In these videos, Frances Ryan explores the devastating reality of austerity on disability benefits – providing a damning indictment of a safety net gone wrong. She is the author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People
A special issue exploring the tensions of the global conjuncture across three domains: the dynamics of world capitalism, the clash of forces in the political arena, the multifarious production of meaning in the realm of culture.
Response from the left to the government's recent Augar Review of higher education has so far focused on whether it is deliverable, not whether it is desirable. In this article, Oliver Eagleton argues that the left must reject the Report's proposals in full, and replace them with a radical, de-marketised alternative.
Alexander Gallas on the debates between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop on the nature of Thatcherite hegemony, and the way in which the New Labour era can be seen as a consolidation of Thatcherite neoliberalism, with Alex Doherty on the Politics Theory Other podcast.
HBO's new miniseries Chernobyl, a gloomy and lyrical historical drama that tells the story of the catastrophic explosion of a nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine in 1986, has taken the unusual decision to cast a nearly all British cast of actors. Why does Stalinism seem so plausible in a British accent, and what does that say about the parallels between contemporary Britain and the USSR?
Last month, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a prototype of its Starlink satellite. With them, Musk hopes to create the world's first global Internet service. But, should space be merely a new arena for the dominance of global mega-corporations? And could we repurpose this new infrastructure for emancipatory ends? In this article, Aaron Bastani argues that the repurposing of this vital service could help socialists begin dreaming as big as the oligarchs.
Emily Apter's Unexceptional Politics "is a sprawling and remarkable mapping of the terrain of terms, idioms, and actions that constitute the philological and conceptual depth of our contemporary political lives." These commentaries were presented as part of a roundtable discussion on the book as "an entry port, a spur for continued engagement with the rich range of concerns that Unexceptional Politics raises."
In these videos, Sophie Lewis offers a radical feminist analysis of surrogacy, abortion, gestational labour, and the family. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.
With France marking six months of ‘yellow vest’ rallies and civil unrest, a new movement is making itself heard. The Gilets Noirs, the largest collective of undocumented migrants in France, have been conducting a series of high profile actions, most notbaly the recent protests at Charles De Gaulle airport calling for an end to deportation flights. In this article, Luke Butterly reports on the movement.
Sophie Lewis offers a critique of surrogacy as it is described in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
On gestational communism and radical kinship: McKenzie Wark, Jules Joanne Gleeson and Natasha Lennard respond to Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis
Jacobin’s David Broder interviews Marco Revelli about the weakening of the traditional parties, the decline of democratic antibodies to the far right, and the possibility of reviving different forms of mass organization.