. 134. 74. ^ Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, University of California Press, Berkeley CA, 2002, p. 15. 75. ^ Ibid., p. 128. 76....

Robinson in Ruins: New materialism and the archaeological imagination

...y be from above rather than from below. Indeed, this is precisely what the crisis of 2008 seemed to bring – capitalism seeking shelter from its own systemic havoc. Despite this, and, as the narrator puts it, after the state interventions in the fall of that year in support of the banking system, it was possible to ‘imagine for a moment that this was no ordinary crisis, that some larger historical shift was occurring’. This, it transpires, is a sha...

On the origins of Marx’s general intellect

...ng capital). 63 The most visionary passages of the Grundrisse refer to the crisis of capitalism due to the crisis of the centrality of labour, and therefore of the labour theory of value, which is to say, due to the fact that ‘direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production … compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences … and to the general productive force arising from so...

The future of fascism

...abilityʼ of its outcome. If, as he acknowledges, fascism ʻthrived upon the crisis of liberalismʼ (which, after all, was precipitated by capitalism), he moves quickly to reject any theory of crises that might explain the revival of the figure of fascism – such as the one proposed by Polanyi. One need not be a Marxist, he avers, to see the crisis of the liberal state as a reflection of ʻa stressful transition to industrializationʼ. But the spectacle o...

Global homocapitalism

..., no. 2, 2014, pp. 175–81. 48. ^ Miranda K. Hassett, Anglican Communion in Crisis: How Episcopal Dissidents and Their African Al ies Are Reshaping Anglicanism, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2007. 49. ^ See, for example, the extremely revealing account of this moment offered in the authorized biography of the then Archbishop of Uganda, Livingstone Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo, in Hamlet Kabushenga Mbabazi, Leadership Under Pressure, African Christi...

Lost minds: Sedgwick, Laing and the politics of mental illness

...includes articles by inmates, guards, therapists, stewards, chaplains and educational workers, Sedgwick declares ‘the purpose of education in the institution must be to combat the absorption of the inmate into prison routines.’ [56] Yet ultimately he acknowledged that education in the institution was part of those routines and no amount of handicraft lessons or amateur dramatics would tear down the prison walls. Working at Grendon Underwood made...

Alternative economics: A new student movement

...s, Panics and Crashes: An Introduction to Alternative Theories of Economic Crisis’, which covered heterodox crisis theories and the history of financial crises. In the last year, the group also organized numerous public lectures delivered by prominent post-Keynesian, Marxist, Institutionalist, Austrian, feminist and ecological economists. Further, PCES released a comprehensive report on the economics curriculum at Manchester in May 2014, identifyi...

The Cuts at NELP, Conference Against Biological Reductionism

...for these cuts, beyond an assumed financial necessity, that the financial crisis of higher education is being used as a cover for a radical restructuring which has quite other motivations. The general climate of uncertainty, division, and pessimism among students and staff is the condition of possibility for this restructuring to be imposed with minimal resistance from below. Fortunately, the strategy seems not 39 to be working at NELP! As the un...

Ideological Commitments in the Philosophy of Science: With a Comment on Ravetz by Edgley

...he Labour Party (Mike Rustin); operate as a unit of socialist research and education (Hilary Wainwright); serve as a forum for trade union activists (Robin Blackburn). . Organisationally, three types of proposal seemed to be coming from members, suggested Sarah Benton; (a) the research/education function and style of grouping; (b) an emphasis on local groups; (c) centrally co-ordinated local discussion groups. It was decided to establish a working...

Of course… however

...(highlighted in detail in Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and Low-Wage Nation), to the history of the student movement, and to international changes in higher education in insightful essays by Natalie Fenton, John Rees and Marion von Osten. The voices raised here are also historically suspended, poised between an enthusiasm for the student movement that took to the streets in November 2010, disappointment over the Common...

