Humane socialism
By Phil Hall and the contributors of Ars Notoria I dreamed of a world where people got together into families and then organised into neighbourhoods. From there they organised into districts, then towns and regions and larger regions. I dreamed that everything that was political and economic and social and artistic, and environmental and recreative […]
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Bizarre-ha Of all the achievements the grey-haired, and now bespectacled Joseph Nettexe may, and often does boast – all of it set out in a voluminous résumé – a first hard hour at the woolsack is not about to be one of them. Mr Nettexe plc is voluble in stating this himself, as often as […]
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Will there be pie in the sky for us when we die? By Phil Hall Socialist arguments against the use of religion are not always arguments against the idea of an ordering presence in the universe, or against an Earth and a cosmos full of meaning, or against a transcendent expansive all including love, or […]
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It’s been a very bad month for blue tits, for the poor and for me! By Gordon Liddle Zombie Apocalypse, 18th Sept 2021 Blue Tits tend to have only one brood per year. They feed their young on caterpillars and have to gauge when these are freely available to choose when to lay their eggs. […]
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We live on the only Paradise humans will ever know. It reduces down to one strike and you’re out. Life here is as far as we know the only life there is. We haven’t even begun to understand it. We have barely begun to understand, we don’t understand it, yet we are at ad hock war with every other life form, organic or inorganic, the very mix that sustains us, driven by greed and ignorance. I suggest we turn our gaze to those who rule and subdue us. They are the enemy at the gates.
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No one wants to be lead by donkeys, or dangerous buffoons like Boris Johnson. But who imagines that the Naxalites (or the Sikh farmers) can govern in India? Who thinks the Zapatistas should rule in Chiapas, or Sendero Luminoso in Peru? Who agrees that certain key Brexit voting communities in the north should be the ones to decide the future of the UK.
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If capitalism really gets hold of software that can manipulate human behaviour, then game over. By Phil Hall Soviet Science Fiction authors, when they were not Communist Party suck ups, were often serious people, scientists. At the very least they were social scientists. In one story written by a Soviet author an AI becomes sentient. […]
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We need to be better people By Pete Field Would you torture your own children? Would you destroy their future? Would you sell out your family and friends for cash? If you could, would you wipe out the world?We love those films where the forces of good destroy the evil psychopath’s plan for world domination. […]
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More Glamorous than Che: Make a Film about the life of Angela Davis By Phil Hall It’s fascinating to see how films or books or musicians who really epitomised the zeitgeist and hit the spot sometimes plunge out of sight. What a good film My beautiful Launderette was. It exposed the homo-eroticism behind so much […]
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By Neil Newman One of the most striking facets of the secular religion Marxism is the almost complete lack of a model for the post-revolutionary society. What are the economic relations of that society? How does that society continue on from there? Towards what is it supposed to evolve? Marx had few answers to these […]
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Everyday working class, fascism is real by Phil Hall One of the dirty secrets of history is that fascists can also be working class. Marxists, communists and socialists claim that all fascism comes from the middle and lower middle classes, that fascism is a last ditch response to the failure of capitalism, an attempt to […]
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Is the solution to racism, misogyny and prejudice a nicer capitalism or do we need a more profound transformation of society? What do we do when a right winger like Priti Patel claims that she is fighting prejudice? Do we acknowledge this and support her as a woman who has suffered deeply from two types […]
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The Problem of Surplus and the COVID-19 Pandemic. ‘Can we justify £16bn fortunes when nurses are poorly compensated, care workers are on zero-hour contracts and thousand are homeless?’ by Dr. Pete Stanfield dirig ancient Assyrian term for surplus (Veenhof, K. R. 1972. E. J. Brill, Leiden) Since the founding of the first city states, the […]
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Was Labour’s 2019 Election Defeat a Grave – Even Terminal – Defeat for Democracy Itself? By Richard House Now the dust has settled over five months on from last December’s general election defeat for Labour and all the accompanying whirlwind of emotions and tribulations, it’s perhaps an opportune moment to take sober stock of the […]
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Socialism? What are we talking about? By Dominic Tweedie The communists mean to show the way – as a vanguard – through revolution, to a classless, stateless condition called communism. The agent of revolution is not a communist party. Since the 1840s, communists have said that the principal agent of revolution against the present dictatorship […]
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Victorians and Edwardians did terrible, cruel things in the name of Malthus and Darwin. by Philip Hall The cast system is inhuman. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) seems impossibly cruel. Look at the Taliban: Malala got a bullet in the head just for going to school. Look at forced marriage, at child marriage. How can that […]
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Now AI is Coming for the Middle-Class By Emil Blake In 1925 a Russian economist, called Nikolai Kondratiev published a book called Major Economic Waves in which he predicted the rise and fall of economic prosperity driven by new, era-defining technologies. The crux of it, according to Kondratiev, was that economic cycles last 40-60 years. […]
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What do you do when the cure does you more harm than the disease? You stop taking it. Controversially, James Tweedie puts forward an argument for lock-down to be lifted. By James Tweedie, Plymouth, England, Friday May 15 th 2020 The prescribed treatment for the COVID-19 pandemic, a disease without a cure or vaccine, has […]
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WHAT IS TO BE DONE? By Phil Hall The British Disease is passive aggression. It is class hatred not class warfare. Class warfare is healthy, it leads to revolution and change. Class hatred, on the other hand, results in ordinary people giving Boris Johnson a large majority because they have decided they don’t like middle […]
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The demoralisation of grassroots Labour. By Paul Halas The Stroud Labour CLP meeting to nominate its preferred leadership candidate back in January was packed, yet the atmosphere was sober and subdued. Members were permitted a two minute slot to talk up their choices, with the majority speaking for Starmer, citing his electability, his dependability, the […]
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