I confess that
I surf too much and collect too many hyperlinks and excerpted text which I am
too lazy to read - let alone post about. The result is that the file which I
label “rawtext” is currently 180 pages long….Don’t take my word for it – thanks to pcloud
you can actually view it for yourself here (and it does contain some great
material – including paywalled text from my LRB and NYRB accounts!)
One blogger
deals with this by posting a weekly “Links I liked” - a great way of
honouring good reads without having to spend a few hours on a post…
It’s in that
spirit that this post is written – but also in the vague hope that it might
flag up material for me to return to in future posts…….
My mail is
generally the first thing I turn to when I open the PC - Dave Pollard’s
blog has a feed to which I subscribe and his latest post is
a typically thoughtful one about “good questions”
For a variety
of reasons (not least technology) we do tend, these days, to be very self-centred
– which makes “good listening”
something we have to work at according to a podcast inspired by a book called “You’re
not Listening”. That, in turn, took my thoughts back to the idea of good conversations,
encouraged by the likes of Theodor Zeldin
and the Conversation
Café people.
Another feed I
get is from Oxfam’s resident blogger, Duncan Green, which duly alerted me to Global
Megatrends – mapping the forces that affect us all (Oxfam 2020) which looks
a must-read!
Another feed
from “Reviews in History” told me of Thatcher’s Progress – from
social democracy to market liberalism through a market town (2019) an
interesting-looking book by Guy Ortolano which explores how the national mood
changed in the 1970s. Googling the title alerted me to an intriguing blog which
invites authors to apply the “page 99
test” viz looking at a single incident on that
page and briefly explaining how it relates to the book’s wider analysis.
Having
exhausted the contents of the mail, The Guardian newspaper is my next
destination. Their ‘Long Read” is generally a useful source and so it was with today’s
which dealt with the crucial issue of food and its adulteration - a
terrific article which alerted me to a fascinating blog
Michel Albert (who
died, sadly last year) was a Frenchman I have admired since I first came across
his “Capitalism v Capitalism “ in the heady days of 1990 and random googling
brought me today to Occupy
theory, the first of a 3 volume series Michael
Albert wrote to mark the Occupy movement, the others being Occupy Vision and Occupy Strategy. But it
turns out, after some confusion on my part, that it’s a different Albert, this one being still alive; one of the architects of the participatory economics
movement; and author of what looks to be a great memoir - https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/remembering-tomorrow-introduction-by-michael-albert/
I know that the
UK left the EU a couple of weeks ago - but the question of what attitude “progressives”
should take to the EU still exercises me. Lexit was the position adopted by
British leftist Leavers to which I didn’t pay much attention. Busting
the Lexit Myth was a pamphlet issued in 2018 by Open Europe which attracted
a fairly withering response from https://www.labourleave.org.uk/the_lexit_mythbuster_that_never_was
And I’m sorry
that I also missed England’s
Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (Pluto
2018)
Dissent magazine is a US leftist
journal whose articles can be accessed in full. Try, however, to copy the url
of an article you like and you will be blocked. Excellent approach which I wish
more journals would use.......
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview5
Naomi Klein has
a powerful article on the Green New Deal which explores the intellectual and
moral as well as political challenge it poses
But for
those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the
dead-end flaw of its central logic, it
can remain intensely difficult to see a way out. And how could it be otherwise?
Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for a way to live
that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature.
This is where the right-wing climate change
deniers have overstated their conspiracy theories about what a cosmic gift
global warming is to the left.
It is true that many climate responses
reinforce progressive support for government intervention in the market, for
greater equality, and for a more robust public sphere. But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis—that humanity
has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting
regeneratively rather than extractively—is a profound challenge to large parts
of the left as well as the right.
-
It’s a challenge to some trade unions, those
trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good
clean jobs their members deserve.
-
And it’s a challenge to the overwhelming majority
of center-left Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of
traditional measures of GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes
from low-carbon sectors or rampant resource extraction.
Some other hyperlinks
Podcasts is a
medium I have tended to ignore. And the BBC archives are the best for English
speakers see, for example
-
Arts and Ideas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvk3
-
free thinking BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn
