A Mute Magazine talk

As the global ruling class finally admits that the 'financial' crisis has spilt over into the real economy, the fiction that the credit crunch is containable has been dispelled. Will resistance to capital's genocidal expansion now become equally uncontainable? Can anti-capitalists take advantage of the global system's instability, or will austerity measures and gloves-off geopolitics triumph?

Paolo Virno's latest book contends that the question of human nature – good or evil? – is suddenly topical, thanks to ‘immaterial labour'. But, if true, how useful is this insight?, asks Nina Power

The 19th century 'Great Game' rivalry between Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia is seeing a resurgence, with America taking Britain's place. The stakes are higher than ever, argues Loren Goldner

Was modernism complicit with colonialism, and did the struggle for decolonisation also entail a targeting of imperial modernist architecture? Mark Crinson visits the exhibition In the Desert of Modernity to see if the charge will stick

Giving a critical survey of the documentaries of Adam Curtis, Andrew Fisher evaluates the claims to 'realism' and political neutrality made for his work against the critical methodologies of Guy Debord and Georg Lukács

My job is not to try to change the world, but to describe it.¹

Contemporary curators are loving the alien, the sacred and the cultic. But far from challenging contemporary social mores, this Other-worship is just an orthodox postmodern denigration of human agency, argues J.J. Charlesworth

In the second of a two-part analysis of neoliberalism Indian style, Neil Gray looks at the economic impact of policies legitimat

Marx's concept of 'species being' is for some a way of re-connecting with fertile currents in the communist left. Howard Slater explores Frére Dupont's recent book Species Being and Other Stories as a vehicle of exodus from left orthodoxies

But this negation carries within it a yes which is greater than itself

– Octavio Paz

The collapse of Lehman Brothers has got the mainstream media hitting the panic button and talking of systemic crisis. But the crisis isn't just spreading to the real economy, it began there, argues Jon Amsden

In May of this year, Brian Marks made a valiant attempt to tie together inflation, the current crisis in financial markets, and struggles of the world working class. Marks wrote:

When rivalry still openly reigned between the Obama and Clinton camps of the Democratic Party, Ulrich Gutmair spoke to Sci-Fi writer and pioneer of cyberpunk, William Gibson, about American politics, the online age and Voodoo

UG: You invented the term cyberspace when only a few people were online, on an early version of the Internet. What is the most fascinating thing for you on the net today?

Countering media representations of the food crisis as unexpected, George Caffentzis argues that its essential role in thwarting resistance to neoliberalism's enclosures and austerity measures was thoroughly predictable

As western audiences increasingly switch off from generic reporting of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Imogen O'Rorke finds the news-unworthy testimonies at Tate Modern a much needed corrective

Angela Mitropoulos and Bryan Finoki present an incursion, in text and image, into the contemporary borderlands

Sociologist Giovanni Arrighi invokes the political economy of Adam Smith to claim that China's 'labour intensive' mode of production is the future of capitalism. It's also the past, argues Daniel Berchenko