This is a blog about ‘beginnings’. Why am I committing valuable café time to this concept? For three reasons: (a) it is a significant notion with an extended reach and multiple reference points; (b) it is of sociological import in several respects, and (c) it is fascinating in its own right. The beginnings I’ve opted… Read More »
I have often said blogs are a device for thinking aloud, for me at least. This one is an exemplar for that agenda. I would not hesitate to argue that financialised capitalism is characterised by a deepening class division and class struggle amounting to class warfare. But what does class mean in this context. It… Read More »
I have maintained over a period of roughly two decades that capital buys power to make policy with a view to its further accumulation, and that it has shown a greatly enhanced return under post-1970s financialised capitalism. Expanding on this formula, I have argued: (a) that the UK is now characterised by a new ‘class/command… Read More »
I am delighted to be co-authoring a book on ‘Communal Forms’ with old friend Aksel Tjora (well, I’m old and he’s a friend). Naturally enough it’s set me thinking about how far we have come from the early days of ‘community studies’. Blogs, as I’ve often said, allow people to think aloud, and this blog… Read More »
Guy Standing is an innovative thinker and contributor to policy formation. He is best known for his concept of the ‘precariat’ and for championing a universal basic income. In a recent chapter in Economics for the Many (edited by John McDonnell) he introduces a few more novel concepts, and these are the focus of this… Read More »
There has for some time, most particularly among French philosophers and commentators, been an interest in recovering the notion of communism: people like Badiou for example have espoused a ‘new communism’. The rationale for this is generally that throughout parliamentary or other forms of liberal/social democracies in the West the electoral choice is merely between… Read More »
Alan Badiou gave a lecture at Tufts University, Boston, two weeks after the election of Trump during which he attempted to come to terms with this enigmatic and painful happening. His observations have a wider relevance, not least to UK post-Brexit. Badiou rightly sees Trump as a symptom of financialised capitalism, which he characterises in… Read More »
The headline from the Sunday Times Rich List 2019 concerns the likelihood of the super-rich leaving the UK en masse (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms) if ever Corbyn, ‘an ardent Marxist’, were to be elected PM. Its editorial too defines this possible migration as constituting a significant ‘loss’ to the UK. Apparently the… Read More »
I have always had a soft spot for Marx’s labour theory of value. I’m not an economist, which for most in that discipline would account for my lingering respect for a theory way past its sell-by date. But I remain obstinate. The most I am willing to concede in this thinking-out-loud or exploratory blog is… Read More »
The extraordinary but longstanding over-representation of those educated in the private sector, most conspicuously in the major ‘public’ schools, in, for example, politics, the judiciary, newspapers and the commentariat is well documented and well know. This is the very stuff of elite recruitment and the reproduction of class relations. Less appreciated, perhaps, is the salience… Read More »