“Being human means joyfully throwing your whole life ‘on the scales of destiny’ when need be, but all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.” (Rosa Luxemburg) “Dum spiro spero! [While there is life, there’s hope!] […] As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future […].” (Leon Trotsky) […]
“It would be difficult to deny the difficult days that the world is going through. One might say that the four horseman [sic] of the apocalypse have moved from a quiet trot to a full gallop and this increase in activity has been accompanied by the rise of Right-wing politics of various kinds which are […]
Globalisation – i.e., the time-space compression of the past twenty to twenty five years – is dialectical. A new phase of capitalism has given birth to contradictory tensions that have long been pregnant and kicking. Globalisation is an interplay of forces demanding the future and forces heralding the past. It straddles both static and motion. I’m with motion. […]
The following quotes are from “How We Live and How We Might Live” by William Morris (1884), and “America Under the Workers’ Rule” and “What Socialist America Will Look Like” by James P. Cannon (1953). Together they narrate a case for socialism as both a good idea and a feasible future reality, and cleanse and release socialism of distortion, pollution, […]
My deliberation on the question of the ritual circumcision of male minors on this blog (Scandinavia’s ritual circumcision debate: a socialist response and Ritual circumcision of male minors, and the political befuddlement of Eric Lee) started with a comment that I’d read by Frank Furedi, in which he tosses into a wave of European anti-immigration, anti-gay, and anti-abortion reactionarism: […]
I came to revolutionary socialist politics in 1996 at the age of nineteen. These two badges still have a deep affect on me – stirring a raw political passion for justice and a personal sense of responsibility to ‘do something’ in the face of injustice. Moreover, the badges are a reminder of the impact of two […]
Here is a podcast based on the lead-off that I gave at the 2014 Ideas for Freedom conference. I hope you find it of some political and intellectual use:
On the 1st May 2014 (International Workers’ Day) I attended a session titled “Intersectionality” at the launch event of the Free University of Sheffield. The strap line to the session – “checking our own privilege” – was a more accurate descriptor, since the session itself advanced privilege theory rather than explored intersectionality. Ideas on intersectionality […]
The independent Marxist and Orientalist scholar Maxime Rodinson is praised by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) for his “extraordinary achievements” and his “methodological self-consciousness”. For Said, Rodinson was one of an exceptional few who proved “perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old ideological straitjacket” of the Orientalist disciplines. Rodinson wrote the following books: Mohammed […]
“the construction and reproduction of the idea of ‘race’ is something that requires explanation.” (Miles, 1989: 73) I. The idea of ‘race’ Primarily to offer an explanation of European history and national formation, the idea of ‘race’ entered the English language in the early sixteenth century. The idea of ‘race’ came under scientific investigation from […]
