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The state and us: The left between paranoia and abdication in the pandemic

Picture: Israeli riot police patrol Yefet Street in Jaffa after putting down demonstrations against police violence, 1 April 2020 (source: Matan Kaminer) The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly enhanced the charisma of the strong state around the world. In the West, the early knee-jerk characterization of East Asian responses as authoritarian and illiberal has been completely […]

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Czechia 30 Years on: The Coming-Out of the Oligarchy

The pieces in the dossier 1989 Thirty Years Later were developed around the workshop “Eastern Europe after 30 years of transition: New emancipatory perspectives from the region,” held in Prague on 25-26 October 2019, organised by the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Prague), coordinated by Agnes Gagyi and Ondrej Slacalek. In addition to […]

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Putin’s Virus Moment

The current situation in Russia has reached “a perfect storm”: the pandemic here coincided with the collapse of the national currency, as well as the political crisis caused by Vladimir Putin’s proposals to change the Constitution. At a time when every world political leader seeks to show himself as a sovereign capable of declaring a […]

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Coronavirus and the Contradictions of Capitalism

Coronavirus has revealed yet another contradiction of capitalism: the capitalist tendency to globalize as a solution for the profitability crisis has undermined the capitalist capacity to profit. The virus has exacerbated an already deepening capitalist crisis into a catastrophe and illustrated how vulnerable global capitalism is to any external risk. Globalization, which emerged as a […]

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Coronavirus and the racial regime in Slovakia: the state response to the Roma

In moments of heightened crisis, such as today’s, one of the first strategies of a state is to defer its pretense of universal social solidarity, directing its energies towards the social groups it prioritizes but normally cannot single out. This same tendency often leads to postponing of its efforts to negotiate difficult social, economic, and […]

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Time for a Universal Basic Income?

During the last six months or so, I have paid more attention to the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a potential central element of a future-oriented social protection system, implementable on a scale from the local to the global and all points in-between. Although this demands a separate text, I continue to […]

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Bio-austerity and Solidarity in the Covid-19 Space of Emergency – Part 2

All pictures by Michele Lancione. Published first in: Society + Space Magazine (www.societyandspace.org), republished here with the authors’ permission. On circulation and solidarity Twenty-four, twenty-four hours to go, we want to be instructed While it may appear that we have paid insufficient attention to the real dangers of the crisis underway thus far, we want […]

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Bio-austerity and Solidarity in the Covid-19 Space of Emergency – Part 1

The essay will unfold in two parts. The first focuses on what we call bioterity, the ways in which the war against the virus extends austerity regimes into the very biological mechanisms of human existence, and where these mechanisms’ legitimate existence become further removed from a discernible social life. The current mode of governing the crisis in Italy will serve as the primary means to elaborate this notion.

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Breaking the Camel’s Back: When an Earthquake and a Pandemic Converge

Thus, we have to organise and politicise. If anything, the current crisis has demonstrated that the capitalist economy, despite all its hubris over the last couple of decades, is embedded and subordinate to society and not vice-versa. The next crisis will, there’s no doubt about it, demonstrate that the society is embedded and subordinate to nature and not vice-versa.

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How the Western Sense of Superiority Can Cost Lives

My wife and I have been in the middle of a lock-down for quite some time: no need to be afraid of it. What you need to be afraid of is inaction induced by a false sense of Western superiority. You can live with the lock down.