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. . .
A visual poem from Ali Whitelock - "this is coal, don't be afraid"
Words can be made to mean anything at all. The lips and tongues of power-mad politicians say one thing but mean another. Yet the same words coming from a poet
voiced over a simple everyday image, move us in a totally different way.
Greta is not "our leader" - the planet needs no leader but Gaia. What Greta does is tell the truth. Jeanne d'Arc perhaps . . . And apologies for the Murdoch media link!
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" #InvasionDay 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 . . .
Five easy steps towards understanding zombie banks
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.
‘Witnessing Gezi' by Turkish photojournalist Emin Özmen. The events are long gone now but this short film
will make you weep and give you a slither of hope at the same time. Watch
on World Press Photo
One of the greatest writers of the modern day, Ursula Le Guin, has died at age 88.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and
changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
17th Century England witnessed dynamic and exciting social changes that fundamentally altered politics, religion, social institutions and relations,
the historical balances of power, family structures and individual consciousness. . .