The rest of the blog
Trump’s tariff war is not about economic nationalism, it’s a desperate attempt to prop up a failing system through class warfare, digital authoritarianism, and mass repression. As capitalism stumbles deeper into crisis, the dominant class turns to protectionism, billionaire governance, and algorithmic control to maintain its grip, ensuring that workers, migrants, and the global precariat bear the cost.
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.
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.
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.
America’s War on Terror may have ended, but its brutal legacy lives on as Trump resurrects its worst excesses, using Guantánamo Bay to detain migrants in a grotesque expansion of the carceral state.
The Trump administration’s second term is proving to be not a resurgence of American power, but a chaotic acceleration of its decline, marked by incoherence, reactionary bluster, and an open invitation for geopolitical adversaries to fill the void left by its retreat.
As revelations of systemic misogyny and abuse in prominent UK trade unions expose the corrupt old boys’ networks still clinging to power, sisters betrayed by false promises of reform continue their brave struggle for gender equality from below.
Allegations of Hamas ties among some UNRWA staff spark tensions amid Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and the settler community’s escalating far right rhetoric against Palestinians, written by Simon Pearson.
Decades of incremental climate action have utterly failed to spur the urgent systemic transformation needed to address the worsening climate crisis. Therefore, radical eco-socialist change involving confrontational civil disobedience targeting the continued use of fossil fuels may now be the only morally justifiable pathway left to break the stranglehold of capitalism and give humanity a chance at a livable future.
The following recently published articles criticise the weaponisation of rape allegations to justify a brutal military action against Palestinians in Gaza. The authors contend that propagandistic reporting and double standards reveal deep-rooted racism used to advance the oppression of Gazans.
Simon Pearson analyses the multifaceted documentary Israelism and the difficult questions it raises about ideology, identity, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Simon Pearson argues that Marxists must revive class-based language and analysis of capitalism’s exploitation to connect today’s diverse struggles against inequality and build mass working class power.
The recently published Oxfam report revealing that the world’s five richest men doubled their wealth during the pandemic while billions were made poorer spotlights the obscene inequality generated by global capitalism and highlights the urgent need for systemic change centered on collective ownership and democratic control of workplaces and resources by the working class.
The chaos of the “traditional” Boxing Day hunts has ended, with the saboteurs doing all they could to disrupt the hunts; yet we still saw a fox ripped apart by an out-of-control packs of hounds. It’s now time for the Labour Party to commit to ending the blood sport of the ruling class once and for all.
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s time to reflect on the most compelling and insightful reads of the year. In this roundup, I recommend five books spanning climate disaster, digital privacy, the Trump era’s threat to democracy, Marxist theory, and life under Israeli occupation, describing how each illuminates the complex issues defining this moment.
“All I Want for Christmas is You (to Buy Stuff) or Your Exploited Joy,” provides a Marxist and Situationist critique of how the capitalist class has commodified Christmas into a spectacle of consumption that fuels exploitation, alienation, and hollow aspirations.