Column – Page 2 – The Junction

Subversive Space: The Effectivity of Occupy Wall Street

To help contextualize the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, it is useful to return to an analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the theories of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre to understand the effectivity of urban mobilizations that simplify the political space and creatively critique the dominant ideology. The Occupy Wall […]

by Aaron White

A Visual Alternative: The Aesthetics of TWT 2018

How do aesthetics reflect ideology? What does the formation of an alternative narrative look like? The recent The World Transformed (TWT) festival in Liverpool visually revealed the establishment of a new hegemony on the left. The Black-E TWT was primarily split between two main locations – The Black-E space and the Hinterlands venue. The Black-E […]

by Freddie Stuart

The Shift to Postcapitalism

As evidenced in my recent Apeirogon post An Era of Mass Automation, there is strong reason to believe that automation will displace a large section of the global workforce in the next two decades. The unprecedented nature of this challenge requires an acute political response. In this column I consider proposals from the modern left in dealing with […]

by Freddie Stuart

The Contradictions of Capital

The wealth disparity of the world we live in today is unlike any recorded in living memory. The centralisation of wealth has seen global society fractured, and the widening of political fault lines. The result is a struggle between those with a monopoly on wealth, and those without access to its rewards; but it is […]

by Freddie Stuart

TWT: A Return to People Politics

I have been lucky enough in recent weeks to attend a number of events organised or supported by the British left-wing political organisation Momentum, and see for myself the political gusto of the Corybnite movement. It is a zeitgeist to behold. Aaron White recently authored a column detailing the unique aesthetics of Momentum’s The World Transformed (TWT) conference […]

by Aaron White

Was the Bernie Sanders campaign populist?

The term populism colloquially evokes a negative connotation. Yet as Ernesto Laclau argues in On Populist Reason (OPR), populism refers to a social logic and not a predetermined ideology. Through utilizing Laclau’s text and theoretical approach, one can gain a greater understanding into the mechanisms behind the formation of a populist movement. In a brief […]

by Anna Pyregov

Guest Column: Crypto vs. Fiat

The mainstream media has primarily portrayed cryptocurrencies as the gold nuggets of cyberspace’s lawless Wild West. Bitcoin, for instance, often brings to mind pyramid schemes and tax evasion, the Silk Road and the Dark Web, hacktivists and terrorists. But then again, government-issued, government-backed fiat money can be used for the same illicit activities that cryptocurrencies […]

by Aaron White

The Moments in Between

“The major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its actions; that the perfection of power should tend to render its […]

by Freddie Stuart

Discriminating by Geography

‘It [Brexit] was a vote to restore, as we see it, our parliamentary democracy, national self-determination, and to become even more global and internationalist in action and in spirit’ Theresa May – 17th January 2017 The decision of the British public on the 23rd of June 2016 to withdraw from the European Union brought the […]

by Freddie Stuart

The Search for Security

“It is urgent that, collectively, we put in the work necessary to produce a 2019 Clock statement that rewinds the Doomsday Clock. Get engaged, get involved, and help create that future. The time is now” – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2018 With the famous ‘Doomsday Clock’ set at ‘two minutes to midnight’ in January […]