Jason Barker

In an article published in The Guardian in February 2012, Barker criticised the selective interpretation of Karl Marx's writings by economists such as Nouriel Roubini when responding to the global recession. According to Barker, such interpretations water down the revolutionary aspects of Marx's ideas and focus unduly on their reformist tendencies.

The London Evening Standard cited the film alongside the 2012 re-edition of The Communist Manifesto and Owen Jones' best-selling book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class as evidence of a resurgence of left-wing ideas.

Barker is the writer, director and producer of the 2011 partly animated documentary film Marx Reloaded, which considers the relevance of Marx's ideas in the aftermath of the global economic and financial crisis of 2008—2009. The film includes interviews with several distinguished philosophers including Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, John N. Gray, Alberto Toscano, Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek.

Jason Barker (born 1971) is a British theorist of contemporary French philosophy, a film director, screenwriter and producer. He is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in the Graduate School of British and American Language and Culture and visiting professor at the European Graduate School, where he teaches in the Faculty of Media and Communication alongside Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Avital Ronell, Slavoj Žižek and others. Most notable for his translation and introductions to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Barker draws on an eclectic range of influences including neoplatonism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. Writing in both the English and French languages, Barker has also contributed to debates in post-Marxism.

Writing in The New York Times on the occasion of the Marx bicentennial anniversary, Barker argued: "The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not 'philosophy' but 'critique,' or what he described in 1843 as 'the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be'".