The New Significance » Entries tagged with "Class"
DSG: Class Rules Everything Around Me / WOT, NO DEMANDS?
By Deterritorial Support Group A 1% shift can have massive repercussions in a global economy- a 1% shift in theTED spread signifies a looming disaster for liquidity, a 1% rise in interest rates can shut down SME’s across continents. The same holds for the economy of rhetoric. Last year, when the British government started the implementation of “Austerity Measures” with the comprehensive spending review, the justifying refrain that rang throughout the media was one of shared sacrifice- “We Are … Read entire article »
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Left Eye On Books: The Working Class and Occupy Wall Street
By Left Eye On Books Union membership doesn’t increase much due to patient organizing work, as sociologist Dan Clawson explained in “The Next Upsurge : Labor and the New Social Movements”, published in 2003. Instead, it shoots up during upsurges of strike activity, and then levels off. According to Clawson, in the 1980s and ’90s, unions had slowly developed new tactics, including corporate campaigns, labor-community alliances, and new attitudes towards social movements, which improved their chances in the … Read entire article »
Brian Alexander: The Rich Are Different – And Not In A Good Way
By Brian Alexander Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish. In fact, he says, the philosophical battle over economics, taxes, debt ceilings and defaults that are now roiling the stock market is partly rooted in an upper class “ideology of self-interest.” “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, … Read entire article »
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Elaine Graham-Leigh: The New Condition Of The Working Class
By Elaine Graham-Leigh Source: Counterfire The debate about the nature of the contemporary working class is critical for anyone who wants to see radical change. Elaine Graham-Leigh reviews two controversial books on the subject. Guy Standing, The Precariat. The new dangerous class (Bloomsbury Academic 2011), viii, 198pp, Owen Jones, Chavs. The demonization of the working class (Verso 2011), 298pp. It is now fourteen years since New Labour proclaimed ‘We’re all middle class now’ on the grounds of the destruction of … Read entire article »
Alex Snowdon: Class, Work And Politics: Review of Chavs by Owen Jones
By Alex Snowdon: ‘Chavs’ is a much talked-about, even fashionable, book. It is therefore tempting to decry it as over-hyped rubbish. Frustratingly for the polemicist in me, it is actually very good indeed. Owen Jones is an extremely capable and engaging writer who has done his research. His book is full of relevant insights from politicians, writers, campaigners and academics, with generally well-chosen examples from media and popular culture to support his points and a light sprinkling of statistics to … Read entire article »
Owen Jones: The Working-Class Have Been Purged From Our Screens. It’s Time To Put Them Back.
By Owen Jones: It would be easy, but wrong, to get dewy-eyed about a golden age when working-class people were properly respected, let alone glorified. Working-class people barely got a mention in books from the Victorian era and World War II. When they popped up at all, they were caricatures: think Charles Dickens, for example. As George Orwell put it: “If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find … Read entire article »
Anna Marchi: The Worse Part Of Italy – A Post PC Story
By Anna Marchi: This is a post PC story. It’s not a post Personal Computer story, it’s not a post Italian Communist Party story (though it may well be), it is a post Political Correctness story. Post implicates an ante, which is probably a misleading concept in the Italian context, but in the global world please allow the idea that we can be post PC, without having ever been there. On June 14th the web on this shore … Read entire article »
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Ezequiel Adamovsky: Anti-Capitalism
By Ezequiel Adamovsky: An excerpt from a new book forthcoming from Seven Stories Press. [scribd id=56838617 key=key-2fnhs44p0ba0qn2pp5ry mode=book] … Read entire article »
Union Leadership Stands in the Way of Working People in Wisconsin
By John Jacobsen: Political rights do not originate in parliaments; they are, rather, forced upon parliaments from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security… “Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance … Read entire article »
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Noam Chomsky on the State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival
Noam Chomsky was called, by the New York Times: “Arguably the most important intellectual alive today” and, for a man so closely aligned with anachism, the fact that he is cited more than any other living scholar is quite incredible. While Chomsky revolutionized the field of linguistics, he is now most well known for his work on corporate power, political economy, hierarchy, capitalism, and the media. A prolific author, he has penned numourous works, including: … Read entire article »
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Modern Times
On the occasion of Charlie Chaplin’s 122 birthday, and coinciding with the the very first post on this new website, here is a short scene from one of Chaplin’s greatest movies, Modern Times: … Read entire article »