In response to the current COVID-19 crisis the UK Biobank, that contains half a million people’s anonymised health and genetic information, may be used to answer questions about coronavirus. Becca Muir asks, are the biopolitics of these databases being ignored?
Laleh Khalili, author of Sinews of War and Trade, reports on the over 100,000 sailors who are quarantined on their ships, unable to return home or access adequate medical care.
Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, has continuously underplayed the coronavirus crisis, calling it nothing but 'sniffles' but as the death rises, Matheus Lock explains how and why the pandemic reveals the flaws within his leadership that may prove fatal.
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It is with great sadness that we have heard of the death of George Shriver. Peter Hudis, general editor of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg remembers a friend and a comrade.
Hal Foster on Alexander Kluge, emails from friends, and the problem with pandemic diaries.
Today, the idea of socialism is peculiarly alive, especially among young people in the United States, in a way it has not been for decades. Socialists today must build their own, unaffiliated version of how to achieve a more just world, from the bottom up. It is my hope that Romance of American Communism, telling the story of how it was done some sixty or seventy years ago, can act as a guide to those similarly stirred today.
When shared between members of a civic-minded community, trust is the one thing that can keep state power in check — unless, of course, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear and, in the silence that follows, grow apart from one another.
It is not surprising that after 13 years of New Labour most of the party’s senior officials were now Blairites. What is most striking about their behaviour is how entitled they felt to act against the wishes of a dramatically expanded membership.
How has our experience of time under the COVID-19 lockdown changed? Fernando Sdrigotti explores the temptations to do nothing to this period of slowed-down experience, or to find an alternative vital measure of living in the moment.
Philip Mirowski on why the Covid-19 pandemic is more opportunity than threat to neoliberalism, with Alex Doherty on the Politics Theory Other podcast.
On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book Capital and Ideology, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon's opening speech, with minimal revisions. Translated by David Fernbach