anti capitalist musings

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Book Review

The Woman Who Wasn’t There

Caroline Lane wasn’t looked for because the system didn’t need to see her. The system still got paid. That’s the quiet scandal at the heart of Saltwater Mansions. It begins as a mystery, a vanished woman, a locked flat, a pile of unopened post, but becomes something stranger and sadder: an inquiry into how a person can disappear while everything around them keeps functioning. David Whitehouse isn’t writing true crime. He’s writing about the grief we ignore, the relationships we don’t ask about, the neighbours we forget to see. What remains is not just absence, it’s a mirror.
Britain

The Migrant Crisis That Isn’t: Fear, Farage, Robinson and the Fantasy of Invasion

Tommy Robinson doesn’t live the life he claims to defend. He parachutes into protest scenes when there’s chaos to film, then jets off to sun himself abroad. He’s not the voice of the working class, he’s a voyeur of decline, turning grievance into spectacle for clicks and cash. What he sells isn’t solidarity. It’s resentment dressed up as nostalgia.

A man stands in front of a battered white minivan parked on an empty asphalt lot, holding a shotgun and aiming skyward. The van’s door is open, debris scattered inside. The sky is overcast and the scene feels desolate. Text above reads “SOVEREIGN” with festival laurels and cast names including Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay. The overall tone is bleak, tense, and distinctly American.
Film

“As long as I can keep the chains off”

A man, his car, and his gun. This is pure Americana, not the myth of reinvention, but the fantasy that remains when everything else is lost. Sovereign begins with poverty. The ideology comes later.
Jeremy Corbyn

The Macron Fantasy

John Rentoul has never understood the left. A Blairite to his core, he sees politics as something to be managed, not transformed. His call for Starmer to copy Macron isn’t about defeating Farage, it’s about using him. The aim isn’t to inspire, but to frighten voters back into line. Like Macron, Starmer doesn’t oppose the far right. He needs it.

Exporting Jobs, Importing Virtue: A Marxist Critique of Gary Smith’s Net Zero Position

Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.

A digital illustration features portraits of Donald Trump and Alexander Dugin side by side, rendered in bold red, orange, and black tones. Trump appears stern in a suit and tie, his expression tense, with an American flag pin on his lapel. Dugin gazes forward with a solemn intensity, his thick beard and unkempt hair highlighted by radiating orange rays behind his head, evoking a dark, iconographic halo. The background is a deep red gradient, reinforcing the dramatic and ideological tone of the piece.

Trump, Dugin, and the Eschatology of Reaction

Trump is no longer a politician in Dugin’s hands. He is a prophet who fell short. But the prophecy lives on. That’s how Dugin works: he turns failure into myth, betrayal into destiny. Putinism becomes the sacred, Trumpism the fallen. Everything is wrapped in theology, because the politics (when you look closely) aren’t up to much. It’s not tradition he’s defending. It’s accelerationism with a whiff of incense.

No One Is Above the Law—Not Even the SAS

The state demands loyalty from its killers, and contempt for those who ask why. To question the SAS is treated as heresy. To investigate them, as betrayal. But no one is above the law. Not even the men with night-vision goggles and state-sanctioned impunity. If the victims of British state violence are to be denied justice so that the myth of military virtue can remain intact, then we are not a democracy. We continue to be an empire that refuses to admit it.