The noise and the thick black dust, shimmering and sparkling when hit by the light, were almost overwhelming. Just in front, a mighty mining machine continuously rotated along the thick face, its teeth ripping into the wall of coal, whereupon it then loaded great chunks of the black stuff onto a conveyor to take it […]
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Over the past forty years, we have experienced a massive shift of wealth from working people to the tiny minority in whose interests our society is run. Between 1955 and 1980, the average share of income spent on wages was 68 percent; post-1980 the average share dropped to 58 percent. This was also reflected in […]
Forty years have passed, but the cruelty of Margaret Thatcher’s vendetta against the miners isn’t over. Today, tens of thousands of former pit workers are losing billions in pension entitlements in a deal imposed on them decades ago. Successive governments have taken £4.4 billion out of the miners’ pension fund. Retired workers, meanwhile, struggle on […]
Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners, first published by Verso in 1994, remains an elementary text for socialists navigating the question of where established power truly resides in modern Britain. Reviewing the book at the time in the pages of Tribune, Tony Benn concluded: ‘Seumas Milne has written a major […]
The miners’ strike is often heralded as the beginning of the end for Britain’s once fearsome trade unions, the moment at which the backbone of workers’ organisation within industry was broken. Much less referenced (yet no less significant) was the manner in which the breaking of the miners, and subsequently the destruction of much of […]
One summer morning in Sheffield, a young Pakistani man stood beneath his friend’s bedroom window clutching a handful of pebbles. When Mukhtar Dar sent the pebbles sailing through the air, the thud against the windowpane woke up his friend Sadiq. It was 18 June 1984, and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had called for […]
Stephanopoulos brought the fire: No American president had ever faced a criminal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse. Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined by what’s happening in courtrooms than by what’s happening on the campaign trail. The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenants of democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.
Over the last quarter-century David Peace has helped to shape the meaning of historical memory in this country. Since the publication in 1999 of the first volume of his Red Riding Quartet — a suite of novels narrating the decay of social democracy and the rise of Thatcherism in a scarcely fictionalised West Yorkshire setting — Peace’s […]
It is ironic that one of the great challenges of political activism across borders is taking the obscure complexities of a globalised economy and making them legible and local. Even today, with so much direct visual evidence of exploitation and violence at our fingertips, apologists are quick to tell us that any given situation of […]
In 1977, Giorgio Moroder laid down the grid-like groove of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ and established a new electronic paradigm for pop. So began a period of machine-made acceleration that remains the conceptual bedrock of every sound in Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today, a book about our dreams of the […]
Sex, drugs, and midnight screenings of Eraserhead — Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s freewheeling and nostalgic documentary Scala!!! tells the story of the (in)famous London cinema that served the city’s outcasts, punks, and misfits from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. For much of its existence, the Scala cinema was based in pre-regeneration King’s Cross, […]
In my recent article in Small Wars & Insurgencies, Uncovering the sources of revolutionary violence: the case of Colombia’s National Front (1958-1964), I highlight how failures to secure consent through a passive revolutionary process compelled the dominant classes to adopt coercive solutions.
The post Passive Revolution and Armed Struggle in Colombia appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Four explosive tales of blood, spit, and venom.
The post The Animals That Turn Bodily Fluids into Weapons appeared first on Nautilus.
Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa posted that he is in NYC - and now we know that he will appear on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers on Wednesday.
It’s not very convincing Trump is highly, highly unlikely to testify in his NY hush money trial but he has been arguing his case (sort of) outside the courthouse every day. The NY Times did a fact check and it’s a doozy He said: “He puts in an invoice, or whatever, a bill. And they pay it and they call it a legal expense. I got indicted for that. What else would you call it? Actually nobody’s been able to say what you’re supposed to call it.”— last Monday The Times calls this false. Of course prosecutors know what to call them. They’re invoices for reimbursement of the $130,000 (plus taxes and bonus) second mortgage Cohen used to pay off Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet before the election. They call Cohen’s payments “illegal campaign contributions” and the invoices “reimbursement intended to falsify business records.” In no way were they “legal expenses.” He said “Also the things that he got in trouble for were things that had nothing to do with me. He got in trouble. He went to jail. This had nothing to do with me.
The Democrats and the Republicans are outdoing each other to prove who can get us to World War III fastest. Joe Biden and the Congressional Democrats are making a convincing bid to be the leading warmongers. The Congressional Democrats just voted unanimously in a vote of 210 – 0 to extend the Ukraine War with Continue reading »
An invitation: imagine a country wherein, as a matter of policy orientation, its 41 universities have abdicated one of their principal founding roles – to be dominant sites of secular critique practised by people capable of living what they teach and committed to taking aim at the unequal, imperial, antidemocrática present. Imagine, too, that this Continue reading »
In Northeast Asia a system of confronting military alliances – US/Japan/South Korea/Philippines vs China/Russia/North Korea – gradually takes shape, calling to mind nothing so much as the alliance system constructed in Europe in the decade leading up to 1914. The one today is no more likely to lead to peace and regional cooperation than was Continue reading »
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese leads a government supine in the face of Israeli genocide in Gaza. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, I refer to your interview by Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 7.30 Report, 2 April. You speak as if the Israel/Palestine crisis began on 7 October. You attribute blame for the carnage that follows Continue reading »
The regimes in Israel and Palestine both claim to be victims in the violence that engulfs them. Interpreting the situation through “victimhood” assists in understanding the human forces that arise from age-old conflicts and that continue to cause so much horrific suffering. Pope Francis is calling on people of goodwill to raise their voices for Continue reading »
Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have put their future in the Labor pantheon at high risk with their new protectionism. Sooner or later, a real Labor leader will emerge, and one of her first serious acts will be to turn the nation back towards its natural advantage in free trade. It will be harder for Continue reading »
Those with a dedicated interest in maintaining the status quo fear education in the wrong hands. America’s current moment illuminates trends in Australia’s education: from the draconian repression of US student protests against the probable genocide taking place in Gaza to the Republican campaign to destroy public education, we must take note. Campus protests against Continue reading »
Claims that industry assistance comes at a cost to other industries and consumers are too often right. Industry policy should therefore be limited to areas of identified market failure and requires tight evaluation of each case and that performance targets are met. Editor’s note: We apologise to the author, Michael Keating, and to our readers Continue reading »