John Foster / 14 Jan 2022
Communist Artificial Intelligence
Work Without the Worker, by Phil Jones
The robots are coming to take our jobs. Well, perhaps not universally. Truth be told, not everybody thinks it’s a bad thing.(...)
Capitalism
John Foster / 12 Nov 2021
Inequality is Still Wrong
Time for Socialism, by Thomas Piketty
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Penned towards the end of the Vietnam War by Hunter S. Thompson, in his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the statement sounds truer than ever.(...)
John Foster / 01 Oct 2021
The Market or Else
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, by Adam Tooze
In Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, Adam Tooze cites a fund manager’s assessment of the difficulties facing traders when the pandemic blew up in March 2020:(...)
John Foster / 17 Sep 2021
Out of the Red
The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, by Chris Miller
The end of communism was meant to be a return to the “civilised” world of individualism and consumerism. It didn’t quite happen that way.(...)
John Foster / 30 Jul 2021
The World Neoliberalism Made
Empire of Democracy, by Simon Reid-Henry
We are living in an era of challenges to liberal democracy that would have been comprehensible to previous generations. (...)
John Foster / 28 May 2021
Rage Against the Machines
Breaking Things at Work, by Gavin Mueller
Technology is so thoroughly imbricated in our lives that questioning it has become taboo. Particularly on the left, where it's synonymous with the emancipation of labour.(...)
John Foster / 30 Oct 2020
No Alternative to Capitalism
Foretelling the End of Capitalism, by Francesco Boldizzoni
Whoever said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Slavoj Žižek and Frederic Jameson are both blamed,) it’s a quote that has legs because it’s true.(...)
John Foster / 02 Oct 2020
Mark Fisher Lives
Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
It’s tragically appropriate that Mark Fisher, whose work was so deeply engaged with the idea of hauntology, about the persistence of the past, should speak to us from beyond the grave.(...)
John Foster / 07 Aug 2020
Setting the Agenda
Young, Banerjee and Schwartz’s Levers of Power
Proportion explains a lot in life. This has become painfully obvious in the era of COVID-19 when the underlying sociopathy of the US president and of the party he leads can most clearly be seen in their signal failure to understand what the numbers mean.(...)
Ernst Stetter / 29 May 2020
Beijing on the Brink
Xi Jinping’s Globalisation Gamble
The orchestration of Chinese politics by the Communist Party continues. But this year, the National People’s Party Congress was different.(...)