For Humanity's Liberation!

Current Issue: 01.08.2007

Taking coordinates from Aristotle, Malcolm Bull finds in Agamben’s biopolitics and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach the disconnected fragments of a lost vision of society, adumbrated by Marx, glimpsed and rejected by Arendt. Strange meetings as the trajectories of the disenfranchised and the empowered, human and non-human, converge.

by Malcolm Bull

From one sentence in Aristotle derive two arresting theoretical discourses of the twenty-first century: Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, provocatively reformulated by Giorgio Agamben in terms of the relationship between sovereignty and the body, and the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as a means of evaluating and promoting development, justice and freedom.

Biocapital

Experimental Values: Indian Clinical Trials and Surplus Health
Workers accuse the Kuwait contractor building the US embassy in Baghdad of smuggling low-paid South Asians into Iraq and labor trafficking. Still, the US State Department casts a blind eye on the complaints as it rushes to complete its most ambitious project ever.

Biocapital: Outsourcing Risks

Testing new drugs on the world’s poor
Many medicines developed for the rich are tested on poor people from developing countries. This is a failure in the allocation of scientific resources and, worse, a threat to the public health of the entire world.

The Chinese Road

Cities in the Transition to Capitalism
The PRC’s breakneck transition to capitalism seen through the prism of 19th-century Europe and America, as its cities rehearse the processes analysed by Marx: commodification of land and labour, formation of markets and capitalist elites. What lessons might the West’s past hold for China’s future?

Capital

Finance and the Fourth Dimension
The concept of alternative futures, banished from postmodernity’s eternal present, flourishes on the financial summits of the global economy. Robin Blackburn argues against a neo-Luddite dismissal of the new financial engineering techniques by the Left, while coolly assessing the economic and social costs of their current configurations.

Global Finance

The new Global Financial Architecture?

As the world economy shows growing signs of vulnerability, what mechanisms exist for averting repeats of the Asian or Mexican crises? Banking and regulatory regimes as instruments of standardization, pulling national economies into Anglo-American orbits.

Global Power

The new Great Game
For 10 years Central Asia has been caught up in a new "great game" designed to fill the gap left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. By deploying its forces in the Red Army’s former bases in Uzbekistan, Washington is demonstrating how its influence has spread since the cold war ended.

Activism

John Pilger: Interview with Amy Goodman

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Edward W. Said
was born in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

Book Highlights

Orientalism The noted critic and a Palestinian now teaching at Columbia University, examines the way in which the West observes the Arabs. "... The scholar who studies the Orient (and specifically the Muslim Orient), the imaginitive writer who takes it as his subject, and the institutions which have been concerned with teaching it, settling it, ruling it, all have a certain representation or idea of the Orient defined as being other than the Occident, mysterious, unchanging and ultimately inferior." --Albert Hourani

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