radical philosophy

Towards 120 billion

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’

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

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

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’

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

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

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

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

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!’

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

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