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Standalone interesting political articles thread

Idris2002 said:
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Interesting article about Ethel Mannin and her novel Comrade O Comrade. Forgotten today, Mannin was famous enough in her time: this book of hers skewers the pretensions of London parlour pinks by contrasting them with a horny handed Irish son of toil.

Comrade O Comrade: A Forgotten Satire of the British and Irish Left
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Read this novel a couple of years of ago. Sadly, it's not that good. I write sadly because I paid over the odds for a copy of it, AND because I got really excited about it when I first read about it. There are a couple of novels/novellas from the same period which are far funnier at skewering the pretensions of the left: Grey Lynn's The Return of Karl Marx (Marx 'wakes up' in wartime London, and decides to attend a few political meetings held in his name) and Marghanita Laski's Love On The Supertax.
 
imposs1904 said:
Read this novel a couple of years of ago. Sadly, it's not that good. I write sadly because I paid over the odds for a copy of it, AND because I got really excited about it when I first read about it. There are a couple of novels/novellas from the same period which are far funnier at skewering the pretensions of the left: Grey Lynn's The Return of Karl Marx (Marx 'wakes up' in wartime London, and decides to attend a few political meetings held in his name) and Marghanita Laski's Love On The Supertax.
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The long suffering Mrs Idris sent me this issue of the Irish Democrat in which Leslie Daiken basically destroys Mannin's pretensions:

http://www.connollyassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/031-Jul47.pdf
 
butchersapron said:
Maybe one for gawkrodger - the book anyway:

The Center Has Fallen and There's No Going Back - Phil Neel talks to Paul Mattick

One of the big points in the book is that the unrest we’ve seen over the past decade was largely not taking place in the hinterland, and that’s one reason it was so easily crushed. The areas that saw it bleed into the hinterland more readily also saw the most successful insurrections, which then had to be destroyed in more nefarious ways. But the dynamic was really one in which people who lived in peri-urban proletarian neighborhoods or even rural areas entered into the downtown core in an attempt to draw attention and disrupt the normal flow of the city. During Occupy, for example, I worked in a wholesale food processing facility in one of Seattle’s southern industrial stretches and lived nearby. In the evenings I would take the train downtown in order to join the protests. The irony here is that the real ability to “shut things down” lay not in the city’s public square, but precisely in the neighborhoods that I lived and worked in. Meanwhile, the downtown cores of almost every major city are literally built with counterinsurgency in mind. So one of the real problems we see is this persistent inability of unrest to take place within the hinterland, because politics is so often seen as being about visibility, or “raising awareness.” Since so much of the hinterland is invisible, it’s just not attractive for these purposes. But when we shift the emphasis from visibility to questions of power, it’s clear that the near hinterland is of central importance.
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One of the best books I've read for a long time. Excellent, thanks for the heads-up butchersapron
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
One of the best books I've read for a long time. Excellent, thanks for the heads-up butchersapron
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Just finished it myself - some top notch writing in there:

...that vast hostage situation called “the economy”
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and something for the brexit thread:

To be slightly more concrete, they are those urbanites who woke up on the morning after the election and looked around themselves in shock, as if someone had tied ropes around their ankles and dragged them out into the rust- spattered American bloodlands while they slept. Their expressions utterly ashen, they frantically tapped their phones trying to order an Uber to take them back home. But the Uber would never come. They earnestly could not conceive of a world in which Hillary had not won. How could people be so utterly crazy, they asked themselves, before scouring Facebook for a litany of responsible parties—racist ruralites, third-party voters, those infinitely troublesome anarchists, or that vast majority party in American politics: the faithless zealots of the “Did Not Vote” ticket.
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flypanam said:
This one from (of all places) Teen Vogue!
Is It Time for America's Industries to Strike All at Once?
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“Historically speaking, the general strike is incredibly successful since it completely shuts down the functions of the economy,” author and union organizer Shane Burley tells Teen Vogue. “This is really the foundation of the power workers have under capitalism, to withhold their labor and undermine capital. Because a general strike affects the economy so broadly, it gives workers a huge bargaining chip to make massive societal demands — not just in one workplace, but of capital across all sectors.”
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Surprisingly good, thanks. Teen Vogue!?
 
for a while theres been articles and talking from people like Pinker and Gates who are determined to prove capitalism is actually good and everyone has never had it so good. This has led to some exchanges and I thought ths one was useful in countering what is basically cunts giving ideological cover to cunts under the guise of ideology free, non political Science. Hey its just numbers man.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-02-04/a-letter-to-steven-pinker-about-global-poverty/
 
