The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. (Lewis Mumford)
During the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city … there were people shooting at the clocks … (Walter Benjamin)
Just like the clocks, the debate about clock-time is going forward and back, forward and back. See [...]
Besides the ‘quiet crisis’, the other term Ed Miliband seems to be using quite a lot at the moment is ‘moral economy’. Though it seems it was his brother David who used it first, in a speech at the LSE in March and in a speech he would have given this time last year had [...]
As part of a debate elsewhere, somebody asks whether the “August days of 2011 [i.e. last weekend's rioting and looting] can be considered in terms of moments of excess”. It’s a good question.
For us a moment of excess is an intense collective experience, a moment [...]
We’re in the midst of two enormous news stories.
First the London burning story: three nights of rioting (and counting) in the capital, spreading from borough to borough and, now, to other cities (Birmingham). What a finance type might describe as a serious case of contagion.
Second, financial meltdown 2. Plummeting share [...]
A few days ago the following post appeared on the website of the Class War Federation.
The Class War Federation is no more.
Given our inability to continue to function at an organisational level and the huge amount of debt that the organisation finds it self in we have no [...]
What follows are some random (and rambling) thoughts on the power of events or acts to inspire whole movements – in part provoked by Paul Mason’s Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere, but also as an excuse to display this brilliant poster which I found at the bottom of [...]
Like many people who reach our ‘advanced years’ we in the Free Association have turned our attention to the question of inheritance and new generations. What we’re interested in, however, is the prospect of a new cycle of struggle and the emergence of new social movements. Using the concept of a generation to [...]
