Some of us here at Principia Dialectica (the donkey’s. Ed.) have always liked Mickey Rourke. Attacked for his portrayal of Irish republicanism in Prayer For The Dying, his take of Charles Bukowski in BarFly was immeasurably supreme to the Hollywood brat who attempted to remake it a couple of years ago. We even forgive him [...]

The London Eye in Central London, which spins hundreds of metres above ground, affording a bird’s eye view of the capital. It remains something of a tourist attraction, and frequented by media luvvies on a junket, who use it to shmooze clients above terra firma before getting them sozzled enough to sign on the obligatory [...]

This week we will be mostly studying…the short section from Chapter 2 in Moishe Postone’s Time Labor and Social Domination where Postone defines the position of Hegel about the Subject, the use of this theory in a ‘materialist’ (presumed ‘Marxian’) way, and the real Marxian interpretation of the Hegelian Subject. For Marx, the subject is [...]

Ettore Sottsass Jr. died in December 2007, aged 90. He was probably the most creative of all designers in the post-war era. As Deyan Sudjic pointed out in The Guardian newspaper in January: ‘Design is, in the end, about making us want to buy more things, and Sottsass, at heart always deeply subversive, was highly [...]

A teacher writes: ‘Thanks – partly -  to spectacular society, homophobia appears to be dying out. Zizek has been lamenting the fact that civil service vows for gays now means that only those beyond state-sanctioned ceremonies of kinship are the true outsiders – only they remain ‘the slaves’ in the classic Hegelian ‘master-slave dialectic.’ Homophobia [...]

The Financial Times on Saturday 22 March reports: ‘The number of people claiming sickness related benefits has risen fastest recently in parts of southern England where jobs have remained plentiful, according to research conducted by this newspaper. The phenomenon of the commuter-belt claimant will worry policymakers who have long assumed a link between high levels [...]

An interesting examination of the ideas of William Morris, Guy Debord’s use of the phrase ‘abundance’ in The Society of the Spectacle, and some reflections on the meaning of work in modern society. In a debate that follows the article, Dave Beech is mystified and angry about the fact that ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ have melded into one [...]

Cyril Smith, the widely respected scholar of Marx, used to referee a Marx Study group at Birkbeck College in London. He always made sure to remind those present that the study group was about Marx – and not Lenin. A few bug-eyed individuals always tried to exhume the corpse of the Kremlin stiff, but Cyril [...]

The white working class are the subject of a new BBC series. There can be no doubt that the old shibboleth about working class solidarity, ‘the organic link’ between the working class and the ‘labour movement’ is fading fast. There is no hiding the fact that the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 was the last [...]