What are we doing here? Are we building a new society, or are we merely the latest incarnation of a wave of indignant protest? I hope we are the former: the beginning of something special. If that is so, we are currently building our new society in the image of […]
The tuition-fee generation will limp into the world owing tens of thousands of pounds. And they are not alone. More and more of us – through a combination of college loans, credit cards, mortgages and bank loans – are being stealthily habituated to debt. We end up feeling that it’s […]
Recently returned to London after a week in New York, Stefan Simanowitz explores the similarities between the London occupation and Occupy Wall Street. “I’ve had enough” says Tim Saunders. “Enough of this grotesque greed and fraud on a massive scale. Enough of spiralling education costs and watching my mother scrapping […]
A Christian camper writes… Poor old Church of England. They were hoping to get away with another 100 years of not saying anything at all about anything at all, then OccupyLSX comes and lands on their doorstep. What a pickle they’re in. What’s that they’re moaning about? Injustice? Theft? Something […]
POST-MATERIALIST YOUTH TRYING TO REDISCOVER THE SIGNIFICANT’ (Home-made sign from the TUC ‘March For The Alternative‘ 26th March, 2011) In 1968, social scientists and politicians alike lamented the ‘end of ideology’, and a declining public interest in politics. Likewise at the end of the 20th century, immediately before the rise of the […]
When I was little, my grandfather took me on his knee and explained the market to me. In theory, it was a way for people to invest in businesses and commodities that they saw had a future in the economy. For a handful of bills, we could own a tiny […]
“The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera Our lives are based on forgetting. We forget the misery of low-wage work in the UK when we casually spend more than the cashier’s hourly wages on a sandwich and a coffee then get angry […]
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 […]
Earlier this year, the economist Michael Norton from Harvard Business School and Duke University’s behavioral economist Dan Ariely published a study with the title “Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time”. In it, they asked a representative online panel two simple questions: 1. What is the […]
Something exciting has happened. A wave of loosely affiliated occupations are springing up across the Western World, drawing thousands of people to the streets in hundreds of countries expressing dissatisfaction with the current economic order. We are creating a network of unignorable reminders to those in charge that we demand […]