Commentary Archive
Towards 120 billion
Dietary change and animal livesby Tony Weis / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Commentary
Across much of the world there is a growing distance, both physically and cognitively, between people and the animals they consume; at the same time the scale of this consumption marches steadily upwards. Put simply, it is increasingly difficult for people to know much about where and how the animals they consume actually live. So …
‘The money follows the mum’
Maternal power as consumer powerby Victoria Browne / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Commentary
In her 1984 article ‘Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation’, Iris Marion Young contended that ‘pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself’ within patriarchal Western institutions of modern medicine. ‘It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; …
The impossibility of precarity
by Francesco Di Bernardo / RP 198 (Jul/Aug 2016) / CommentaryAs everyone knows, the implementation of neoliberal labour policies in Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and Japan, together with the so-called structural adjustments initiated in the 1980s, led to the proliferation of temporary, part-time and supposedly self-employment job contracts. Many observers have sought to interpret this phenomenon through recourse to the concept of precarity. While …
Anti-Genderismus and right‑wing hegemony
by Eva von Redecker / RP 198 (Jul/Aug 2016) / CommentaryAfter incidents of pickpocketing and sexual harassment were reported to have taken place at the New Year’s Eve festivities in Cologne and Hamburg, and been associated with perpetrators of North African descent, public discourse in Germany turned blatantly racist. [1] This seemed to stand in stark contrast to the relatively broad …
Europe’s ‘Hungarian solution’
by Prem Kumar Rajaram / RP 197 (May/June 2016) / CommentaryIn a speech at a European Union heads-of-state summit on migration in February 2016, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, declared that the ‘Hungarian solution’ to the migration ‘crisis’ facing Europe had now become ‘common sense’, adopted by other European countries after a summer in which Hungary’s ‘illiberal’ treatment of migrants had been pilloried.
A neo-Horthyist restoration
by Tamás Krausz / RP 197 (May/June 2016) / CommentarySince winning the Hungarian general elections in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, Viktor Orbán’s nationalist-populist party Fidesz has introduced an authoritarian administration that is reminiscent of Hungary’s interwar regime, when Miklós Horthy ruled as an ally of Hitler. When state socialism collapsed in 1989, liberal ideologists propagated the idea that an age of Western-style democracy …
Why I write such excellent songs
David Bowie, 1947–2016by Keith Ansell-Pearson / RP 196 (Mar/Apr 2016) / Commentary
As the limousine cruises its way through an arid Californian landscape, a pale and thin David Bowie sits in the back and humorously reflects that he never wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll star, ‘honest guv, I wasn’t even there’. This is a 27-year-old Bowie talking to Alan Yentob in 1974 and screened as the BBC …
Politicizing powerlessness
by Mathieu Bonzom / RP 195 (Jan/Feb 2016) / CommentaryHow might we intervene in the new situation created by the 13 November attacks in Paris and the various reactions they have provoked? Instead of trying to figure out what the government should be doing, social movements should determine what they can do and what we can do ourselves.
One of the most common reactions …
An apology for French republicanism
by Olivier Tonneau / RP 195 (Jan/Feb 2016) / CommentaryWhen the attacks of 13 November in Paris are used by the French government to criminalize activists and protesters, when fear is pushing its population deeper into the arms of the Front National, and when the radical Left has almost disappeared from the political landscape, can one retain any hope that the country will find …
‘Become a permanent migrant to the UK!’
by Claudia Aradau / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / CommentarySince 2005, when citizenship tests were effectively introduced in the UK, the official guidance book Life in the United Kingdom has been a veritable battleground over identity, history and knowledge. ‘Could you pass a citizenship test? ‘Most young people can’t’, the media reiterate with each new edition. [1] Knowledge and ignorance …
Submarine state
On secrets and leaksby Daniel Nemenyi / RP 193 (Sept/Oct 2015) / Commentary
It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within… These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.
The politics of counting and the scene of rescue
Border deaths in the Mediterraneanby Martina Tazzioli / RP 192 (July/Aug 2015) / Commentary
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
Big data, anticipation, surveillanceby Claudia Aradau / RP 191 (May/Jun 2015) / Commentary, Data & Surveillance
‘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?
Informational surveillance and the politicalby Burkhardt Wolf / RP 191 (May/Jun 2015) / Commentary, Data & Surveillance
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
A brief philosophical history of the NSAby Gregoire Chamayou / RP 191 (May/Jun 2015) / Commentary, Data & Surveillance
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 …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20160828081310im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Food politics in the USA
by Allan Stoekl / RP 190 (Mar/Apr 2015) / CommentaryNutrition 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 Partnershipby Maïa Pal / RP 190 (Mar/Apr 2015) / Commentary
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
by Raymond Geuss / RP 190 (Mar/Apr 2015) / CommentaryRussell 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
The case of Thomas Pikettyby Rupert Read / RP 189 (Jan/Feb 2015) / Commentary
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
A new student movementby Engelbert Stockhammer and Devrim Yilmaz / RP 189 (Jan/Feb 2015) / Commentary
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 …