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On the basis of that Tsar thing? :D But that alleged 'mistake' has been utterly refuted. As for baby and bathwater: some form of representative democracy may be necessary but is far from being sufficient.

But I think this presupposes that there is a 'real' 'radical' democracy beneath and beyond the actual corrupt and compromised democracy we always experience. Isn't that, precisely, one of the structural illusions of democrats? As for Gray, yes, his own alternative to democracy is none too...

There are two hidden, superficially contradictory, premises in the arguments of those who defend democracy. The first is that democracy is the best that we can expect. This, in turn, depends on further unstated premises: that human beings are basically venal and self-centred, so that any...

So you're taking a southern asianocentric view, then? :) Surely it's not only in Europe that walking is liberatory. I know people who live in China and they enjoy walking. Newsflash: in the UK, every step is a reminder of your lowly status too, as ppl zoom by in their big cars. But who wants...

What are you talking about? Everyone but everyone who has even the slightest knowledge of this matter accepts that there has been an enormous shift in the labour market in the UK because of recent immigration. Anyone who goes into central London can SEE it. It simply is not a controversial point...

Funnily enough, I was reading Fukuyama only this morning. One of the things that's interesting about his thesis is that it is the end of History AND the Last Man. Nietzsche rather than Marx as the enemy of Human Security/ satiety, i.e. it fits with the idea that Jon Savage/ Greil Marcus were...

Jeez, if anything is silly and 'unMarxist', it's that kind of personalist nonsense: Lenin got rid of the function of the Tsar. The person formally known as the Tsar of Russia was indeed in another country, but, neither the political system that according people with the title 'Tsar' nor EVEN the...

Your notion of 'process' seems to be equivalent to a Hegelian sense of Progress (through dialectical opposition). I think we can dispense with that version of History; as you say, it's nonsense. Don't know where this ex nihilo thing comes from. We have to start from concrete situations, sure....

As opposed to your usual carefully argued, honed and focused responses? Do you really want me to explain what it means? This bluff commonsense thing is really rather tedious. Yeh, my point exactly. Now why not choose a worthwhile ideal over the Tony Blair and the arms factory? Make the...

I think this is far more complex than people are allowing. Surely we can take at least this from Braudel/ De Landa/ D/G: capitalism is not marketized, it is an anti-market. Surely we can dispense with any idea that the 'despotic grey totality' of state socialism had anything to do with...

This is capitalist ideology in itself; it can present itself as realistic only because it has foreclosed the question of what reality is. In other words, it has stopped politics and made everything into a question of administration. Who's talking about an ideal? It seems to me that Oliver is...

Why? Two well-known fallacies here: irrelevant appeal to authority and irrelevant appeal to popularity. Because most ppl thought that the earth was flat in 1500, were they right? All of this presupposes that there was such a thing as Free Trade in this period - rather than a situation...

These are obviously massive questions. Nothing could be more important. They need to be carefully untangled (and not by me at a time i shd be asleep ;-) ) ... But surely the slightly facetious point is that it wouldn't be communism by defintion if it involved control by a small elite?

John Simpson, tonight, on Newsnight (paraphrase): Talks to camera as if addressing five year olds 'People in Iraq WEREN'T ALLOWED to identify themselves ethnically. They had to think of themselves as IRAQIS. And that's how some people still see themselves here. But now they have the...

Global communism is something better. They had democracy imposed upon them did they? News to me..

Yes, apologists for kapital always seem to discount kapital's 'actual tyranny' as actual tyranny. When the US throws ppl out of helicopters, shore up corrupt regimes (like, needless to say, Saddam's when it was more expedient to do so), illegally bomb children, that's not ACTUAL tyranny. It's...

Uh, this is what always happens when things get personal. Much better if we stick to arguments, with reasons, rather than ad hominem attacks which by their very nature can only descend into name-calling. I would want to pose things differently. What is supposedly good about democracy? I mean...

Yes, new language --- the old Left language is liable to set off all kinds of alarm bells.... 'Revolution', for instance, is a term that has no more useful libidinal political function IMHO.... Something else on this... A fascinating piece in the Bagehot column of the Economist (which is pretty...

Funny, given Derek's jokes about Soho, but some of this reminds me of Freud's oneiric-comic description, in 'The Uncanny' of his inability to find his way out of the red light district of a 'provincial town' in Italy: 'As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets...

I always get lost in Soho too! What is it about Soho that makes that happen do you think? The other place I'm hopeless at is Bloomsbury --- all those Squares --- I'll never fathom it lol ---