Cities have long been the pivotal sites of political revolutions, where deeper currents of social and political change are fleshed out. Consequently, they have been the subject of much utopian thinking about alternatives. But at the same time, they are also the centres of capital accumulation, and therefore the frontline for struggles over who [...]
Archive for the ‘cultural criticism’ Category
David Harvey – Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
Posted in activism, cultural criticism, tagged activist, anti-capitalism, David Harvey, geography, marx, marxism, Rebel Cities, urban on May 11, 2012 | 1 Comment »
The Use and Abuse of Cybernetic Concepts: Where Part Two of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace Went Wrong
Posted in cultural criticism, Ecophilosophy, tagged adam curtis, bbc, cybernetics, documentary, machines of loving grace, orange revolution, systems theory on June 1, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Generally I quite like Adam Curtis’s documentaries. I admire the fact that at a time where expository documentaries presenting wide scale socio-cultural arguments are hugely out of fashion he makes films which probe big issues around power, politics and history. I hugely enjoy the aesthetic of his work, the heavy usage of archival material to [...]
Soul at Work – Franco “Bifo” Beradi
Posted in book review, cultural criticism, politics, tagged Anarchism, Autonomism, Berardi, book review, communism, philosophy on August 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Franco Berardi was a key member of the Italian Autonomist movement, alongside the likes of other authors such as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Mario Tronti and Paulo Virno, and was a close associate of Felix Guattari, the French philosopher. Berardi’s work has only recent been translated from Italian into English, and Soul at Work was [...]
Thoughts on ‘Should we Seek to Save Industial Civiliasation’
Posted in activism, climate change, cultural criticism, Ecophilosophy, environmentalism, tagged activism, climate change, grassroots, Kingsnorth, mon, Monbiot on August 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Recently George Monbiot has been in the blogosphere for his exchange with Iam Plimer in which he joined the bastion of scientists, bloggers and journalists condemning Plimer’s recent book. Personally I found his debate with Paul Kingsnorth far more interesting, Kingsnorth criticises Monbiot for seeking to create ‘Liberal Democracy 2.0′ arguing that ‘What we face [...]
Postmortem reveals G20 death was not a Heart Attack
Posted in activism, cultural criticism, media, tagged citizen journalism, g20, g20 death, ian tomlinson on April 17, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Breaking News right now on the BBC… A new post mortem says Ian Tomlinson died from an abdominal haemorrhage not a heart attack after contact with police during the G20 protests. The statement from the City of London Coroners Court overturns the initial assessment that the newspaper seller died of natural causes. This stunning news [...]
Pirate Bay Trial Reaches Guilty Verdict
Posted in cultural criticism, media on April 17, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Breaking news today is that the Pirate Bay, the world’s largest bittorent portal has been found guilty of ‘assisting making available copyrighted content’ after the more serious charge brought against them of ‘assisting copyright infringement’ had been thrown out by the judge on the second day of the trial. While the e International Federation of [...]
G20 Death: Video and Analysis of Police Statement
Posted in activism, cultural criticism, media, tagged climate camp, g20, g20 meltdown, ian tomlinson, police brutality on April 8, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The guardian has now released this footage showing Police attacking Ian Tomlinson Their behaviour here, attacking a man with his back turned, and hands in his pockets is entirely in keeping with the rest of their violent and unprovoked behaviour on 1st April 2009. The Lib Dems justice spokesperson David Howarth has come out in [...]
Analysing Media Coverage of the Wildcat Strikes
Posted in activism, cultural criticism, media, media activism, tagged bbc, indymedia, jobs, Lindsey Oil Refinery, strikes, wildcat, workers on February 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
While the mainstream media has mainly presented the current wildcat strikes in the UK as a nationalist phenomena, concentrating on the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers,’ they have seemed to largely ignore what the workers themselves have been saying. For example one of the Lindsey Oil Strike refinery unofficial elected strike committee leaders wrote [...]
Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the edge of Chaos – Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh
Posted in activism, book review, cultural criticism, environmentalism, media activism, tagged Chesters, complexity, ecology, globalization, media, politics, protest, Welsh, WTO on November 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
This book, published by Routledge in 2006, is a recent attempt at a sociological analysis of the alternative globalization movement (AGM) using a theoretical framework based on an almagamation of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri and Gregory Bateson, with complexity theory via D&G deployed to provide qualitative analysis of events such [...]