The Chilean winter

...t listened to the students and perpetually challenges their claim for free education for all, replacing it with the empty notion of a ‘better quality’ education for all. The notion of quality operates in the government’s discourse in very much the same way as the notion of ‘excellence’ does in what Bill Reading calls the ‘University in Ruins’, as an ideological device that means more or less whatever you want it to mean, if not nothing at all.[11]...

István Mészéros: Marxism Today

...case now. That’s why we are in the situation that the health service is in crisis, the education system is in crisis, the welfare state as a whole is in crisis. So the historical end of this process reopens the question: if the working class cannot obtain defensive gains any longer, through what strategies can it transform society? RP: What I had in mind is more the extra-parliamentary parties like Lenin’s Bolsheviks or the Chinese Communist Party...

Starting again from Marx

...ation stays unchanged, it is within it that any rupture is determined. The crisis of 2007, which is unending, can be interpreted starting from these premises. The crisis stems from a need to keep order by multiplying money (subprimes, with the completely horrendous mechanism to which they gave rise, served the purpose of a banking system in the process of seizing global command to pay for the social reproduction of a riotous labour power). We need...

Uncaptured desires: What affirms our political imaginaries?

...ives serving primary producer cooperatives: social insurance, training and education, research and development. 39 Thus, Mondragon supported new entrepreneurial ideas in society if compatible with cooperative principles; it redistributed surplus to provide care, education, health for its members and expected them to reconcile individual interest with the broader social order. Even though the cooperative went through several challenges after its in...

Defund culture

...ts, The Humanities in Modern Britain: Challenges and Opportunities, Higher Education Policy Institute, Report 141, 2021, https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-Humanities-in-Modern-Britain-Challenges-and-Opportunities.pdf. ^ Bobby Duffy, co-author of ‘Culture Wars’ in the UK, quoted in John Morgan, ‘UK Public “Don’t See Universities As A Front Line In Culture Wars”’, Times Higher Education, 5 August 2021. ^ UCU, ‘UCU Condemns ’Bigge...
Outline of gun filled with machines early twentieth-century machines on a read background with the text Weapons of Mass Creation below

The hungry of the earth

...shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the attempts to deal with the current crisis should have been so transparently directed at furthering the dispossession of peasants. Before the food crisis had begun to bite, the World Bank’s 2007 World Development Report on Agriculture had already begun to pave the way. To take one among many ways that the Bank’s approach to agriculture militates against the poor, the Bank’s approach to land reform is tilted t...

The Cards of Confusion: Reflections on Historical Communism and the 'End of History'

...w social movements’ as a contestant of the new order is their own manifest crisis (invariably neglected by those who harp on the crisis of the labour movement) and eclipse by some very old social movements: the furies of communalism, fundamentalism, nationalism, etc., their militantly particularist dystopias stamped with the mark of exclusion. And yet, if the prominence of regressive social movements on the current world scene contributes to the d...

A Marxist heresy?: Accelerationism and its discontents

Dossier: Future Stasis

...iterates what has become a thoroughly uncontroversial understanding of the crisis of the Left as a crisis in historical temporality more generally, of which the loss of a historical future appears as the main source of a political paralysis in the present. Appropriately abstracted, the task becomes simply ‘the recovery of the future as such’ (AR, 351). Discourses of modernity Symptomatically, what might be most interesting about accelerationism, p...

Bodies in space: On the ends of vulnerability

...cially and historically differentiated terms. The escalating inequities of crisis neoliberalism are sketched in, as well as specific episodes of contemporary protest and the gamut of state repression in which they can be located. In all these iterations, the visibility of living bodies to one another, to mediated witnesses and the state – a visibility which is a public articulation of the commonality of precarity, of exposure, of need – is the bed...

Justice and the Gulf War

...eter Gowan has argued, was of little relevance to the actual course of the crisis and the motivations of nearly all of its participants. What concerned the alliance during the crisis was not its domestic character, but the military power, and its potential as a regional power. The proportionality of means and ends A very important consideration within the framework of Just War theory is that of proportionality. The norms of Just War theory prescri...