Arriving in Kansas City from London sometimes feels like being a messenger from the future. The place where I grew up has been subject to enormous speculation on residential real estate over the last 25 years. In the neighbourhood where…
A note on denazification, because lots of people have not understood the issue. Meanwhile this BBC report comes to the disturbing conclusion that because neo-Nazis in the Ukraine are a small force, and because they are fighting on the correct…
Away with all your monuments. Yet today, again, we are compelled to monumentalise. It is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Little liberation it was: of the 1.3 million Jews sent there, over a million were murdered. The…
All of capital will put on its liberal mask, and claim it is glad to be done with that man. The rich and the powerful will, for a few short weeks, pretend to rejoice with “normal folk” in their relief.…
I am glad the election is over, because through the weeks of opportunism, integrating myself into the campaign, I have watched myself getting stupider. It has felt like lopping off, day by day, each organ of perception. Sometimes the cause…
A central problem of radical politics today is the confusion of oppression with persecution. Often the malign volition of the oppressor has been elevated to the highest question of why and how oppression happens. The fact that oppression operates upon…
“Prison spaces” Boris Johnson chose to announce his flagship “law and order” policies in the Mail on Sunday, a paper in which comment tends from “lock them up and throw away the key” to “bring back hanging”, with every brutal…
“Golden Age” On 25 July 2019, Johnson set out his plans in his statement on priorities for the government. The conceit of his speech was to shuttle between the pragmatics of policy and governance, via panegyrics to optimism and a…
Half the population is “fed up.” To express being “fed up” means to be a middle aged man, and to shout a lot (so lots of fed up people, who are neither men nor loud nor middle aged have no…
About two years ago I posted about how to spot “left-wing antisemitism.” I have now, after quite a lot of consideration, decided that my previous analysis was theoretically weak. So here is a reconsideration – in which I make an argument…
Next week the UCU (University and Colleges Union), which represents most people working as lecturers and researchers in universities, is beginning a wave of strikes. The strike is about cuts to pensions. Since there is a large financial hole in…
My ill-advised tuppenceworth on ’Cat Person’: There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and…
The following text was written for Facebook a week after the fight between trans* activists and transmisogynist feminists in Hyde Park in September. Since these issues have come up once again – this time at the Anarchist Bookfair – and…
Today is world mental health day. Lots of friends have already posted extraordinary things. I just wanted to write about one point: the ubiquity of cognitive behavioural therapy within current treatments. For nearly all minor mental health problems (anxiety, depression,…
Last week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I’m also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being…
1. Contemporary capitalism rarely appears simple. Back in 1848 Marx wrote in the opening of The Communist Manifesto about how “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a…
I don’t want to hear Theresa May going on about “our values, our country, and our way of life” as though there are a bunch of other places in the world where everyone thinks it’s just fine when children get…
It was suggested to me that I make some notes on my experience of CBT that I have to do at the moment, so here is a rather fragmentary thing from the first week penned last night when my sleeping…
I spend a lot of time thinking about Charlotte Beradt. She was a Jewish communist, a collector and translator, but little is known of her. During the 1930s in Berlin for reasons we still don’t know entirely, she collected dreams…
“They understand how to pose subtle and sophisticated questions, but they swamp the sewers of their questions with the tidal sludge of their answers – that unfiltered wealth which is beneficial for a few and detrimental to almost everyone.” –…
I don’t know how many people caught this video (below) that Jeremy Corbyn put out, made of excerpts from his speech at the Fabian Society earlier in the week. The first half in particular is striking because of its choice…
This is probably the wrong place to write this. Everyone knows the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, where Marx talks about how society is dividing ever more into two great classes in struggle. The history of a lot of Marxism…
1940-41 mark Disney’s greatest experiment with Ballet, and particularly with the sounds of Paris two to three decades earlier, and the Ballet Russes. And while only explicitly this can be found in the Rite of Spring in Fantasia so are…
What happened at Byron has brought back memories of the terrible events at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2009, when all the cleaners were summoned to a meeting, the doors were locked, and then the UK Border Agency…
I. Renaming the Cosmos No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. – NRSV The names we call the cosmos are given in…
1) There will be no second referendum.2) Big capital, most of the politicians in the UK and EU, and a large part of the British population do not want Brexit to go ahead.3) A general election will be held in…
