Has capitalism done as much for gays as Pride?
Today the fortieth Gay Pride march takes place in London. I have a natural sympathy with protest movements and as a particularly striking and long-lived one, the gay pride movement has much to be...
View ArticleIs opera really all that expensive?
The Proms season has begun, so it’s time for the media to laud and damn high culture all at once. I didn’t get far in a little Guardian discussion between Roger Wright, the director of the BBC Proms,...
View Article‘Impact’ as surplus value
Universities are increasingly treated like businesses, and most people seem to think that this is a good thing. According to the general prejudice, public-sector organizations like universities tend...
View ArticlePolitical problems with the Great British Class Survey
The results of the BBC-sponsored ‘Great British Class Survey’ were widely publicized yesterday (see the footnote for the academic study on which they are based, and a link).[1] The chief claims are...
View ArticleClass and material reality
[This is the first of three posts on the Great British Class Survey. To access the others, go to the introduction here.] The question of class is bound up with the security of one’s position in...
View ArticleExploitation in contemporary society
[This is the second of three posts on the Great British Class Survey. To access the others, go to the introduction here.] If an analysis of exploitation is reintroduced to the picture, we are left with...
View ArticleDemonization of anti-capitalist cultural forms
[This is the last of three posts on the Great British Class Survey. To access the others, go to the introduction here.] My final concern arises from the attitude to forms of culture that this study...
View ArticleDaniel Barenboim and music’s emancipatory symbolic violence
Daniel Barenboim has, for the second year in succession, provided the most life-enhancing musical experiences of the London summer. Last year it was his conducting of the Beethoven symphonies (intercut...
View ArticleBrief thoughts on Lily Allen
Lily Allen’s ‘feminist’ video ‘Hard Out Here’ is old news, a couple of months old, but I’m behind the times and I’ve just encountered it, and its critical responses, today. Its flaws have already been...
View ArticleSelf-borrowing and -plagiarism
‘Eminent sociologist has recycled 90,000 words of material across a dozen books, claims paper’ – thus the Times Higher Education on 20 August. A newly published paper by two scholars from Cambridge...
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