Perhaps the paramount research question confronting sociologists today is: why is it that those being exploited and oppressed are not rising up? And as a follow-up: what are the most likely drivers of social change? In this blog I focus on the second question and consider and comment on several possible ‘drivers’. The primary characteristics… Read More »
I am a socialist. It is difficult to write in a detached way so soon after a general election that delivered such a surprisingly decisive and divisive conclusion. I still feel emotionally fatigued, disorientated, and above all sad and angry at the future that faces so many who are already suffering at the hands of… Read More »
So what’s all this about ‘high net worth’ people? This is how it works, courtesy of Guardian journalism. If you are a wealthy person, tax-resident in the UK but with strong foreign links, then you are a ‘high net worth’ individual. The question for you is: do you want to share all your income with… Read More »
In this second decade of the twenty-first century we have reached a crossroads. The end of the cold war has not led to a new and more stable world order but instead to widespread disorder and human suffering. Our global world is fragmenting and life is becoming less predictable not only for people in poorer… Read More »
Buried deep in my laptop’s memory is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine following the infamous London riots. It was intended as a corrective to a ‘biomedical’ examination by a Dr Misselbrook of the underlying causal mechanisms that shaped the young rioters’ behaviour. As a… Read More »
There is widespread unease at the sharpening divisions between the haves and the have-nots within the UK and within and between countries worldwide since the onset of financial capitalism in the mid-1970s. At different times and in different places and contexts this unease has fed into serious rebellions and uprisings in the early 21st century.… Read More »
Like many others I purchased a copy of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century early on. One of Heffers sales people mentioned in passing that a Yale rep had told him it was the most significant book they have published in a generation. That was enough for me. But it is a big fat book… Read More »
There is a dearth of information on the composition of what I have called governing oligarchies in countries like the UK and the USA. This includes data on top income earners. In his The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2014), however, Goran Therborn cites data from the US Congressional Budget Office (2011) on the composition… Read More »
I am reading Tony Benn’s latest, and last, diaries: A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine. They make poignant reading, charting his growing frailty and his focus on ageing as well as his extraordinary day-to-day commitment to his socialist causes. You feel he needs to stay engaged because it is extrinsically as well as intrinsically worthwhile; it… Read More »
I have at various times and in various places advocated a form of engagement for change that I have called ‘permanent reform’. The basic idea is that if sufficient people can be mobilized around the righting of a number of incontrovertible wrongs, once mobilized they will up for more activism to secure more and yet… Read More »