Occupy The World! To the barricades comrades? By William Bowles

19 October 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Four years ago in a Ministry of Defence Review, the Whitehall Mandarins, more astutely than any so-called Lefty, determined the following:

“The Middle Class Proletariat — The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” — ‘UK Ministry of Defence report, The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036’ (Third Edition) p.96, March 2007

Capitalism: what a load of rubbish! By William Bowles

18 October 2011

Something has to be done about a world rapidly filling up with the (often poisonous) rubbish that capitalism produces in vast abundance. Rubbish that will be with us for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Even the middle of the Atlantic Ocean is carpeted with the stuff, mostly plastic waste of all kinds. Even the remotest corners of our once, largely pristine planet are now poisoned with the excreta of capitalism’s insane and so far, unstoppable and largely arbitrary productive capacity.

Who is the sick one here? By William Bowles

11 August 2011

Yesterday, 10 August our vainglorious pm announced that the communities from which it is alleged the ‘rioters and looters’ emanated from were “sick”. But more on who is really sick in our society later. In the meantime I’d like to pick up on an aspect of the state’s response (or apparent lack of) to the uprising that I referred to yesterday, namely my assertion that the forces of ‘law and order’ deliberately allowed fires to burn and shops to be looted, as it served to demonize the people involved as well as justifying the use of heavy firepower and a complete lockdown (which happened yesterday).

How about socialism for the rest of us By William Bowles

15 October 2008

“Come back Michael Foot, all is forgiven, could be the cry from the (old) Left as – who’d have thought it – the British state seizes the Queen’s overdraft or the state seizes the Queen’s bank account… (yes, Coutts bank, her bank, is part of RBS)” — Channel 4 News Email, 13 October, 2008

Sink or Swim in the capitalist ocean? By William Bowles

9 April 2008

When a group of so-called Aboriginals from I believe Borneo (or maybe it was Papua New Guinea) visited the UK recently they were gob-smacked to find homeless people on the streets of London. The concept ‘homelessness’ simply didn’t exist in their vocabulary and reinforced by the vast wealth that surrounded them (the ‘Aboriginal and the homeless). So too was the idea of the ‘nuclear family’. The concept of ‘living apart’ is totally alien to them.

The BBC’s hall of mirrors By William Bowles

26 August 2007

“However, especially in the years since Hutton, we’ve come to focus on it [public trust or rather, lack of it] first and foremost in the context of journalism. Accuracy, impartiality, resolute defence of our editorial independence, a willingness to acknowledge mistakes when we make them: meeting all these expectations simultaneously is an immense challenge in these complex, disputatious times, but it is what the BBC has to do.” — The BBC has squandered trust. But we will win it back Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, the Guardian, Friday August 24, 2007

Methinks ‘the lady doth protest’ just a little too much. More to the point, Thompson’s observations on the public’s lack of trust in the BBC uses the pathetic example of the furore over the promo on the Queen’s photo-shoot, not exactly at the cutting edge of BBC news and current affairs programming.

Book Review: Can’t see the wood for the trees? by William Bowles

18 March 2005

A Review of Caliban and the Witch – Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici

The subject of this book goes to the very heart of what it is to be a man or a woman in our world and as someone who feels very much to contain equal portions of both, it means delving into those areas of one’s ‘self’ that are the most vulnerable, what we choose to call our identities and attempting to reassess how we came to be what we are.

Unglued, unstuck, pear-shaped, wobbly…and sick By William Bowles

2 June 2003

Call it what you like, the events of the past week are a genuine watershed in the USUK campaign to sell the world ‘democracy’ out of the barrel of a gun. And even though the mass media still can’t bring itself to utter the words, ‘what are the real reasons?’ the desire to pursue the ‘story’ is so compelling that they just can’t let go of it. And the more Blair’s government rolls out one mouth after the other, to utter the words, ‘just you wait, have patience’, ‘we’ve got the evidence’, ‘you’ll see, we didn’t actually say that’, ‘read what we really said’, the more the media and critically, the public, look on in disbelief and increasingly, disgust.

Apologies – Remember to Remind Me By William Bowles

15 May 2003

‘If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own…. For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.’ — James Baldwin

‘First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.’ — Martin Niemoller