Over the last five years, I’ve been writing about forgiveness – not all forgiveness though, rather one minority strand of that practice, of a particular and unruly sort. Two events made me interested in forgiveness. One was the 2013 crisis on the British left, when one of our largest groups was sundered by a leader […]
A piece about the Bund’s Arkadi Kremer, the ethical content of his socialist politics, and where it fits in the history of Marxist thinking about morality May in the global lefty reading calendar is the month to work through Molly Crabapple’s new book on the Jewish Bund. Launched four weeks ago before a crowd of […]
Here are some thoughts on ICI, and Amu Gib’s, results. To me, this feels too soon – I’m still too exhausted to think – but a scourge of opinions are already out there already. Please treat this not as anyone’s official draft, but something intended to start a conversation. There are many things ICI did […]
Over the last 40 years, people who write about Marx have reached a consensus that he had a worked-out, if subtle, theory of how to live. Norman Geras’s book Marx and Human Nature argues that Marx wanted people to have access to food, water, clothing, shelter, rest, conditions of good health, and a chance to […]
One of the most powerful claims made by second wave feminism is the idea that the personal is political; in other words that the choices all of us make about who we live with, how we live with them (who cooks, who cleans, who keeps the house going) are political. They determine how resources are […]
Most people have a political morality. There are principles we use to decide when the people in charge of our society are heading in a direction which you could call “bad but tolerable”, and when things are so bad that you need to be shouting out in protest. I’m not going to set out here […]
It was summer 1986, and the kid in front of me in the backroom of his father’s Midlands shop was trying to explain the new game from its rulebook. Lawful creatures, he told me, try to tell the truth. “If a choice must be made between the benefit of a group or an individual, a […]
Or, is it fair to be cross with a film that doesn’t want to be any good? Three weeks ago, Circus Film Studios brought out a feelgood comedy ‘Mother’s Pride’ about a pub-owning family. Mick Harley (acted by comedy veteran Martin Clunes) is the landlord of the Somerset pub, The Drovers Arms. His business is […]
From autumn 1970 till summer 1971, the beatnik poet, translator of Victor Serge, and future Marxist critic of the anti-psychiatry movement Peter Sedgwick was living in Queens, a borough of New York. One October evening, he left the Sociology class he’d been teaching to spend an evening with the city’s International Socialists. The reason Sedgwick […]
Here’s a phrase I learned this week: faecal tenesmus. It describes when happens when your feelings are based on error. In this case, the part of me doing the feeling is the nerves around my bowel. My brain is convinced that I am carrying around a huge, bulking, swagger-bag of excess waste, which it is […]
