William Bowles – Essays
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Book review of ‘Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir’ by Joe Bageant – So different yet so familiar By William Bowles
What Joe calls the white underclass, some forty-plus million Americans, who struggle to survive out of sight and out of mind of the urban middle class who not only manage capitalism but who also shape the kind of self-image people end up having of themselves. They are Marx’ surplus labour writ big, real big. They… Continue reading
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Music Review: Paul Hanmer’s ‘Accused No 1 – Nelson Mandela’ By William Bowles
Paul Hamner represents perhaps the best synthesis of what it is to be a South African musician today, with the mix of African, American, European, Asian, Caribbean and Latin American musical traditions, all coming together in Paul’s capable hands, assisted by an equally talented cross section of South African musicians. Continue reading
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Diz the Whizz and Bill at the Mac
The computer for the rest of us? This is the very first drawing, wobbly lines ‘an all that I did on my new Macintosh back in 1984, recently unearthed from my stuff that has been packed away in a loft in Brooklyn for fifteen years. Printed out on the original Apple Imagewriter dot matrix printer… Continue reading
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MIMO – A socio-economic model for the 21st century? By William Bowles & Michael Jensen
MIMO is a ‘work in progress’, that starts from the point where use value is transformed into cultural capital and, over time (as with the evolution of money from being a portable form of barter, to being a commodity) establishes a mechanism for measuring value generation that has meaning in the real world, insofar as… Continue reading
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How to build a real Web Economy – a socialist one By William Bowles
Flattr is a social micropayment platform that lets you show love for the things you like – Help support the people you like and enable them to continue with what they do. Well that’s how the blurb goes. Continue reading
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A Tribute to David Coetzee (1943-2010) By William Bowles
I was in London trying to get the Morning Star newspaper online, or at least using email and I met with the then foreign editor of the Star, David Whitfield who was less than impressed with my vision but who nevertheless introduced me to David Coetzee, an exiled South African journalist who published a weekly… Continue reading
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Israel, Nazi propaganda chief Göebbels would have been proud of you By William Bowles
As the true nature of the massacre on the Mavi Marmara becomes apparent now that witnesses can speak out, so too is the scale of the pre-planned propaganda blitz conducted by the Israelis, a blitz that was launched in tandem with the armed attack. Continue reading
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Caught between a ‘liberal’ and a hard man: How the BBC spends your licence money By William Bowles
2 June, 2010 “Israeli commandos had paintball guns” – Israeli Ambassador to Russia, Anna Azari “This happened in waters outside of Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves.” — Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich In Yiddish it’s called Chutzpah, to have the nerve to say something outrageous, the perfect description—if what was… Continue reading
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Welcome to BBC Israel By William Bowles
So it seems that the BBC care only about Israel’s reputation and that it will undoubtedly be a ‘public relations disaster’. The deaths of at least nineteen unarmed people doesn’t figure in the BBC’s universe of spin. Continue reading
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From International Brigade to Freedom Flotilla: Remembering the ancestors of our struggle By William Bowles
In the light of the Freedom Flotilla on its way to Gaza and the opposition it’s facing, not only from Israel, but the news blackout by the corporate/state media on the seven hundred brave people making the trip, it’s worth recalling that back in the 1930s the International Brigade was formed to defend Spain’s democratic… Continue reading
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Coalition of the unwilling? I don’t think so By William Bowles
There’s a fascinating pas de deux going on here between the media and the political class that centres on not talking about about the crisis of capital. Instead, the Independent along with the rest of corporate/state media, focuses all of a sudden on ‘peoples’ rights’ what Clegg is calling the “power revolution”. Continue reading
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Shelling out or just a Shell game? By William Bowles
As far I know I’m not on any Shell mailing list but Shell must have been doing their homework and Googled me because low and behold, on the 17 May I got a press release from the biggest energy company on the planet. Amongst other things, the press release informs me: “The Comprehensive Shell Remediation… Continue reading
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Alice in Videoland By William Bowles
In every sense this past election was played out on television, with the print media doing ‘backup’. Whether the ‘debates’ affected the outcome is neither here nor there, as the script had already been written, on television, through the way the ‘news’ presents the issues and critically what issues to push to the ‘consumers’, sorry… Continue reading
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Israel: The not-so-new Fascism – Palestinians, the not-so-new Unter-Menschen By William Bowles
For decades the Zionist entity has played the victim card, even appropriating the term ‘Holocaust’ as its own, this in spite of the fact that millions of Roma, Slavs, Russians, Homosexuals, the ‘mentally feeble’ and other ‘undesirables’ (‘Unter-Menschen’ or under-people) were exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. In fact collectively, a far greater number than that… Continue reading
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The carve-up in ‘the national interest’ begins By William Bowles
You didn’t need a visit to the Delphic Oracle in order to figure out what would happen, in any case I doubt that many want to visit Greece these days. So, on 8 May the carve-up began with Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats meeting a team of Tory advisors in order to strike… Continue reading
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And the winner is? The Media By William Bowles
The idea of televised debates between the candidates was first proposed forty-six years ago in 1964, and of course it was rejected.[2] My, how times have changed reflecting as it does the desperate nature of the political class who fear not a ‘hung Parliament’ but ruling an electorate that doesn’t want any of them to… Continue reading
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Parliamentary ‘democracy’ – a triumph of Victorian engineering? By William Bowles
Enter Parliamentary ‘democracy’ and the route chosen by organized labour as the one true road to socialism. And it’s here that the role of myth-making was and remains crucial to the exercise of ‘democracy’, a ritual performed every 5 years as the political elite go through the motions of winning our votes. Continue reading
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Beautiful mind, fucked up planet By William Bowles
Lovelock’s contention is simple, in fact so obvious it hardly needs debating: Life, the oceans, the atmosphere/climate and the land are all part of a single self-regulating system that Lovelock calls Gaia after the ancient Egyptian goddess of life. Life maintains the right balance through regulating the type and proportion of gases in our atmosphere,… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 