ranterulze.net

The Ranter remembers a kinder, gentler time and recalls youth and its belief in itself - when we thought we mattered and would prevail. He reads history and imagines when peoples' movements established true democracies, when the world was "Turned Upside Down" by Diggers, Ranters, Levellers, Quakers and Seekers. He knows too of the Paris Commune as well as of Rojava today. Even though winter is coming he remembers the spring of childhood. . .

There's confusion, in common English, between the meanings of money, value and wealth. Conventional economics does nothing to enlighten us, but marxism does. An excerpt from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists explains a lot . . .

There's a lot of uninformed ranting going down right now about "Australia Day" and #ChangeTheDate. Personally I don't want to "change" the date - I want to understand it and ask why have national days at all? In the interim, consider this contribution from Alexis Wright . . .

There's a muted memory in the capitalist world, a reluctance to acknowledge the Bolsheviks and what they did. We don't need to see it as a binary, good or bad, this or that - it happened and understanding why can only help us deal with today's problems. One hundred years and we still grapple with huge inequality, power abuse, oppression and unfulfilled hopes . . .

A common view is that banks act as middle men between savers and lenders - storing all those pennies from the nation’s piggy banks and lending them out to investors and entrepreneurs who then make a profit so the repayments return to us as interest on our savings accounts. Nothing could be further from the truth . . .

Theories abound as to how Donald Trump came to be President of the USA and how we are to understand our own responses to him. This article, originally Towards A General Theory of Trump: For a Strategic Red-Red-Green Fightback, is reposted from Progress in Political Economy. It gives a pretty good Modern Marxist analysis. By Paul Mason.

We never studied Australian history at school. Maybe we never actually “studied” at all, but we were schooled if not educated. Either way, there was no such subject as Australian history, just British history and later a sort of general world narrative focussed on heroic leaders and imperial wars. The template for this grand narrative was a map on the wall showing the whole British Empire upon which the sun never set.