A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
A bureaucratic revolution in the late 19th century led to capitalism being organised by states and large corporations. This stage of 'state capitalism' is still with us and it involves the attempt to manage markets and accumulation through national bureaucracies. Its antithesis was called socialism, but after our experience in the 20th century, it may […] →Read more
The London bombings of 7 July have provoked an orgy of anxious introspection in the British media. Its chief focus has been the parlous condition of our national identity. How could four British men blow up themselves and scores of innocent commuters? If the second, failed round of bombings seemed to play into the phobias […] →Read more
Death of a Salesman seems to underscore the inhumanity of money–the relentless calculus of debt, disregard for human life and worth, enslavement to branded machines, the impersonality of ‘business’. But Arthur Miller was also concerned in this play with the other side of money–the magic and alchemy of Goethe’s Faust, Benjamin’s idea of capitalism as […] →Read more
France is notorious these days for two things – getting up the nose of the Americans (from French fries to ‘freedom’ fries) and banning the veil in schools. The second of these is a ‘total social fact’, something that taps into the deepest and most contradictory currents of modern French history. As an anthropologist who […] →Read more
The year I got my doctorate, in 1969, there were 23 lecturing jobs I could have applied for in Britain; and at least one had no applicants. The fifteen new universities that had just been created were still recruiting and their graduate students had not yet reached the market. The situation quickly turned to one […] →Read more
Theory Culture and Society, PUBLICity I read about A Foreign Sound at the same time in Le Monde (1) and the New York Times (2). The CD is Caetano Veloso’s homage to the formative influence on him of American popular music (3). The 23 tracks, sung in English, are mostly standards, but also by the […] →Read more
How can an economic democracy be built from the bottom up? One method is exchange circuits using community currencies of which the most widespread form is called Local Exchange Trading System (LETS). The idea of LETS is to foster exchange within local communities. Conventional money is issued by an authority in limited supply to assure […] →Read more
…be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. — The Tempest IV: I, 147 There is a shop near our local park that sells little girls’ ballet dresses. The yellowing models in the window do not […] →Read more
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