One of the arguments that comes up time and again in discussions of Israel and the oppression of Palestinians goes, “and the Jews ought to know better because of what was done to them by the Nazis.” The argument is…
There is a lot of chatter today about what is meant by Zionism, whether our definitions of it are correct, and how we address its twinned histories – of 19th century nationalism and of state-building in the mid-20th century, of…
[This piece was originally published on Novara Wire a month ago. It has since been taken down so I’m putting it back up here, as it’s hopefully useful for the campaign. Thanks to the Novara team for edits!] “The cleaners…
Since I’ll hopefully be leaving Bloomsbury at some point after about 7 years of involvement in various struggles (cleaners campaigns at UCL/Senate House/Birkbeck/SOAS; anti-fees movements; occupations at UCL/Birkbeck/SOAS; Cops off Campus; a few UCU and Unison strikes) I thought I’d…
It would really help if people wouldn’t keep insisting that it doesn’t exist. It does. And unfortunately you do find it more often in those parts of the left engaged in pro-Palestinian activism. It may be true that Zionists will…
I don’t normally write to my MP but today I made an exception. This is what I said: Dear Ms Harman, As one whose hands are so blood-soaked already I can only imagine that you face the prospect of another…
My newsfeeds are full of communists and anarchists who think it’s of great significance that Jeremy Corbyn has opinions different to theirs. A dialectical commentary: 1) if when faced with opinion you respond with opinion, as though the two were…
I was having a chat about social reproduction with my housemates last night that got me thinking – and maybe this is a crazy idea. I’m pretty allergic to a lot of the theorising of “reproductive labour” that goes on…
On Politics and Newspapers In the essay on the metapsychology of dreams there is a footnote that describes the difficulty of the interpretation of dreams that deal with abstract ideas. Freud says, “We might compare it with the problem of…
Let’s be more explicit about debt. The question of default is not, as presented in the media, about a struggle between interested parties like any other contract. The matter is not about lent money and interest all floating financially in…
Today I finally got around to reading the letter the Church of England’s House of Bishops sent to the members of the church about the upcoming general election. It is a pretty middle-of-the-road document, the main point of which is…
On the question of squirting/female ejaculation that has been doing the rounds since some research was published last week saying that it’s just pissing: these scientists are of course the same idiotic positivist lot who spend their lives trying to…
Today I received a response to my letter from the Editor of 19th-Century Music Journal about their publication of a rather dubious essay which centred on the charge that Adorno was attracted to the Nazis’ utopian project: Dear Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Thanks…
Does anyone else reckon one of the big historical problems of the French Revolution was that it allowed those who repeated its mottos as if they had overcome history to believe also that they had overcome xenophobia and domination? If…
The correspondence below took place in January 2015, after 19th-Century Music published an article that tried to claim Adorno, a victim of Nazi policies, was himself a crypto-Nazi, whose thought continued a lineage from Klages and Heidegger. The response from…
The universities have truly become the spirit’s burial mounds, filled with the stink of corruption and immovable gloom. – Ernst Bloch I have learnt two things at university: in the entire history of university exams no candidate has ever written…
The text below is a letter/email I sent a couple of months ago, in response to a really wonderful article by Dr Daniel Greenberg that was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis back in 1990: “Instinct and Primary Narcissism…
I see some famous actress has made a speech launching the UN’s HeForShe campaign. The speech was aimed at men telling them that feminism is definitely not about man-hating while quoting Edmund Burke and offering such pearls of wisdom as…
What are those things in the centre of their mouths, that ringed silence, that crushed clock, screams of dead and flying things: as if all of their verbs, those private plazas, had coagulated, into nouns, and the nouns themselves something…
I got into university today to discover a sign in the library saying that Birkbeck College (one of the big universities that makes up the University of London) is no-longer going to be running its site 24 hours a day.…
Berta Lask, 1921, trans. Jack Zipes A boy and a girl walked together on a country road. They were carrying books and pencils in their knapsacks and heading toward school. Along the way the boy said, “We have our history…
Sometimes I’m happy that there seems to be a big conversation going on about labour and art – and what the labour in artworks is like. That is important, at least in understanding artworks’ social immersion, that they are inextricably…
No doubt that Jameson’s talk at the CUNY Graduate Centre will be watched by loads of people in the next few days. Here are a few critical notes that I’ve thrown together in the middle of the night immediately after…
1) It is striking how deep the will goes to fulfil idiotic demands from the state. I know of no single department in the UK that refuses to submit Research Exercise responses. In almost every department these exercises are a…