RSS Feed

Commentary Archive

Towards 120 billion

Dietary change and animal lives
by / 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 power
by / 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 / RP 198 (Jul/Aug 2016) / Commentary

As 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 / RP 198 (Jul/Aug 2016) / Commentary

After 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 / RP 197 (May/June 2016) / Commentary

In 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 / RP 197 (May/June 2016) / Commentary

Since 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, 1947–2016
by / 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 / RP 195 (Jan/Feb 2016) / Commentary

How 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 / RP 195 (Jan/Feb 2016) / Commentary

When 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 / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / Commentary

Since 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 leaks
by / 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.

Yanis Varoufakis, description of the Eurozone

The politics of counting and the scene of rescue

Border deaths in the Mediterranean
by / 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, surveillance
by / 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 political
by / 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 NSA
by / 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 …


Food politics in the USA

by / RP 190 (Mar/Apr 2015) / Commentary

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
by / 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 / RP 190 (Mar/Apr 2015) / Commentary

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

The case of Thomas Piketty
by / 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 movement
by and / 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 …