anti capitalist musings

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Bossware

Stop, Go, Smile: The New Discipline of Bossware

From PwC’s colour-coded attendance dashboard to HSBC’s biometric checkpoints and the rise of Algorithmic Affect Management, the new wave of “bossware” represents less an innovation than the latest stage in capital’s long history of making workers legible. What began with the factory bell and the punch clock now extends to our faces, moods, and keystrokes.

Corbynism

The Party of Good Intentions

Zarah Sultana’s interview in Sidecar captures the anger at Labour’s complicity in genocide and austerity, but it risks becoming another broad reformist project, haunted by the ghosts of Corbynism—vulnerable to sect capture, parliamentary illusions, and the same popular-front logic that has historically disarmed the working class.

A satirical cartoon shows a battered wooden puppet painted with the Union Jack dangling limply on strings. The marionette is worn, chipped, and cracked, symbolising a weakened Britain. Behind it loom two large shadowy figures: one in a Nazi uniform, the other resembling Vladimir Putin. Both extend their hands to manipulate the strings, casting an ominous, ghostly control over the puppet.
History

The Faragist Fantasy: Britain Should Have Backed Hitler

Nigel Farage’s TikTok wunderkind wants us to imagine a Britain that never fought Hitler, kept its colonies, and models itself on Bukele’s prison state. This is not contrarianism; it is fascist nostalgia dressed up as common sense.

Donald Trump–like figure dressed in a tuxedo clapping enthusiastically, standing beside a stern Vladimir Putin–like figure holding a chained brown bear. The background is a dark curtain, giving the scene a theatrical, vaudeville atmosphere.
Donald J Trump

The Last Superpowers

Alexander Dugin calls the Trump–Putin summit in Anchorage “splendid,” insisting the US and Russia must find an “understanding as superpowers.” The problem is that this fantasy of bipolar order flatters two declining states while obscuring the real forces shaping the 21st century.

Donald J Trump

Trump’s Civil War Rehearsal

With armed red-state troops patrolling a blue city, Trump is not protecting Washington; he is rehearsing the mechanics of civil war.

A satirical illustration of a grand Gothic-style university building with a large sign out front that reads: “CLOSED TO THE LIKES OF YOU,” highlighting the exclusion of ordinary people from higher education.
Higher Education

Universities Were Never Meant for You

Every August, the right reheats its old contempt for higher education. Their complaint is not about debt or “Mickey Mouse” degrees, it is about closing the gates of knowledge, keeping universities for the dominant class and consigning everyone else to warehouses and call centres.

A black-and-white satirical cartoon depicts a stern Daily Mail journalist dressed as a judge in full wig and robe, holding a gavel in one hand and a sign reading “GUILTY” in the other. He stands on a gallows platform beside a hanging noose, with the caption below reading “JUDGE, JURY AND EXECUTIONER.” The title “DAILY MAIL” looms overhead, suggesting the paper acts as a one-man court of condemnation.
Gaza

Hodges’s Courtroom: Palestine Action on Trial

Dan Hodges’s Mail column denouncing Palestine Action as “terrorists” is not journalism but ideological policing, an attempt to criminalise dissent while excusing the real violence: Britain’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction.

Unbinding the State: On Suella Braverman’s Plan to Leave the ECHR

Braverman’s plan to leave the ECHR isn’t legal reform, it’s preparation for rule without restraint. Like the ERG before her, she wraps authoritarian ambition in the language of sovereignty. Strip away the rhetoric and what’s left is a state unbound, a state that punishes, not protects. If she jumps to Reform UK, this plan becomes reality.

Time to Face Facts: Bayrou, Budget Bombshells, and the Unthinkable Truth About Fortress Europe

Europe is not being overrun—it’s running out. Of workers, of births, of time. François Bayrou’s budget bombshell is less about fiscal rules than demographic reckoning. Fortress Europe clings to nostalgia while the tax base collapses. No amount of white-baby fantasies or border theatre will reverse the maths. The future demands what no mainstream party dares admit: migration, not austerity, is the condition of survival.

A vintage, protest-style print featuring two empty wooden podiums positioned in front of large, grainy depictions of the UK and German flags. The image has a textured, screen-printed look in a red, black, and beige palette, evoking the visual language of 1968 political posters. The flags loom behind the podiums, slightly distorted and overlaid with halftone grit, suggesting absence, power, and ideological theatre.

The Treaty’s in the Mail

What began as rupture has returned as routine. Brexit survives not in open defiance, but in the quiet enforcement of borders, the bureaucratic choreography of treaties, and the managed reintegration of a Britain that still won’t say its name.

A diamond-shaped, weathered yellow road sign stands against a backdrop of dark storm clouds. The sign reads "END OF THE WORLD*" in bold black letters, with a small asterisk. Below it, in smaller text, the caption reads "*IF PUTIN HAS HIS WAY." The sign appears aged and rusted, evoking a sense of dystopia and looming catastrophe

Dugin Watch: The Mad Prophet of Multipolarity

Dugin’s latest tract is less geopolitics than geopolitical psychosis. An unhinged blend of Orthodox ultranationalism, fascist paranoia, and terminal online posting. But buried in the hallucinatory sprawl is a blueprint for what Russia’s ideological vanguard now sees as the next phase: war with Europe, justified not by security, but by metaphysics.

After Le Pen

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

Not Again

Another boat sinks, more bodies wash up, and Europe’s leaders repeat the same empty promises, yet the boats keep coming, because they must.

No to racism graphic from the NPA

The Real Forces Behind Le Pen’s Rise

Marine Le Pen’s rise in French politics, often attributed to immigration and crime, is more accurately understood as a reaction to the economic exploitation and inequality perpetuated by the capitalist system.