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/...B7SXbm3vBhcnaAmXcXkCrWMvYrHD6B5iQfPADoyKOwfDs

As a “big S” Socialist, my reading habits often surprise liberals. I’m a writer, though my biggest audience comes from the listenership of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist comedy podcast. This makes me something of a curiosity among my colleagues at traditional media institutions—staffed largely by liberals—so I often find myself explaining my preference for the pink paper of liberal capitalism over the Gray Lady of cultural liberalism. The answer is simple: by literally any measure, the Financial Times is just a better paper. It covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.
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There are psychological factors at play: denial, certainly, which we see in the constant reassurance of the Times’s #resistance readership that this was all a big mistake and that Daddy is coming to save them any day now. But as a good Marxist, I must point out that ideology and its attendant publishing philosophies are largely the product of market forces. Public broadcasting institutions like the BBC can remain dull and informative. FT’s reportage serves a readership that gambles on world events. The New York Times compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated. Just look at the “Trump Bump,” the 66 percent increase in profits the paper enjoyed from exhausting every possible iteration of commentary, speculation, or tirade about The Donald.
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The greatest factor in the decline of liberal journalism, however, is the decline of the Left itself. In the absence of labor desks at local papers and a vibrant trade union movement to fund working-class publications, the labor beat goes largely unreported, or merely reported within the confines of an egregiously bourgeois myopia. Take #MeToo, a “movement” to combat the scourge of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. The media obsessively focused on wealthy movie stars and high-profile women in (you guessed it) the media. If readers had zero knowledge of the US and they picked up the Times, they might assume these rich, famous women are the most vulnerable women in the world, and not, as it is, the exact opposite. (FT is no Studs Terkel, but as a paper of capitalism its editors at least keep the focus on policy and women at work, without trying to pass endless lurid celebrity gossip off as feminist journalism.)
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Another name for this article could be "Why the New York Times is going down the pan".
 
yikes

The rangers believed that Shikharam helped his son bury a rhinoceros horn in his backyard. They couldn’t find the horn, but they threw Shikharam in their jail anyway, court documents filed by the prosecution show.

Nine days later, he was dead.

An autopsy showed seven broken ribs and “blue marks and bruises” all over his body. Seven eyewitnesses corroborated his wife’s account of nonstop beatings. Three park officials, including the chief warden, were arrested and charged with murder.

This was a sensitive moment for one of the globe’s most prominent charities. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) had long helped fund and equip Chitwan’s forest rangers, who patrol the area in jeeps, boats, and on elephant backs alongside soldiers from the park’s in-house army battalion. Now WWF’s partners in the war against poaching stood accused of torturing a man to death.

WWF’s staff on the ground in Nepal leaped into action — not to demand justice, but to lobby for the charges to disappear. When the Nepalese government dropped the case months later, the charity declared it a victory in the fight against poaching. Then WWF Nepal continued to work closely with the rangers and fund the park as if nothing had happened.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/wwf-world-wide-fund-nature-parks-torture-death
 
LRB · Ian Jack · Why did we not know?: Who is hoarding the land?
Christophers estimates that since 1979 the state has sold about two million hectares – about a tenth of Britain’s landmass – which at today’s prices would be worth £400 billion, ten times the amount realised by its most valuable component, the sale of social housing. His estimate includes land qua land such as forests, artillery ranges and municipally owned farms; and land as an inherent element in other privatisations such as electricity generation and social housing. (On average – that is, for all kinds of housing – land now accounts for 70 per cent of a house’s sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent.) When Thatcher entered Downing Street in May 1979, more land was owned by the state than ever before: 20 per cent of Britain’s total area. Today the figure is 10.5 per cent. The disposals include council houses, forests, farms, moors, royal dockyards, military airfields, railway arches, railway sidings, museums, theatres, playgrounds, parks, town halls, bowling greens, allotments, children’s centres, leisure centres, school playing fields. There has been in Christophers’s words ‘a colossal devaluation of the public estate’, and not one that came about by accident. This was a project determined and driven by the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, a project that in the forty years since its inception has never been seriously studied, let alone contested or protested, and shows no sign of letting up. In his introduction, Christophers suggests that the book’s British readers keep a puzzle at the back of their minds as they follow his disclosures: why did I not know about this before?
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