Not many people have heard of Gullah/Geechee culture, the Sea Islands, or this respective nation, but many more have heard of the ‘Heritage Golf Classic’ or ‘Hilton Head Island’. Little do most know that beneath the perfect lawns and clubhouses of the golf courses are the blood, sweat, tears, and […]
In early May, a Global Occupy Manifesto, drafted by an international Occupy assembly, was published in “The Guardian” to correspond with the global May 12 actions. The document’s authors aimed to offer a critique of the in-built injustices within economic and political systems globally. Yet they wrote the document without once […]
A question has been gnawing at me for several months now. Can fiction, poetry, any creative writing, make a genuine difference in a social and political sense? How much of it, really, is just self-aggrandising ego? Can it, at the end of the day, enable positive change? And in the […]
On 6 February, Chris Hedges, a journalist, self-described Christian and prominent weathervane of the softer side of American radicalism, opined that Black Bloc anarchists were “the cancer of the Occupy movement” (www.truthdig.com). Hedges had earlier extended Occupy a hearty “welcome to the revolution,” and so his critique sparked considerable discussion. […]
Shell is the world’s fifth largest company and second largest energy company, producing 3.1m barrels of oil a day. The company’s track record is both dark and dirty: oil leaks and human rights abuses in Nigeria, destruction of first nation lands in Canada and Alaska, and $55bn to support Assad’s […]
The 2008 film Gomorrah, loosely based on Roberto Saviano’s book of the same name, follows the lives of five people living in Naples. Eschewing the tiresome Hollywood format of intertwining stories in which characters are thrown into each other’s paths in improbable ways, the casts of the different chapters never […]
There’s music, there’s politics, and there’s the hope of revolution in Venezuela. Founded in 2003, the Hip-Hop Revolución (HHR) movement brings together like-minded young people from across the country to organize festivals and help to educate each other. HRR has created 31 hip-hop schools across the country, which teenagers can […]
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. […]
Anyone would have thought ‘Ill Manors’ was conceived specifically to generate broadsheet think pieces. With “rich boy”-baiting lyrics and a catchy Amen break chorus, Plan B’s latest single is as zeitgeisty as they come. The track has been lauded by Guardian columnists and Labour MPs alike (a surefire sign you’re […]
Millions of people are being made jobless in Western economies due to the obsession with neoliberal economics amongst Western policy elites. I would like to argue that the West is in decline relative to powers like China because of a lack of openness in economic thought. This may sound like […]