15 May 2007 Believe it or not, there was a time when working people actually directly participated in the political process, believing that as members of the class of producers they could manage the affairs of state and eventually take control of the businesses they worked for; that was what socialism in the 19th century… Continue reading

9 April 2007 Marx’s famous dictum that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’[1], is never more appropriate than now. Yet in spite of the absolutely desperate state of the world, we seem to be even more removed from the political process than our ancestors were… Continue reading

3 April 2007 ‘I was nobody. I had no desires, no will, no likes, no dislikes. I had been fashioned to resemble as closely as possible a human model which I had not chosen and which did not suit me. Day after day since my birth, I had been made up: my gestures, my attitudes,… Continue reading

29 March 2007 We are so used to the ruling political class making decisions ‘for us’ that we forget that they exist and act only because we allow them to. We allow it because we think that once elected, our representatives will act in our best interests. And because ‘we elect’ them every so often—itself… Continue reading

21 March 2007 “The body had to die so that labor-power could live.” — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 141. Anybody who has read Michel Foucault’s ‘Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’, and who agrees with him, will probably have a very different take on the entire… Continue reading

17-18 March 2007 I hope that my piece ‘Don’t bother breathing out’ (see below) didn’t lead readers to assume that I don’t think that global warming is not the result of human actions. If so, I wish to clarify that all the available evidence points to the fact that global warming is the result of… Continue reading

26 February 2007 ‘When politicians wave abstractions around like flags—abstractions like ‘security’ or for that matter ‘freedom’—citizens should be immediately suspicious.”[1] There is one thing we can be certain of; the capitalist state is in disarray and in crisis. With every passing day its legitimacy crumbles further. Much of its prior claim to any kind… Continue reading

22 February 2007 If nothing else, groups like Medialens[1] perform an invaluable service to an otherwise woefully misinformed public pointing out the blatant and not-so-blatant bias in the corporate and state-run media’s coverage of events. Back in the mid-eighties I was involved in Extra!, a publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)[2], a New… Continue reading

18 February 2007 Here in the UK we are, according to the statistics anyway, the fourth or fifth wealthiest nation on the planet at least in material terms but according to the latest UNICEF report we are at the bottom of the list of the twenty-one most developed nations when it comes to the treatment… Continue reading

20 January 2007 “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume — your capital. The less you are, the less you give expression… Continue reading

9 January 2007 “China’s growth is replacing the US as the engine of the world economy. China is the world’s largest consumer of steel, cement, copper, aluminum and zinc and the second largest oil consumer. Says Robin Bhar of UBS, “The fact that growth in the developing world will offset the decline in demand from… Continue reading