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 graphic poster with a textured, warm brown background. At the centre is the BRICS 2025 logo: a stylised, symmetrical burst of colourful triangles forming a tree-like shape, using vivid red, orange, yellow, green, and blue tones. Beneath the logo, bold black text reads “BRICS,” followed by “BRASIL 2025” and the Portuguese phrase “SUL GLOBAL INCLUSIVO E SUSTENTÁVEL.” The overall design evokes a mid-century political aesthetic with modern international symbolism.

When Principles Are Selective: BRICS, the Global South, and the Silence on Ukraine

BRICS condemns the bombing of Gaza and strikes on Iran with the language of international law, civilian protection, and sovereignty. But when it comes to Ukraine (a country invaded by one of its founding members) the silence is deafening. This isn’t a blind spot. It’s the logic of bloc politics. BRICS positions itself as a voice for the Global South, an alternative to Western hypocrisy, but it has its own double standards. Anti-imperialism loses its meaning if it only runs one way. The emerging multipolar order may be less Western, but it is not necessarily more just.