Awed by the Amazing Twentieth? Are the salaries of the best-paid 5% justified? How come they managed on much more modest incomes before the 1980s?
Degraded Globalisation. How the 1980s saw increasing inequality in the West. But also a fast rise by China, which resisted Neo-Liberal ideas.
Why the USA was always likely to fail in Iraq. What I wrote at the time, covering the first nine days of the war.
Ukraine – Kiev’s Five Day War Machine. What actually happened after rioters chased out the elected President. How they alienated the large minority who were not hostile to the Soviet past, and made the Russian-backed secession of Crimea almost inevitable. And the strong fascist connections.
Reinventing Normality in the 20th century. How modern “conservatism” borrowed many ideas from the left. And in the 1930s, was much closer to fascism than is generally realised.
The right hand of anarchy. Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s took an axe to the roots of Britishness. This is not how she saw it, of course. She genuinely believed that she was removing an excrescence on True Britishness. Nice theory, shame about the facts.
Hong Kong shanghaied. The true history of the ‘opium city’ created by Britain when it broke open China and forced it to accept Western values.
Why Business Success is a Mix of Skill and Luck. A review of Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.
Why ‘The Individual’ is a muddled idea. (From one viewpoint, the ‘average individual’ is a bronze-skinned hermaphrodite less than 5 feet tall. That comes from taking your abstractions a few degrees too far. )
Why Trotksy’s politics achieved nothing solid. Noting his clever observation that the Bolshevik / Menshevik split was between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ politics, but is inability to derive useful politics from this. And the interesting similarities and difference between him and Mao.
The Trotskyist Origins of the USA’s Neo-Cons. And older versions such as James Burnham‘s The Managerial Revolution, which inspited Orwell’s 1984.
The Limited Light of the European Enlightenment. The ways in which its aims were very different from what we have now. And how modern science tells us that Nature rambles and the moon don’t care.
Contraditions In Human Nature Make ‘Rational Self-Interest’ Unworkable. Even if people could be the ‘rational agents’ of Modernist thought, they’d still face the ‘Disagreement Between Anyone and Everyone’.
Market-Dominating Minorities Across the World. Jews in Europe as just one example of a global pattern.
Sir James Goldsmith: Rich, Loud and Ignorant. And how a lot of success was due to luck, including an unforeseeable bank strike in France that saved him from bankrupcy.
The World as a Global Night-Club. Written in connection with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. But making the general point that ‘global society’ is much more like a night-club than a village. People can see each other but mostly do not know each other.
Why I Call It a Global Night-Club. Expanding the idea.
How the British Empire Blighted Britain. Large parts of the British Isles are depopulated while wealth flows to London as a Global City.
Yeltsin’s Final Election and the Near-Return of the Russian Communists. The situation in 1996, when support for pro-Western elements was already collapsing. The situation which led to the rise of Putin.
Why the Web never evaded government control. (An article published in 2000, when almost everyone believed it was impossible to regulate or restrict.)
Civilisation Alley. Globalism before European Imperialism, considered as a broad band of advanced cultures from North-West Europe to South India, plus the sophisticated and diverse cultures of East Asia.
Bonfire Of The Vanities. The world after 9/11, as forseen at the end of 2001.
How Roosevelt’s New Deal Saved the West. And what he said about parasitic finance.
Anti-Globalisation in 2001. Why the main protestors were “rebels without a clue”.
Remixing the Mixed Economy. A review of Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism.
The Unnatural Nature of Commerce. Far from arising from human nature, it is a gross distortion of what we mostly are.
British Democracy Began in 1884, at the earliest. The USA was not much better, maintaining racism into the 1960s.
The broad range of meanings that democracy can include. Also available as a PDF, Problems 14.
A criticism of David Miliband’s notion that Britain should try to impose its own model of democracy. From 2008, when he was Foreign Secretary.
The Radical Rightists of 1979. A review of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, by Christian Caryl.
David Hutton and “The State We’re In”, viewed from 2002.
From two magazines, Problems and Labour Affairs., with other old articles on the website.
Long Revolution 