In a recent email to the rest of this blog’s editors, Jacob requested, in his usual forthright fashion, that we refrain from writing ‘pseudo-insightful piece[s] based around new years’ resolutions’, so I’m not going to do that. However, because it’s Boxing Day (at the time of writing), because I’m full of too much wine and [...]
The world may be getting warmer, but, for one day at least, it looks as if hell is getting colder. What’s that? A piece of good news from Copenhagen? No, my friend, not one piece, but two! Not only is Europe pledging €2.4bn a year to help developing nations cope with the cost of climate [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman
In my opinion, that famous neo-Hegelian thinker Francis Fukuyama – the man responsible for the predication in the late eighties/early nineties that at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end-of-history had loomed upon us, and it had shown free-market capitalism to be the victor over socialism – has gone from [...]
The recession seems to have become a pantomime this week. At every opportunity the Chancellor tells us: “it’s behind you”, then the Office of National Statistics (ONS) yell: “Oh no it isn’t!” So are we in recession or aren’t we? There’s an easy answer to this – some of us are and some of us [...]
In capitalism’s early life Marx compared capital to a vampire, that ‘only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. Chris Harman thinks a different horror staple is appropriate for the system’s later years. Far from being the sophisticated, sentient vampire count, it is better compared to the mindless, [...]
“…to ‘send back’ every one of ‘these people’ would cost a total £6,250,000,000. That’s a ridiculous amount of money! We could have another war somewhere out of that!”
