Going It Alone at the End of Time When we think of evangelical Christians today, we do not often imagine them forming small groups on the estates of their wealthiest adherents, reducing their reliance on infrastructure, and fostering a radical anti-establishment politics based on communal property. But the earliest Christians […]
A Tupi-Guarani tribe seeking the ‘Land-without-Evil’, a Mughal Sultan quizzing a Catalan Jesuit about the Last Judgement, a German theologian yelling ‘omnia sunt communia!’; each in some way anticipated an impending finality to the world around them, an end of times. From the Americas, through Europe, to the Indian Ocean littoral, […]
This issue of the Occupied Times was hand-folded at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC) in Whitechapel. For a little over two years now, following the eviction of the St Paul’s protest camp and moves by the OT towards full independence from any affiliation, we have been meeting at LARC […]
The city of Leeds was once a Victorian powerhouse of capital accumulation, high employment, rich industrialists and grand civic architecture. Today the city centre markets itself as a haven for financial services, high-end shopping, and innovative PFI schemes. The financial crisis of 2008 has caused this story to stutter, but […]
Technology is at the heart of contemporary social movements. Activists can bypass the corporate media and post their views via blogs. Police brutality can be easily captured and disseminated across the web to counter the lies of the establishment. I actually came to write this article as a result of […]
It is not obvious that one needs a sovereign for a society to organise itself or to address its concerns. The Occupation movement has drawn attention to the possibility for people to assemble, discuss, vote on and implement actions that have local and national significance when no leaders are present. […]
“I think the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he…and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to the government that he has not put himself under.” These words of the republican Leveller, […]
Ever asked your mum if she did anything more constructive in the Thatcher years than dressing up in ra-ra skirts and pixie boots and dancing to Duran Duran? It’s a reasonable bet that some people participating in Occupy London today are sons and daughters of the brave women who camped […]
Brainwashing, said the historian Christopher Hill, is something that happens to Other People. That’s the point, of course. You can’t see it if you’re in it. Hill was talking about the ideological victory of the Puritan work ethic: a notion that labour, however menial or immoral, is Good, and idleness […]
In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from St Paul’s, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates went on sale, and became an instant hit. Though pirates’ bodies were hung in gibbets along the banks of the […]