Radical Philosophy Review

The work of Ernesto Laclau develops a line of equivalences in which populism is hegemony is democracy is politics. Against this, I contend Laclau recreates rather than challenges basic tenets of modern liberalism and ultimately risks contributing to the “post political” order against his populist reason is deployed. Drawing from José Carlos Mariátegui, Antonio Gramsci, and Jodi Dean, I outline the limitations of hegemony theory and populism for thinking through the roadblocks and possibilities for social change in the present. The essay concludes with a provocation to de-center and de-fetishize democracy’s place in the radical imaginary.

If climate change continues unabated it will create massive insecurity and displacement, particularly for people in the Global South, leading to extreme pressure to migrate to the Global North. Yet political policy in the North is overwhelmingly hostile to large-scale immigration. We are therefore on a collision course of increased pressure to migrate facing increased barriers to migration – a global structure I refer to as eco-apartheid. This paper argues that preventing eco-apartheid requires, fundamentally, a massive shift in culture – from a vision of a good life with growth and consumption at its centre, to one centered on community, free time and relationships. However, this shift in culture can only be accomplished with a corresponding shift in our economies towards real security for all; real economic security requires a new kind of robust welfare state, premised on the provision of generous public services and work sharing to maintain high employment.

Why hasn’t the Marx-inspired Left seized upon catastrophic climate change as the basis for reconceiving historical materialism and the contradictions fueling anticapitalist struggle in the twenty-first century? Defining core participants as energy users and abusers, anchored in the opposition to fossil-fueled profit and growth rather than in traditional class conflicts, the struggle to create a postcapitalist energy commons can become the leading edge of a more broadly conceived global struggle for a sustainable and just postcapitalist society. The new global movement will be enabled by technologies of green energy microproduction, an energy internet for sharing energy on postcapitalist grids, and efforts to create more sustainable community relationships and practices. Catastrophic climate change can become the occasion for reigniting a Marx-inspired sense of transformative agency and solidarity that will enable us to confront transnational capitalism globally and locally in ways that are beyond the imaginative bounds of the current paper.

In this essay I argue that Slavoj Žižek’s “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’” betrays, in an exceptionally telling way, the existence and persistence of dimensions of modern colonialism within contemporary continental philosophy. After offering a general characterization of the way in which the idea of the “West” is used to justify (neo)colonialist patterns of thinking, I provide a thorough criticism of each of Žižek’s central premises.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not only a work of economic history and theory but also a political and normative argument and a critique of ideology. It is invaluable for its magisterial documentation of increasing inequality in capitalism, and unprecedented US economic inequality in particular. I situate it within philosophical conceptions of justice. I also identify it as a non-determinist critique of the political economy of capitalism and a substantive and methodological challenge to mainstream economics. I discuss not only what Piketty does not do, as some Marxists do, but what Piketty does do and summarize some of his central claims. I then discuss some problems in his work, some of which have not been addressed in the literature. In particular Piketty’s concept of labor income masks forms of capital, and given his arguments, gender and all women’s reproductive practices should have been addressed more fully.

Judith Butler maintains that the universality of the precarity of life confirms the interdependence of lives. Such interdependence makes us fundamentally responsible for the lives of Others. Through the application of Marx’s critique of capitalism as ontological degradation, we ask whether the notions of a life and of lives as Butler outlines them in her recent works are adequate to ground moral understanding and practice, or whether, the manner in which human lives produce and reproduce themselves within the capitalist context (now being globalized) problematizes the revision of the ethical. We therefore expand from her claim that “moral theory has to become social critique if it is to know its object and act upon it” (Butler, 2004).