capitalism Archives - Andrew Blackman

Reading

Stories of Racism and Retail Hell: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Race and capitalism in America should be fertile ground for literary fiction. This year’s Black Friday shopping frenzy brought the usual bout of stabbings and shootings to add to the overall death count, not to mention the looming environmental collapse that…

Reading

Capitalism & Slavery

This book does an excellent job of showing exactly how the development of British capitalism was dependent on slavery. The author is Eric Williams, an obscure PhD student at the time of writing, but later in life to become Prime Minister…

Thinking

The only possible system

Capitalism, we are told, is the only possible system. Anything else is impractical dreaming. Capitalism delivers prosperity, stability, growth… except when it doesn’t. The credit crunch is nothing new – remember the Asia currency crisis, the Russian debt crisis, Black…

Reading

“Anarchy” by Errico Malatesta

With the G20 protests engulfing London this week, and anarchy briefly replacing terror as the bogeyman du jour, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at what anarchism is really all about, according to Errico…

Thinking

Consume less, live more!

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OPFl2Kxhs&hl=en&fs=1] From Friends of the Earth, https://www.foei.org/en/get-involved/livemore. Seen originally as a cartoon in New Internationalist, August 2008

Reading

The Shock Doctrine

New Left Review 48 carries an interesting review by Michael Hardt (co-author of “Empire”) of Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine. Makes me want to read the book. Klein, according to Hardt, draws a parallel between the electric shock…

Thinking

Marxism 2007: Day Four (Sunday)

“Cuba after Castro” was a great talk, with one small problem: it wasn’t about Cuba after Castro. The speaker, Mike Gonzalez, focused most of his talk on Cuba under Castro, and spent only the last few minutes talking about Cuba…

Thinking

The crime of compassion

Sometimes I think I have become so cynical that I am no longer capable of feeling true outrage. I have come to expect fascism, brutality and heartlessness from my elected leaders as a matter of course. But every now and…

Thinking

How we used to be

You may remember the vague speculation in my earlier Cutty Sark post about community being traditionally much more important to human beings than competition, and therefore being something we always reach back to even though contemporary society has more or…