Yesterday the Conservative chancellor of Great Britain gave his Autumn Budget (yes, in winter). As the image here shows, Autumn is the leafy, golden one, with people picking apples, bottom right. Winter is the snowy, ice-hockey one, top right. chancellor osbourne (he doesn’t get capital letters) might need such nursery learning resources so that in [...]
The distinction between the representative, parliamentary democracies of capitalism, and vanguardists should be carefully marked (as Marcos does, in his way during his exchange with ETA). The Subcommandante shits on the vanguardists, whereas one of the designations of the representative, parliamentary system (and its attendees) is that this system is “full of shit”, as are [...]
For two months Spain’s coal miners have been on strike; they famously marched on Madrid to take their protest directly to the conservative government; more recently they have been subjected to brutal police repression, fighting back with home-made rockets and dynamite. Their dispute hinges, as do all politics at the moment, on austerity measures. The [...]
Neo-liberalism has become a bit of buzz word, replacing postmodernity (although the two are crucially interlinked). So two books and a film which provide excellent in-roads into the topic. First: Foulcault’s lectures on the “Birth of Biopolitics”, given in 1978-79, particularly lectures 4,5,9,10,11. He has the remarkable power of being able to condense the [...]
Patriarch to continent., Simon Critchley, places the beginning of politics-proper in the feeling of disappointment; similarly, philosophy for him (and Alain Badiou) begins in nihilism, which is not exactly conterminous with disappointment, but which is certainly mixing in the same zone. The spirit of Algiers began in disappointment, and perhaps a dose of nihilism, about [...]
In the opening three chapters of Marx’s Capital we famously learn that capitalism is a society in which production for exchange predominates; something produced for exchange Marx calls “commodity”, in other words, capitalism is a society of generalised commodity production. The commodity can be broken down into three components (its dialectical structure): use-value, exchange-value, and [...]
The British website MediaLens.org has been causing waves for some time; originally begun as part of the broad anti-Iraq War movement, it focussed on the complete failure of the mainstream media – whether supposedly Left or Right – to fully expose what was hawkish, imperial propaganda, masquerading as “critical journalism”. From the BBC, to the [...]
In the last two posts (1,2) we briefly considered what happened in the run-up to, and during Britain’s mass public sector strikes a little over a week ago on 30th November 2011 (so-called N30). We fitted it into a longer running series of agitations, beginning with the student movements this time last year, the major [...]
On 29th November I spoke to an ambulance driver (who wished not to be named) at a major urban hospital. “What are you lot on about?” He approached me, pointing to the copies of the newspaper which I was distributing. “The public sector strike tomorrow, and the pensions the politicians are pulling in” I [...]
There are two newspapers in the UK to read if you’re after the grubby materiality of what’s going on in the country: Fleet Street and the City of London’s mainstay, the Financial Times, and the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Morning Star. The Economist is no longer “where the ruling classes chat amongst themselves” as [...]