Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici

by Marina Vishmidt, Mute Magazine, 7 March 2013

On the occasion of the publication of an anthology of her writing and the accession of a  Wages for Housework NY archive at Mayday Rooms in London, Marina Vishmidt interviewed Silvia Federici on her extensive contribution to feminist thought and recent work on debt activism (with contributions by Mute, Mayday Rooms and George Caffentzis)

From the Cult of the People to the Cult of Rancière

A radical social historian as well as philosopher, Jacques Rancière has spent many years rescuing vivid fragments of proletarian life and thought from the  vested interests that claim to speak for them. But in thwarting the instrumentality of intellectuals, he also risks obscuring the material he cherishes and the energies it carries – write Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts in Mute Magazine

Reflections on the Arab Spring

By Anustup Basu, Mute Magazine

Twittering teens or absolutist ayatollahs, men we can do business with or loony autocrats? The media's proliferation of polarities is a strategy to fragment the connectedness of events and disavow western Realpolitik. Here Anustup Basu reveals the transnational composition of a Spring that is now an Autumn

In a column published on 25 May, 2011, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman issued a pious call to Palestinians. In the wake of the Arab Spring, he invited them to learn from the Egyptian insurrection and adopt the ‘Tahrir Square Alternative' (TSA).

Damning the Flood

Richard Pithouse, Mute Magazine, 2008

By supporting NGOs, is the left suppressing a radical politics in Haiti and elsewhere? And is it possible to defend a popular movement without deifying its leader? Richard Pithouse reviews Peter Hallward's new book on the containment of popular politics in Haiti

Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town

By Richard Pithouse, Mute Magazine

Taking up the gauntlet of pessimism thrown down by Mike Davis’ account of the global slum epidemic, Planet of Slums, Richard Pithouse draws on his involvement with the struggles of slum dwellers in Durban to offer an alternative and engaged perspective. Against Davis’ homogenisation of slum life, misrepresentation of slum politics, and ‘imperialist’ methodology, he argues for an analysis grounded in specific settlements, histories, people and struggles – a ‘politics of the poor’