Talent and hard work isn’t enough

Sorry for the delay between posts. I have had to get a job to pay the bills and keep putting food on the table. I knew it would happen eventually, clearly my talent and hard work was never going to be enough. And as so accurately predicted by everyone I told I was going to write full time, the savings from the last ‘employment’ eventually ran out. So, rather than go back into the ‘office’…

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What does a post-brexit UK look like?

In the lead up to ‘Brexit’, it is worth considering what it was that it’s instigators had in mind for a post-brexit UK. And when I say it’s instigators I don’t mean those carefully sampled and then edited members of the general public that are now the staple of ‘unbiased’ and ‘democratic’ reporting. I mean the sub-group of the political and economic ruling class that were keeping time for the ‘journalists’ from the early days…

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Who benefits from shutting down the Anarchist Bookfair?

I have only just found out that there will be no Anarchist Bookfair in London this year. It is not entirely surprising, but it is entirely unfortunate. One of the problems facing socialist events in the UK, is that in our hurry to ensure that all voices are heard, we inevitably allow those who would undermine us the opportunity to do so. One of the key strategies of the state, in its capacity as proxy…

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Football and socialism together are greater than the sum of their parts

As a socialist and a football fan, there have been periods when I found it a struggle to rationalise these two aspects of my identity. I know from speaking to other people, that the feeling that football and socialism are mutually exclusive is not entirely uncommon. Chomsky's comments didn't help, when during an interview he called sports “another crucial example of the indoctrination system”. In terms of the capitalist model of modern football, with it's…

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Cultural Imperialism and the mass-production of racism, sexism and violence

When I sat down to write the post that would accompany archiving my 2005 review of Ben Dickenson's Hollywood's New Radicalism, I got caught up in a couple of issues. Primarily steel tariffs, Weinstein, the new Avengers movie and cultural imperialism. After rereading the review a couple of times a lot of the feelings that had accompanied writing it clearly came flooding back. When you have been standing in the middle of the woods for…

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