Socialism. May '68. Olympic Totalitarianism. The Red and the Black. Radicals have a habit of speaking in the conditional. Underlying all their talk about the changes they’d like to see in the world is the uneasy knowledge that our social system places rigid limits on how much change can be accomplished now. “After the revolution . . .” is the wistful, ironic preface to many a fondly expressed wish on the Left. Why, then, are radicals so hesitant to talk about what a different system might look like?
One of the oldest and most influential objections to such talk comes from Marx, with his oft-quoted scorn toward utopian “recipes” for the “cookshops of the future.” The moral of the quote, supposedly, is that a future society must emerge from the spontaneous dynamics of history, not from the isolated imaginings of some scribbler. A related cause for reticence is the feeling that to spell out ideas for future social institutions amounts to a sort of technocratic elitism that stifles the utopian élan of the people-in-motion. Start with the basics. How the EU works: a video guide. BBC Europe correspondent Matthew Price has been exploring the corridors of power in Brussels, and here he explains what each EU institution does.
Come on a video tour with him. European Commission There are 28 EU commissioners - one from each member state - and each one focuses on a policy area, for example justice and home affairs, or the EU internal market. The Commission's job is to draft EU laws and act as "guardian of the treaties". It enforces EU rules, and if a member state delays enacting an agreed policy, or simply refuses to comply, then the Commission will warn them and if necessary pursue them at the EU Court of Justice. The Commission can levy fines or suspend EU funding. New EU laws, or revisions to existing ones, come about usually after requests from governments, Euro MPs or lobby groups. The Commission has a staff of about 33,000. Council of Ministers Usually this institution is simply called "the Council". European Parliament There are 751 MEPs. Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president.
14 November 2012Last updated at 19:29 ET By Vladimir Hernandez BBC Mundo, Montevideo It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay. Laundry is strung outside the house. The water comes from a well in a yard, overgrown with weeds.
Only two police officers and Manuela, a three-legged dog, keep watch outside. This is the residence of the president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose lifestyle clearly differs sharply from that of most other world leaders. President Mujica has shunned the luxurious house that the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders and opted to stay at his wife's farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo.
The president and his wife work the land themselves, growing flowers. "I may appear to be an eccentric old man... "I can live well with what I have. " All the president's wealth - a 1987 VW Beetle.
Gavin Esler: 'A good leader needs a good story' - video. Integration? The opposite is true in Jeremy Hunt's NHS | Polly Toynbee. Snorts of disbelief greeted the new health secretary's buzzword: "integration". What can he mean? At the Conservative party conference he kept repeating it, baffling the leaders of the British Medical Association, the royal colleges and patient groups assembled at fringes and breakfasts trying to discover what to expect next. Integration? "The entire reform is designed for disintegration. Second only to the economy, the NHS will be the next election's hot potato: on this, Labour scores 30 points ahead. In April, 210 clinical commissioning groups take over from the 152 primary care trusts. Health leaders assembled in Birmingham were chewing over news that the government has back-pedalled on a key promise made to calm Lib Dem anxieties during the passage of the Act.
The conference gathered just as the go button was pressed, allowing NHS trusts to sell up to 49% of their services privately. Where will the public feel the pinch first? • This article was amended on 12 October 2012. The Tories just aren't patrician enough | Geoffrey Wheatcroft. The International Convention Centre, Birmingham, scene of the 2012 Conservative party conference Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images 'What is that man for? " a little girl asked, pointing at the egregious figure of Randolph Churchill.
Even that ever-diminishing band who could be called friends of Randolph, Sir Winston's bibulous and noisy son, sometimes pondered the same question. And today it could be asked of the party with which the Churchills once had such complicated relations: what is the Conservative party for? All our parties have been going through existential crises, and for the Liberal Democrats theirs may yet be terminal. Although Cameron has been endlessly derided for his failure to win a majority of seats two and a half year ago, this derision can only come from those unable to read simple electoral statistics. A ham-handed attempt to reduce the number of MPs has now been abandoned thanks to the rupture with the Lib Dems over Lords reform.
Pussy Riot. Turkey and Syria: The nervous wait. Tony Blair. Arab Spring. East-West. Quebec separatists' success spells trouble | Colin Horgan. The night was already surprising enough before a man in a bathrobe shot someone outside Pauline Marois's victory rally in downtown Montreal. Only a short time earlier, separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) leader Marois became the province's premier-in-waiting, gathering 54 seats in the National Assembly and a minority government. The shooting will likely go down as a disturbing moment in Canadian political history.
