Tag: social equality

The geopolitics of struggle

sanjay perera

by The Uninomade Collective 1. The fracture of European space. Everyone is looking for an exit strategy. The rhythm of transformations is accelerating and, at the same time, is breaking any linearity: financial governance looks more and more like a system of fragmented tools, attempts at stabilization that duly end up reaffirming the crisis’s constitutive turbulence. In this framework, the temptation to accept a simple cartographic role of the crisis, ignoring the complexities of the present, is quite strong. “Fragmentation” and “complexness” are indisputable facts of our present: the risk, however, is that these terms are transformed into a charmer’s mantra, both … Continue reading The geopolitics of struggle

Post-racial America

sanjay perera

by Henry A. Giroux  The killing of a young African-American boy, Trayvon Martin, by an overzealous white Hispanic security guard who appears to have capitulated to the dominant post-racial presumption that equates the culture of criminality with the culture of blackness, has devolved into a spectacle. While there is plenty of moral outrage to go around, a recognition that racism is alive and well in America, and that justice has been hijacked by those who can afford it, the broader and more fundamental questions and analyses are not being raised. Complex issues get lost when spectacular events are taken over … Continue reading Post-racial America

Fighting neo-liberalism with education and activism

sanjay perera

by Dave Hill This is a revolutionary period in world history. The collapse of finance capitalism, the bankers’ bailouts across the globe, the continuing bankers’ bonuses, and the intrinsic problems of finance capitalism have, under current `bourgeois’ parliamentarist rule, resulted in ordinary families, workers and communities,`paying for the crisis’. All this, while the national and international capitalist classes and organisations impose austerity capitalism on a reeling public and public educational, social, health and welfare systems. This `austerity capitalism’ has led to an eruption of discontent-against political, economic and financial dictatorship, through the Arab Spring, the indignados in Spain, the Occupy … Continue reading Fighting neo-liberalism with education and activism

Alternatives to capitalism

sanjay perera

by Gregory Albo It is said so frequently now that socialism is dead that even socialists no longer notice.  This view is based, in good part, on the end of the political formations that came to represent socialism through the twentieth century (tiny Cuba notwithstanding).  The statist command economies of Eastern Europe, the diverse state-led national liberation projects of the South, and the social democratic welfare statism of Western capitalism have all fallen victim either to internal collapse or external de-stabilization.  The old joke of the Soviet leadership that the central question facing the US was the prospects for capitalism … Continue reading Alternatives to capitalism

Justice for all and the European Union

sanjay perera

by Philippe Van Parijs When we are thinking about how the European Union should evolve, what competences it should be given, what direction it should take, what is the ultimate objective? The answer is simple: justice. But what is justice? Any conception of justice relevant for our times must combine two elements, both strongly rooted in our European traditions, but neither of them exclusive to them: equal respect for the diversity of conceptions of the good life that characterizes our pluralist societies and equal concern for the interests of all members, present and yet to come, of the society concerned. … Continue reading Justice for all and the European Union