Cedric Durand's Fictitious Capital offers a lucid analysis of the growth of finance and its significance for capitalism. In this essay, originally published by Open Democracy, Durand surveys the current state of the global financial system.
Two struggles, at present little-known within the English-speaking world, have come to define the ground of activist struggle in mainland Europe: the zad (Zone À Défendre - or the zone to defend), and NoTAV (the No to Treno ad Alta Velocità rail line). Each offers a continuation of the kinds of localised, spatial conflict whose genealogy can be traced from the Paris Commune, through Sanrizuka in Japan, the Zapatistas in Mexico and Standing Rock in America, whose form has been analysed most forcefully in the work of David Harvey.
In this extract from the introduction to the new ebook The Zad and NoTAV by the French collective Mauvaise Troupe, which offers English readers the first and most comprehensive narrative of the interlinked stories of the two movements, Kristin Ross offers an introduction to this "never-ending process of soldering together black bloc anarchists and nuns, retired farmers and vegan lesbian separatists, lawyers and autonomistas into a tenacious and effective community".
"We must look at the potential implications for human rights if the Good Friday Agreement were to break down, with a loss of neutrality in Westminster leading to a resurgence in the kind of violence that was stymied by the conclusion of the peace process."
Gracie Mae Bradley examines Theresa May's threats to remove human rights laws in light of a DUP alliance.
Without winning the vote, Jeremy Corbyn won the election. Raising Labour’s vote by the biggest margin since 1945, to 40 per cent, he added thirty-three seats to Labour’s total, when almost all pundits expected a Tory landslide.
Scotland looks very different after the general election, with the strongest performance for Scottish Conservatives since 1983. Niki Seth-Smith looks at what lies ahead for Scottish politics.
In General Intellects, I offer condensed versions of twenty-one leading thinkers across a range of fields. but I did not include figures in anthropology, as I am still working my way through reading in what's going on there. I have been finding some exciting stuff. Elsewhere, I wrote about Anna Tsing and Achille Mbembe. Here's my report on the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, author of the brilliant Cannibal Metaphysics, including notes on a recent collaboration with the Brazilian philosopher Déborah Danowski, called The Ends of the World.
At the point at which we wrote these stories, we had not yet turned our attention to the way in which sexuality itself is constructed. Writing and discussing stories of this kind left us with a feeling of helplessness; how were we to identify means of defending ourselves against the forms of oppression they described? No matter how far back they went, these stories always depicted the results of an already existing repression of sexuality. Examining the notion of sexuality more closely, we found it to be represented and lived as oppression at the very moment of its emergence; thus its suppression could not be assumed, as we had hitherto believed, to consist solely in a prohibition of the sexual. But then, what is “the sexual”? In the first instance it seems clear that it is something that happens with our bodies. In an attempt then to discover the origins of our deficiencies and our discontents in the domain of the sexual, we decided at an early point in our research to focus our study on our relationships to our bodies and to their development.
Corbyn’s accession to the leadership of the Labour Party, and the campaign conducted over the past six weeks, has shifted the space of the politically acceptable: talk of public ownership and common good, once deemed electoral poison, are back on the agenda.
Brecht’s verses say uncomfortable truths rather than toe party lines and so offer us a still vital critique of the economic forces behind war, of how wartime rhetoric becomes a lie machine unfairly demonising and dehumanising our foes.
In Stop Making Sense Huw Lemmey looks at "the image as political tool" through the works of Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Bertolt Brecht's War Primer — a series of photo-epigrams revealing the truth of war.
"The power of the work lies in that dynamic relationship between text and image. These are not illustrations. The text reveals the material nature of the image, cast in sorrow, rage, cruelty and pity. Like Heartfield, Brecht leads the reader to draw an unavoidable political conclusion: the rich and the brutal can only realise themselves in barbarism and death, with their senseless fist-fights conducted on the mounting bodies of the poor."
Brecht considered War Primer part of “a satisfactory literary report on my years in exile,” as he wrote in a 1944 journal entry. Since this first English language reception of War Primer on the centenary of Brecht’s birth in 1998, what are we now to make of his poignant modernist epic of four-liner lyrics and scrapbook photos? Today, in our post-crash era, with its renewal of Marxism, Brecht the formalist can be freed from a series of postmodern qualifications. War Primer’s historical intervention can be seen in a new way today. With the far right politically relevant again, Brecht’s image-by-image analysis of social democracy, America, and fascism, which is the veritable heart of War Primer, possesses fresh relevance.
It has become popular today to say that we live in an era of what Benjamin Barber has labelled "Jihad vs. McWorld." The globalising powers of capitalism ("McWorld") are confronted with or resisted by the forces that Barber labels "Jihad" — the variety of tribal particularisms and "narrowly conceived faiths" opposed to the homogenising force of capital. Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and the expansion of what is erroneously termed the global market usually subscribe to this interpretation. In fact it is the critics who often argue that we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against the "universal" force of the market.
The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, to adapt Barber’s nomenclature, of "McJihad." It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements. It may be true that we need a better understanding of the local forces that oppose the globalisation of capital; but, more than this, we need a better understanding of the so-called global forces of capital.