Miłosz is best known outside Poland for The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how Eastern European intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism. Through several character portraits, he showed how a combination of opportunism, exhaustion, and hope led Polish writers to swallow the pill of contentment in exchange for compliance. Some prospered, like “Alpha, the Moralist” (based on… Read More Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance… Read More Anjan Basu: What Can Karl Marx Offer to the 21st Century?
I am in blood, Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er: Macbeth I have spent most of my adult life in war. I began in Central America during the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where I spent five years, on to the Middle… Read More How With This Rage. BY CHRIS HEDGES (2005)
The Indian working class was a proud participant in the anti-imperialist struggle against British rule in India. Whether it was the six-day strike of the working class of Mumbai in 1908; the attempts of the Ghadar Party organised by Punjabi immigrant workers in Canada, who sailed to India in 1914 to overthrow the British; the… Read More Sudha Bhardwaj: Seventy-Five Years Since Independence, Industrial Working Class Still Struggles for Rights
Social media platforms are devised by a Californian tech scene committed to competition and social hierarchy. Twitter’s protocols treat us as wannabe celebrities, striving to produce storms of admiration and rage. It is a complex evolutionary system that selects the vacuous grandstanding and sniggering boorishness of adolescent personalities… So much the better if, like Musk,… Read More RICHARD SEYMOUR – Musk & Twitter: the first lab rat to take over the laboratory
‘This rhythm in Russia, of repression and violent revolution, is well known to Sorokin, who first emerged as a writer under Soviet rule in the 1980s, when he was no less irritating to the Kremlin. He’s not just a satirist but also a speculative fantasist, and he became angrily political after Putin came to power.… Read More Book review: Day of the Oprichnik, 16 Years Later
From 2017 to 2021, gas pipeline leaks averaged more than 200 a year. In most cases, leaking gas either ignites at the construction site or passes through a confined space underground and enters nearby premises before exploding. For example, one of the most deadly accidents in recent years in terms of casualties was a gas explosion… Read More Frequent gas accidents threatens safety of Chinese workers
Around the world, many countries are becoming less democratic. This backsliding on democracy and “creeping authoritarianism,” as the U.S. State Department puts it, is often supported by the same industries that are escalating climate change. In my new book, “Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis,” I lay out connections between these industries and the… Read More Big Oil, Rising Authoritarianism and worsening climate. By Eve Darian-Smith
Marina Hyde: For this NSFW government, it’s the last days of Rome How long were the last days of Rome? By some estimates, about 200 years, so I hope you’re sitting comfortably after a week in which: a female MP was baselessly branded an exhibitionist; a male MP was accused of watching porn in the Commons chamber; it… Read More The rotting carcass of English conservatism (+ the certifiable lunacy of the American variety)
Taken together, the continental and analytic meltdowns indicate that truth is either an evil authoritarian force or that it is nothing at all. That just about does it, doesn’t it? In one way or the other, then, and through the whole century, truth seemed to be in collapse, a scene of puzzlement and despair, a… Read More Crispin Sartwell: Truth is real
