Solid Workers

Twitter is a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse. It enables the rapid networking and dissemination of information - any information - but simultaneously doubles down and condenses the pathologies of platform capitalism and the attention economy . I'm reminded of this every single moment of scrolling through my Twitter feed and seeing shared articles and bad tempered polemic mixed in with attention seeking and mind-bending narcissism. Normally, you just go with the wretched flow. In terms of a cost/benefit analysis the price of scrying performative stupidity is outweighed by the pay off of decent opinion and info. But the toxicity does grate, and a lot of what is bad has to do with the Twitter tribes. Because I inhabit a very particular online universe, there are two groups who are especially annoying and sometimes toxic. The Follow Back Pro Europe crowd, grouped by their totemic #FBPE hashtag overlap with the worst people in the Liberal Democrats, the Labour right, and with cen...

A guest post from @jake_srowland If you’ve been living under a stone for the last few years you might have missed Labour's anti-semitism crisis . That Labour has a problem with this form of racism is undeniable, and there have been many members found to hold and share these repugnant views. Labour has never denied this is the case, and the party's educational leaflet for members, No Place For Antisemitism acknowledges a “number of Labour members hold antisemitic views and a much larger number don’t recognise antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories.” Labour has taken a long time to make its position clear, but isn’t action without serious thought beforehand dangerous? As Horkheimer made clear: “action for action’s sake is in no way superior to thought for thought’s sake, and is perhaps even inferior to it”. Can the problems Labour has with anti-semitism be called a crisis? If here we were to take a leaf out of Stanley Cohen’s great book Folk Devils and Moral Panics , we...

Was Theresa May the worst Prime Minister this country has ever seen? She's up against stiff competition, from both her immediate predecessor and the utter void following her. Whatever verdict history decrees, her record in government is almost singularly awful. Even if you sit and meditate on the last three years, surely the most earnest Tory would have difficulty picking out a May achievement that isn't spin and hot air. A fair few words have been expended on May on this place, so I won't try your patience by saying much more. Except to reiterate two things about her legacy, both of which are inseparable. On Brexit, May bears a large share of the responsibility for normalising the idea of a no deal Brexit with her idiot mantra of no deal is better than a bad deal. This line, more than anything Nigel Farage has said, strengthened and emboldened the hard right of the Tory party. You know, the people tied to the most backward and reckless sections of capital. She offered t...

Panorama , the BBC's premier investigative journalism show comes in two flavours. You have considered pieces, usually but not always focusing on allegations of wrongdoing, that sifts through evidence and builds a case for or against that episode's object of scrutiny. And then you have the lazy hit job that sees testimony and documentation arranged without due space for the right of reply, nor the consideration of evidence that flies in the face of the case. Can you guess which way tonight's Panorama alleging leadership interference in anti-semitism complaints went? This isn't the first time a political target has been roughed up this way. Indeed, not long after Jeremy Corbyn came to prominence the BBC used Panorama to suggest he was chillaxed with the Iraqi resistance attacking British soldiers, because in December 2003 Stop the War was present at a conference in Cairo that urged resistance to the US/British invasion, and the declaration of said meeting was published...

A great new show in which Alex interviews Adom Getachew about her new book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination . As always, please support Alex's work here . More money = more quality interviews.