radical philosophy

A is for apocalypse

David J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame , Zero Books, Winchester and Washington DC, 2013. 319 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 78099 578 6.

Amidst the recent flood of lachrymose reports on the neoliberal assault upon education, this book stands out for its unflinching survey of the extent of the …

Corporate open source

I began to worry about open source when the corporate world stopped worrying and learned to love open source. For me the turning point was a drinks party in Paris in 2003, thrown by the wife of an American advertising executive temporarily based in the city. First, a bit of context for the party and …

Extraction, logistics, finance

Now that the global crisis of capitalism is entering its fifth year, it is possible to discern the contours of its unfolding. No New Deal or world war is emerging to save the day. The ritual purification of austerity has not cleansed the global sewer of finance despite the harsh and unequal punishments it has …

Resisting Resilience

I’m 24, in a horrible relationship, feeling stuck and alone. I met my boyfriend three years ago while I was struggling to find work after graduating. He was not only charismatic, ambitious and gorgeous, but supportive, too. I became infatuated. By the time I found out about his angry rages and subtle bullying, I had …

Euro-Keynesianism?

Financial collapse is haunting Europe. The most immediate fear is that a small European state might default on its government debt, but several large European banks might go bust because of a deflated real-estate bubble in Southern Europe. Brutal austerity policies have been imposed on countries that are already in recession, but in …

Technoreformism

Bernard Stiegler, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, trans. Daniel Ross, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 200 pp., £55.00 hb., £16.99 pb., 978 0 74564 809 5 hb., 978 0 74564 810 1 pb.

Bernard Stiegler’s work addresses the relationship between philosophy, technology and culture. This combination has proved popular, and has been furthered by Stiegler’s …

Inside the factory, and out

Fredric Jameson, Representing ‘Capital’: A Reading of Volume One, Verso, London and New York, 2011. 158pp., £14.99 hb., 978 1 84467 454 1.

John Kraniauskas

Fredric Jameson’s latest book, published hot on the heels of a monograph on Hegel’s Phenomenology (The Hegel Variations, 2010) and a large collection of essays on the dialectic …

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 …

Robinson in Ruins

Robinson in Ruins (2010) is the third of Patrick Keiller’s fictionalized documentaries featuring the investigations and struggles of his character, the ‘wandering, cracked scholar’ and political visionary, Robinson.1 The first in the trilogy, London, was released in 1994, and the second, Robinson in Space, in 1997. Together they represent, aesthetically and politically, some of the most enlivening …

The global capital leviathan

The money mandarins of global capitalism and their political agents are utilizing the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are …

Who needs postcoloniality?

In Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune on British colonialism in India and the events leading to the Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the structure of archaic societies and lay the …

Capitalist Epics

In our recent highlight from RP163, David Cunningham examines the relationship between Lukács’ ‘The Theory of the Novel’ and his later Marxist works, and its asks how we are to read this work today.

The myth of preparedness

Look at this place! It’s buzzing… [Bomb explosion. People screaming. Chaos] Were you caught off-guard? That’s the problem. Can you imagine life without the places where we congregate? These are convenient places, places where we want to go, are free to go. In airports and stadiums you can monitor access, they are contained. Public spaces …

A sudden topicality

Marx, Nietzsche and the politics of crisis

Marxism and war

War for Marxism is not exactly a concept, but it is certainly a problem.* While Marxism could not invent a concept of war, it could re-create it, so to speak – that is, introduce the question of war into its own problematic, and produce a Marxist critiqueof war, or a critical theory of warfare, war …

Rentier capitalism and the Iranian puzzle

Dariush M. Doust considers the relation of the Green Movement to the Iranian Revolution and to rentier capitalism in Iran

Sovereign democracy

Sovereign democracy and Russian capitalism

Down to earth

As part of RP 159’s dossier on ‘The Postcommunist Condition’, Svetlana Stephenson and Elena Danilova consider The Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy in relation to the changes within Russia since the start of market transition.

Towards a critical theory of postcommunism

As part of RP 159’s dossier on ‘The Postcommunist Condition’, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu attempts to move beyond anticommunism in Romania by developing a critical theory of postcommunism.

Children of postcommunism

Transitology and the infantilization of postcommunist societies (part of RP 159’s dossier on ‘The Postcommunist Condition’).