But what about the election results? As Quebecers woke up this morning to the new world of a PQ minority government (and say goodbye to now-former premier Jean Charest, who was unable to hold his own seat), the rest of the country will equally be wondering what comes next. That includes those just over the provincial border in Ottawa, where the ghost of past national existential nightmares is looming once again.
For the federal New Democratic party (NDP), Marois's victory is perhaps even more interesting. In the meantime, Quebec might transform. G4S failures don't change the fact that outsourcing works and is here to stay | Martyn Hart. Outsourcing has come under fire recently following G4S's failure to supply the requested amount of security staff for the Olympics. Instead of concentrating on the factors that led to that particular failure, commentators have spied their chance to castigate the very concept of outsourcing. Outsourcing is privatisation, they cry.
Outsourcing is far from privatisation – done properly, the client remains in control at all times. The client's purchasing a service, over a long period of time: as paying customer, they are perfectly entitled to specify exactly what they want. But a key facet of outsourcing is the shared bearing of risk: the partners are in it together. Not just financially, but also in terms of reputation. The media backlash has led to G4S's chairman John Connolly stating that "if a contract was being given out by a government department or other large business at the moment, you can understand they would find it difficult to hand that contract to us".
Reclaiming Europa and the uncontrolled power of business. In Dionysiaca, the last epic poem of Greek antiquity, Nonnus of Panopolis tells his version of the kidnapping of princess Europa. She's attracted by a particularly handsome bull (Zeus in disguise) and when she caresses him, the bull lifts her and starts to cruise over the surface of the ocean. Europa is overwhelmed with fear, awe and desire. As this "mimic ship of the sea" passes by, an Achaian seaman cries out: “O my eyes, what’s this miracle? How come that he cuts the waves with his legs, and swims over the barren sea, this land-pasturing bull? Navigable earth – is that the new creation of Cronides? When they arrive at shore, Zeus takes the form of an attractive young man and unites with the virgin. For several years now the concerned citizens of Europe have been watching astonished the hijacking of the European project that promised democracy, prosperity and solidarity.
It is in fact a "bastard voyage ". The dictatorship of money This is the state we find ourselves at present. BBC World Service Programmes - Outlook, 17/05/2012. Rupert Murdoch: myth, memory and imagination | Harold Evans. Rupert Murdoch has apparently lost a great deal of his power of memory, but nature has compensated by endowing him with a vivid imagination. He can surely deploy his new gift in the service of Fox movies. There is the great scene he pitched to Lord Justice Leveson on Wednesday morning where the editor of the Times enters left, closes the door behind him and begs: "Look, tell me what you want to say, what do you want me to say, and it need not leave this room and I'll say it. " And our hero proprietor, so famously fastidious about such matters, has to tell Uriah Heep: "That is not my job.
" And thus, children, was how Mr KR Murdoch honoured the promises of editorial independence that enabled him to avoid the Monopolies and Mergers Commission over his bid for Times Newspapers in 1981. When counsel waved the book in front of him, Murdoch wanted everyone to know he had not read it. There is a pattern to the Murdoch sagas. George Galloway and Jean-Luc Mélenchon expose a huge political gap | Seumas Milne.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Front de Gauche's candidate for the 2012 presidential election at a ‘march for the 6th republic' in Paris. Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters If next month's presidential election turns out as expected, France is heading for confrontation over the disastrous austerity drive now choking the economic life out of the eurozone. As in Britain, the economy is struggling to recover from the crash of 2008, loaded down with bad bank debts and heading for debilitating cuts and tax increases – but with the added burden of being locked into a German-orchestrated treaty that would make an economic stimulus illegal. Since last month's atrocities in Toulouse, President Nicolas Sarkozy has improved his poll ratings a bit, pandering to xenophobes and Islamophobes and posturing as a security champion.
The bland Hollande is very far from the swivel-eyed radical he has been portrayed in the British media. The result, as the Economist reported, has been a "sensation". Lists of Note: The Seven Blunders. VersoBooks.com. The 1st of May marks International Workers' Day, a festival of working-class self-organisation stretching back over 130 years. It was originally inaugurated to commemorate the "Haymarket Massacre" of 1886 in Chicago, where a bomb thrown during a worker's strike kicked off a police crackdown followed by a period of anti-labor hysteria. In 1890, the first internationally co-ordinated demonstration for an 8-hour day was held, in commemoration of those killed in the massacre, and those eight anarchists executed on trumped-up charges after the event. Here, Verso staff present "A Reading List for May Day", looking at the radical history of the festival in the European and North American labor movements, and how that spirit lives on in grassroots workplace struggles.
The Communist Manifesto — Karl Marx & Frederick Engels Making of the English Working Class — E.P. Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry — B.S. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt — Ching Kwan Lee Strike!