anti capitalist musings

The rest of the blog

Close-up of a British two pence coin, copper-coloured, showing a heraldic lion in a crosshatched frame with fleur-de-lis corners and the words “TWO PENCE” at the top.
Labour Government

Rachel Reeves and the 2p Trap

The chancellor’s proposed income tax shuffle is clever accountancy but toxic politics — a pledge-break disguised as fiscal discipline, and proof that Labour has trapped itself in rules it cannot escape.

An illustration of a red fish (Herring) in profile against a pale background, with the words “RED TERROR” in bold black capitals beneath it.
Charlie Kirk

Red Herring, Not Red Terror

David Frost calls it a new “Red Terror.” The truth is plainer: it’s the Right’s wars, coups and crackdowns that have spilt the deepest blood in politics.

Donald J Trump

The Invention of the Narco-Terrorist

Trump’s latest “kinetic strike” killed three unknown Venezuelans he labelled “narco-terrorists.” The phrase is not law but incantation, a word that strips away humanity and legitimises killing. From Vietnam body counts to Obama’s “signature strikes,” America has always named its enemies into existence, and into death.

Britain

Beyond Creeping Fascism

To call Robinson’s rally “populist” or “right-wing” is to miss the point. Fascism doesn’t require every marcher to be a coherent ideologue; it requires a mass, a scapegoat, and leaders prepared to turn grievance into violence. That is what we saw in London.

Screenshot of a Telegraph article by Camilla Tominey titled “The killing of Charlie Kirk shows just how poisonous Left-wing politics now is,” with the subheading “Speech has consequences – we have once more learnt that lesson from the horrifying events in Utah.” Below the headline is a photo showing two people in jeans holding a poster with a portrait of Charlie Kirk.
Camilla Tominey

Tominey’s doublethink

Camilla Tominey’s sainthood act for Charlie Kirk trades politics for piety. The Right already owns the machinery (press, finance, courts, police) and Kirk was part of the drive shaft. A death certificate doesn’t wash clean a career built on making violence respectable.

Britain

Flatlining Growth, Rising Crisis

The ONS reports zero growth in July. The papers call it “grim news” for Rachel Reeves. In reality, it is the latest entry in a long obituary for British capitalism — a system now sustained only by euphemism, stagnation, and decline.

Front cover of Haywire by Andrew Hindmoor

Haywire Britain

Andrew Hindmoor’s Haywire offers a quietly devastating account of Britain’s long crisis, from Blair’s stage-managed optimism to Truss’s market-induced implosion, tracing how New Labour’s betrayals laid the foundations for a state that can no longer govern itself.

Front cover of Abundance By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

All This and Star Pills Too

Klein and Thompson promise a post-scarcity future powered by clean energy, AI, and vertical farms, but their liberal techno-optimism leaves untouched the class relations and ownership structures that produce crisis in the first place.

Front cover of the hardback book Who is Government?

The Last Bureaucrats

Michael Lewis has always been at his best when writing about finance, exposing the absurdities and myths of capital. Who Is Government? is a departure, an obituary for the administrative state, told through a series of essays by various writers.

Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Translated by David Broder

The People’s Tribune and the Sixth Republic

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Now, the People! Revolution in the 21st Century, published by Verso books, is a sweeping and urgent call for a citizens’ revolution, rooted in French republicanism but alive to the crises shaping political struggle across Europe and beyond.

Neil Faulkner: The Historian as Revolutionary

I knew the late Neil Faulkner, and I have always meant to review his last book; he was a storyteller, a fighter, and one of the great Marxist historians, someone who could hold a room and remind you that history is not past but struggle.

Front cover of Munichs snipped to fit.

David Peace’s Munichs

David Peace’s Munichs is not just a novel about the Munich air disaster, it is a novel about how tragedy lingers, how history is shaped in grief and uncertainty, and how disaster, in the absence of instant news, once unfolded in echoes and silence.

Front cover snip of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck showing the twi towers appearing from a cloud, looks menacing

Spectacle and Surveillance

This review explores how Richard Beck’s Homeland and Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly reveal the profound domestic and global consequences of America’s response to 9/11, from creeping authoritarianism at home to declining influence abroad.

Front cover of the book "Careless People"

Careless People

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People exposes Facebook’s internal reckoning with its role in political manipulation, revealing a company that prioritised engagement over ethics and profit over truth.

Photograph of Harlow Town railway station in 2007

Everything, Even Ruins, Is a Choice

The ruins Owen Hatherley documented over a decade ago, of modernist ambition, of public housing, of a Britain that once believed in itself, have only deepened, and with a new New Labour government poised to repeat the same failed housing policies, the cycle of speculation, privatisation, and social cleansing shows no sign of ending.