Yesterday morning acclaimed theorist David Harvey was featured as a guest on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, holding court on the commons, urban democracy and what he means when, in his new book Rebel Cities, he asserts that we must create a politics around the principle of just cities.
Listen to the interview by clicking this link.
One of the last questions Professor Harvey answered was whether war is inevitable--part of Brian Lehrer's ongoing "End of War" series. Click here to listen to his thoughtful response.
... and visit the Brian Lehrer Show to listen to the segment in full.
In New York and London, gentrification transforms previously low-income neighborhoods into playgrounds for the rich, while foreclosures have pushed scores of Americans out of their own homes. Land grabs for urban spaces inhabited by the poor and disenfranchised worldwide--from the favelas of Rio to the slums of Mumbai--further entrench the vast divide between the holders of capital and the dispossessed.
David Harvey's new book Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution explores the future of this radically unstable world. Unveiling a vision of the city as a social, political and liveable commons, Harvey pinpoints cities as the focus for anti-capitalist resistance, arguing that the definition of the right to the city is itself an object of struggle--and that this struggle must proceed in tandem with concrete efforts to materialize it.
In a two-part installment, Guernica Magazine has excerpted "Things" from José Saramago's short story collection, The Lives of Things. To be published on April 25 to coincide with Portugal's Carnation Revolution, The Lives of Things comprises Saramago's sole collection of short fiction and offers a look at his early experimentations with the themes of social decay, alienation, and political repression that would become hallmarks of his celebrated novels.
Visit Guernica to read "Things" in full.
In a very revealing—and apparently boozy—interview with Full Stop, Simon Critchley recently opened up on a wide range of topics, discussing at length everything from love and death to faith and politics, and touching on how recent turns in his life set his political and philosophical worldview in a new direction. The discussion usefully clarifies many of the important theoretical moves he makes in his new book The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology and provides an immediately salient political context—especially in light of the Occupy movements—in which to understand his reflections on the relation between love, representation, democracy and belief.
For instance, he says:
Faith is a subjective commitment to something that places a demand on you, that places a call on you. There are people that will believe that the source of that call is a divinity; there are people that will believe that the source of that call isn't. It's not for me to decide one way or the other - the experience of faith is the same. If I understand faith as a faith in the existence of a deity, I still can't make that leap - and then philosophy is atheism. But if faith is understood as, let's say, an ethical disposition of the self as a kind of commitment that the self makes, then I think faith makes sense to me. So the word "faith" can be used in very different ways. But it's a question that I do ask myself and perhaps should ask myself on a deeper level, I think. One of the formulations I come up with in The Faith of the Faithless is that politics is association without representation. It's a form of being together that doesn't necessarily require the forms of voting, representative assemblies, parliaments, houses of congress and all the rest. So politics is really at its essence a form of direct democracy. The Occupy Movement was playing that out, I think, in a very incredible way.
Visit Full Stop to read the interview in full.
Frank Bardacke was awarded the Hillman Prize in Book Journalism for his epic book Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, which was published by Verso Books in 2011 to rave reviews.
The Sidney Hillman Foundation's Hillman Prizes for Excellence in Reporting in Service of the Common Good are given to journalists whose work identifies important social and economic issues and helps bring about change for the better.
This year, the Foundation recognized stories about the struggles of families during the recession, fairness in immigration policy, flaws in education reform, contract workers on military bases, farm workers and battered women in prison.
The Hillman Foundation will present its distinguished annual journalism prizes, awarded every year since 1950, at a ceremony and reception at The Times Center in Manhattan on May 1st.
For a full list of this year's winners, visit Hillman's site.