Obituary:: David Graeber died recently. MODERN TIMES chooses for once to bring an obituary – here over the anarchist who wanted to change our usual notions of what is possible and impossible, right and wrong, normal and strange.
CONTROL: Today, millions of racialized bodies have been made redundant in relation to the metabolism of capital and are being written into a digitally mediated nexus of exclusion, control and destruction technologies. MODERN TIMES here goes into the topic via author Achille Mbembe in three articles.
Deborah Posel and Ilana van Wyk (eds.): Conspicuous consumption in Africa
CONSUMPTION AND CORRUPTION: We have not heard much about Luanda Leaks in Norway. Perhaps because it is embarrassing that Statoil paid NOK 420 million to a non-existent research center owned by Angola's state oil company Sonangol, where Isabel dos Santos was director until she was fired in November 2017?
THE PROTESTS IN THE USA:: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, LA, Louisville, New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Oregon, Richmond, Salt Lake City, Seattle and Washington. A response to the structural violence the poor are exposed to.
THE WOMEN OF EUROPE: In our interview series with European women, Sweden's former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Margot Wallström is last out. She believes that we currently live in a world of autocrats, where Nordic welfare values have poor conditions.
corona: Will a far more favorable ideological virus spread and hopefully infect us, the virus that makes us think of another society, beyond the nation state, a society that realizes itself as global solidarity and cooperation?
MIGRANTS: How hospitable can one be expected to be? Those who do not belong anywhere become poets, because they have to invent a new form of world citizenship, writes Alain Badiou.
Andreas Reckwitz: The End of Illusions. Politics, Economics and Culture in the Late Modern
THE MIDDLE CLASS: Relevant in these corona times is whether Reckwitz's analysis opens up for a restructuring of the economy back to a "real economy" – from the cultural capitalism where the goods promise consumers symbolic, narrative, aesthetic and ethical experiences.
Giorgio Agamben: Creation and Anarchy. The work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism
AGAMBEN: The archeology of religion, art, politics, and capitalism is not a search for any kind of origin – but a search for a foundation that tears past notions to the root.
ACCELERATIONISM: For the children of the new millennium, conservatism is a dead ideology. And before neoliberalism, a new communist realism is now taking shape among young Britons.
THE CHALLENGES OF EUROPE: The Brexit chaos seems to culminate in the British leaving the EU – now that the election of Boris Johnson is over. Brexit is the price the British have to pay for not having had an honest discussion about immigration, multiculturalism and the British Empire. But are Britain's problems unique?