radical philosophy

Whose future?

This year’s Venice Biennale, which opened to the public on 9 May, had been widely anticipated since its curator, Okwui Enwezor, announced his intention to turn the event into a forum for the study and reconsideration of the three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Such an undertaking promised to highlight the inherent contradictions of the biennial …

Rusticating Marx

In March the Philosophy Faculty at Cambridge removed a course on Marxism from its syllabus. This was in spite of significant opposition, including two student-led petitions. Along with another course on Power this constituted the entire coverage of non-liberal political philosophy, leaving coverage of questions about human society dominated by the liberal tradition.

Autonomy for a ‘new world’?

Blooming in the shadow of an austerity-era EU cultural policy dominated by ‘measurable outcomes’ that has tasked the cultural field with a plethora of social work from civic engagement, care work and alleviating unemployment to any number of regeneration-based solutions, a number of recent ‘critical’ art practices have come to articulate a politics …

Cultural Commons

The impact of the economic crisis on the cultural scene in Italy has laid bare the complex question of arts funding, as insufficient public and private models meet – and at points clash with – a third alternative for cultural management: the ‘commons’ or bene comune (‘common good’).

The institutional inspiration for this last option …

An experiment in free, co-operative higher education

The Social Science Centre (SSC) organizes free higher education in Lincoln and is run by its members. The SSC is a co-operative and was formally constituted in May 2011 with help from the local Co-operative Development Agency. There is no fee for learning or teaching, but most members voluntarily contribute to the Centre either …

University finances

On 11 July, David Willetts, minister for universities and science, confirmed a new ‘operating framework’ for higher education in England. This pulled together the results of various consultations and the work done by the ‘Regulatory Partnership Group’ to set out regulatory arrangements through to 2015.1 A week earlier, Willetts had written to the Higher Education …

Looting the university

The recent campaign at the University of Sussex against the outsourcing of 235 non-academic jobs has confronted certain organizational and ideological limitations of the struggles in higher education so far. It constitutes an escalation of the anti-privatization movement in the UK. Porters, security, catering, maintenance, and other non-academic staff at the university face …

The Right To Protest

As Quebec erupts over plans to increase tuition fees by the equivalent of £200, and twelve people (including Professor Joshua Clover) who protested against a campus bank at University of California–Davis begin a trial that could see them imprisoned for eleven years and fined $1 million each, what of the scores of people …

Occupy New York

Evaluation of a movement is never an easy task. Emphatically not so, when it is ongoing and moving in confrontation with power, going through ups and downs, gains and losses. Historically there are many examples in which the loss of one achievement or a digression led to a gain or advancement elsewhere. Development …

Occupy Oakland

We live in a time when tents have become the singular weapon of the people which power cannot tolerate, and against which it does not know how to defend itself. The bureaucrats are in shambles; the ‘city’ and its ‘police’ are at each other’s throats; middling reformists have no idea where to position …

#spanishrevolution

You might have read this May that there were protests in Spain. This is hardly earth-shattering news. Social unrest in the countries so endearingly named the PIGS has been rife since the European Union (EU) departed from its early policy of public spending its way out of the crisis, to offer them a …

Against Education Cuts

Reports from the protests by those campaigning against the cuts to educations, including Nina Power on the centrality of women.

Student control in Croatia

Toni Prug reports on the student occupations of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 2009.

Universities in crisis

Education is not for $A£€

Student protests in Germany

In November and December 2009 – responding to the signal from Vienna, where the University’s main lecture has was occupied – buildings, lecture theatres and seminar rooms in fifty West German colleages were occupied…

Alex Demirovi

Violence and the University Sanctuary law in Greece

Shortly before …

Faint signal

How should we take the inclusion of the word “communism” in the Communiqué from an Absent Future, the main theoretical text of the recent student protests at the University of California?

A day in the life of Ivan Ergich

157 News

University occupations over Gaza

154 News

Walking into walls: Academic freedom, the Israeli Left and the occupation within