anti capitalist musings

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After Le Pen

Marine Le Pen is out of the race, but her party is preparing for power.

Black Earth, Still Water

This book is about the fens. I live on the edge of the fens, a flat place. When the wind blows it stops for no one. But the fens are not about wind. They are about earth and water. Black earth.

graphic for the image

The Emperor’s Nurse

Whipple’s Uncharted is less a chronicle of Trump’s comeback than an unflinching autopsy of a decaying liberal order that mistook gerontocracy for stability and denial for strategy

Memorex Mini-Disc

Choice

Choice is meant to liberate us, but what if it does the opposite? In the shift from physical to digital media, the promise of having everything at our fingertips has eroded the way we engage with culture itself.

The Inevitable Decline

As the American empire stumbles towards decline, Mark Fisher’s analysis of capitalist realism, the slow cancellation of the future, where crisis is managed rather than solved, finds its ultimate expression in Trumpism, the rise of the billionaire tech elite, and the ruling class’s increasing reliance on authoritarianism and reactionary culture wars to sustain its grip. This article traces the roots of US decline back to the 1970s, when Nixon and Reagan dismantled the post-war social contract, paving the way for financial speculation, deindustrialisation, and the monopolisation of power by tech oligarchs, before examining how today’s political and economic landscape is setting the stage for fascism.

doge.gov home page as it appeared in early February 2025

Algorithmic Authoritarianism

The age of algorithmic authoritarianism is here: governance has been outsourced to billionaire-controlled social media and AI systems that manipulate reality, suppress dissent, and enforce ideological obedience through predictive algorithms and digital surveillance.