21 October 2013
Central to us on the left is the dilemma of a seemingly indifferent working class to the changes that impact directly not only on our material well-being but on the corporatisation of our cultural lives. Some argue that it’s down to the prevailing sense of powerlessness as the gulf between those who govern and the governed, deepens and widens. But there is perhaps another explanation for our disenfranchisement; the role of the ‘middle class’ as a mechanism of social control.
17 September 2009
“It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do; and which shall be done under such conditions as would make it neither overwearisome nor over-anxious.” — William Morris, ‘Art and Socialism’.
William Morris’s News from Nowhere, his future history of a ‘return’ to an idealized vision of a pre-capitalist society, part feudal, part agrarian socialism, I read when I was a teenager, and perhaps oddly, I also read it as a science fiction story.
11 July 2008
I was raised in a working class family. My father was a full-time trade union official for the Musicians Union and my mother, before she became a full-time ‘housewife’, had been a chorus girl working in pantomime and a member of the Tiller Girls (the Brit version of The Rockettes) and during WWII she worked in a factory making bomb sights at Fry’s Diecasting where she campaigned on behalf of the female workers for equal pay (in the face of opposition from the male-run union). Not exactly typical of working class life but definitely of it.
10 June 2004
To continue my sojourn into the Victorian era it’s also worth looking at the raft of regurgitated Victorian ‘scientific solutions’ that have accompanied the right wing agenda pursued by both the US and UK governments for a decade or more.
October 1987 — InvestigatingImperialism
Pre-amble: This essay was written in 1987 before the domination of Microsoft, at a time when I thought that the people running Apple computer had their act together. How wrong can you be! In other respects however, many of the ideas and concepts advanced in this essay have come to pass in a most fundamental way. I might add that unknown to me between 1987 and as late as 2002, this essay has been reprinted many times, the latest being as part of an anthology titled ‘Engineering Culture‘, Autonomedia, NY, 2005.
Investigating Imperialism 