radical philosophy

The politics of counting and the scene of rescue

Border deaths are not a new phenomenon. Since the early 2000s, the Mediterranean Sea has been named a ‘maritime cemetery’ by activists [1] and critical migration scholars. However, over the last two years migrant deaths at the borders have gained more and more attention in the media and EU political debate …

The signature of security

‘We are not crystal ball gazers. We are Intelligence Agencies’, noted the former GCHQ director Iain Lobban in a public inquiry on privacy and security by the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament (ISC) in the wake of the Snowden revelations about mass surveillance. [1] Several minutes later, Lobban …

Big data, small freedom?

In 2010, ‘big data’ was described as ‘datasets that could not be captured, managed and processed by general computers within an acceptable scope’. [1] Today’s definitions boil down to three Vs: Variety, Volume and Velocity. Big data deals with mostly unstructured, heterogeneous and non-validated data, whose size is so big that …

Oceanic enemy

6 July 1962, NAVFAC base, Barbados.

A grey building stands at the foot of a stone lighthouse overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Inside, a military serviceman is examining the lines being recorded on an enormous roll of paper by the stylus of a sort of gigantic electrocardiogram. We are in one of the secret bases of …

Food politics in the USA

Nutrition in food is, today, a function of profitability: junk food and processed foods are more profitable than organics grown locally; meat is not only more energy intensive, but is more profitable (at least for those who package and market it). People’s diets are, in other words, determined not simply by what is grown or …

Old alliances, new struggles

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a bilateral agreement between the European Union and the United States of America aimed at the liberalization and regulation of trade in goods and services. If adopted, it will supplant the EU, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the deal between China and the Association …

Russell Brand, Lady T, Pisher Bob and Preacher John

Russell Brand’s new book Revolution * is an impressive contribution to political philosophy, a field which during the past thirty years or so has not been overly populated with interesting work. Brand’s argument can be summarized in ten steps:

Our lives are to a large extent given structure by a set of economic practices and …

Green economics versus growth economics

What would be a radical economics today? It would have two components. First, it must understand economics as necessarily political economy; as a continuous human, social creation subject to political manipulation and to new positive political vision and action. Second, it must be a Green ecological economics. That is, it must have absorbed the …

Alternative economics

Economics is in crisis. The profession is under attack from the media, employers and the general public. The economists we are producing are not performing the tasks society demands from them. [1 ]

The recent global crisis not only led to a questioning of mainstream macroeconomic theories and their relevance …

Bruno Latour’s anthropology of the moderns

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns – published with the motto: si scires donum Dei (for those who do not know the Holy Scripture, this is John 4.10: ‘if you knew God’s gift’) – is said to be the result of Bruno Latour’s research over the last twenty-five years. [1] The book …

Legal terror and the police dog

In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in 2001 an off-duty police officer spotted Antonio Chatman, who was known by this officer as having a warrant for a misdemeanour. Soon other officers, including a K-9 unit, arrived on the scene. Chatman attempted to flee but a police dog pursued and apprehended him, which is to say the trained dog …