NM's blog

“ In trying to solve the puzzle of why people vote in politicians that do little to improve their living standards, Seymour goes for a psychological explanation. “this dismissal of the primacy of the economic is not just surprising coming from one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals in Britain today, but rests upon empirically spurious claims. “Seymour only tangentially acknowledges the role of elites in the rise of disaster nationalism. While he does point out that its political economy is mainly about furthering the interests of domestic capitalists, that is never really explored. “To get a full picture  of the social forces driving the rise of the far right and likely to benefit from it, we need more systematic and comparative analysis of party elites, their donors and their actual economic policymaking when they enter office. This could help better explain the apparent contradiction of the far right as both a rejection and reinforcement of neoliberalism. We also need to bette...

In the eyes of the contemporary bourgeoisie everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle class desire to die in peace – after them the deluge. —Geroges Sorel, Reflections on Violence , 1908.

“Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.” Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction. A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.” —Neil Postman,  Conscientious Objections , 1988 A confirmation of what some of us have already observed.  Notice the FT’s columnist invoke of a ‘positive’ aspect of implementing AI: productivity and ‘helping restore middle class heart’. The impact on capitalism’s performance is what should be our concern, according to such a view.

A ‘group’ that “held an attachment to forms of hope that placed faith in the capitalist system to fulfil their dreams . “I develop a political economy of emotion and hope that traces how capitalist systems continue to capture the attention of the very people harmed by them.”  I would use ‘forms of the capitalist system’ rather than ‘capitalist systems’. There is only one globalised capitalist system, albeit with different form in different countries.

Dr Siân Lawrence  says we’re not sliding back to the days of class privilege – we never left them behind . Related What is PPE?

Lessons from the struggles in Sudan, Syria, and Palestine

The Club

The question should be: what’s wrong with the capitalist system? What are we doing wrong?

  We’re Loving Our Favourite Cities to Death

A quality analysis Dreams and Nightmares of the World’s Middle Classes

Signs of alternative power with an opposition that doesn’t want to take power! Belarus on the brink: what now? And as Volodymyry Artiukh wrote : “  Police violence, the lack of central ideological and strategic leadership among the protesters, and the decentralized nature of the protests will determine their further development. At the same time, the ruling elite showed no signs of a split, the security apparatus and the bureaucracy generally remained loyal, although there have been signs of hesitation at the lower and regional levels (with several state media journalists and police officers resigning). There is no central coordination center of the protest, no local centers, no visible leaders on the street, no identifiable political groups. I believe that some already existing political groups are taking part in the protests, but they are not visible as separate ‘tactical units’: they are either disoriented, or deeply disguised, or participating as individuals.” Partis...