I’m presently reading and enjoying Sean Sayers’ recollections of ‘the making of a Marxist philosopher’. He relays his experiences of the dull and conservative teaching of philosophy he experienced at Oxford and Cambridge and how he and a handful of colleagues sought to overcome this deadening influence when at Kent University. This included the founding… Read More »
I have just read Graham Greene’s final volume, comprising a selection of dreams culled from a ‘dream diary’ he wrote for many years. He contrasts events in the real world with those in his dream world. I suspect, having been psychoanalysed when younger, he attributed more significance to the contents of his dreams that this… Read More »
Parliament and Socialism The English parliament is an antidote to socialism: a vote for Labour affording respite care for self-destructing Tories in difficult times. When Corbyn promised mild reforms he was rapidly disposed of, not by the Tories but by the assiduity of Labour’s traitors, led by Starmer. Talking of Starmer, was… Read More »
Part and parcel of the politically calculated undermining of the NHS in England is the introduction of cheaper staff. As has become the pattern of late, it is a process conducted by stealth. In this bog I look at what is happening in the primary care sector. It serves as a rider to my recent… Read More »
1: Dialectical Critical Realism – Moving on from Hegel I have in earlier blogs introduced Bhaskar’s basic critical realism, going on to suggest it offers a way of coming to terms with interdisciplinarity. There are any number of commentators who find basic critical realism helpful. Some of these retain their enthusiasm for Bhaskar’s original philosophical excursions through… Read More »
I have long adopted Chomsky’s formula: capital buys power to make policy. I was interested therefore to read a new report ‘Politics for Sale: Analysing Twenty-One years of UK Political Donations’ by Tom Mills and colleagues. The report draws on official data from the Electoral Commission plus data from Companies House, Wikidata and the Parliamentary… Read More »
The other day I purchased a slim volume entitled ‘John Berger: The Undergound Sea’, edited by Tom Overton and Matthew Harle, on the miners and the miners’ strike. The bulk of the book was given over to Berger quotes and atmospheric – or fuzzy, depending on your mood – photos of miners at work and… Read More »
I was born and socialised in a social world markedly at variance with the one entered by my grandchildren. WW2 had thrown our parents’ plans and prospects into disarray, destined for the most part to construct DIY biographies in a world radically departed from the one they had been used to in the interwar years.… Read More »
It has frequently been intimated in these sketches that sociology ought to lead to commitment and engagement beyond Burawoy’s recommendations, and one that recovers and explores alternative modes of social organisation that promise a better society. I have drawn on critical realism to suggest that this is consonant with a general notion of human emancipation.… Read More »
Despite numerous suggestive remarks, some of them uncompromising, I have not directly confronted the circumstances facing sociologists and sociological practice in the rentier capitalism of the 21st century. Anyone who has been with me from the start of this series of epistles will have noted the enormous changes that have impacted academia in general and… Read More »