I had two alternatives titles in mind for this short quasi-autobiographical blog. The first was ‘Prince Charles and I’, the second ‘Me and Prince Charles’. The first strikes as a little courtly – as in the Queen’s routine refrain, ‘My husband and I’ – but accords with a pattern of speech I was taught and… Read More »
It is commonly and correctly asserted that the British aristocracy had lost its political grip by the conclusion of the nineteenth century. The once all-powerful aristocrats had been well and truly displaced by fast-forward bourgeois entrepreneurs. But they did not just fade away. A report in the Metro (of all places), drawing on research by… Read More »
From the early 1970s until I retired in 2013 I lectured on ‘death and dying’ to medical students, initially at Charing Cross HMS, then the Middlesex HMS, and finally at UCL Medical School (strange that all but the last no longer exist, having been incorporated into, or swallowed whole by, Imperial College and UCL respectively).… Read More »
When considering assorted potentials for effective collective action against financialised capitalism in the UK, I have so far put the emphasis on a triad of factors: Permanent reform – or the significance of constantly pushing and campaigning for achievable shifts in policy and practice, and doing so on a sliding scale from minor to major… Read More »
I suppose there is an inevitable gap between reading and writing. In the late ‘noughties’ I added reading ‘Maggie’ Archer to a long-term familiarity with the works of Roy Bhaskar. Eventually, if this is the apt phrase, it bore fruit in my published work. (I have blogged about her work in some detail outside of… Read More »
This is a third and final blog on Erik Olin Wright’s elegant and enlightening How to Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century. Its focus is on what I have previously called ‘triggers for change’ and Wright terms ‘agents for transformation’. It is important to register at the outset a point made by Michael Burawoy… Read More »
While I was engaged in trying to establish a virtual Institute of Sociological Studies at UCL, my published work shifted into new areas, at last theoretically (I stuck pretty much with health inequalities and stigma studies). In a sentence I looked in more detail at Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism and became more familiar with… Read More »
This is a second blog arising out of my reading of Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be An Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century. While the first focused on general modes or strategies for resisting capitalism, this one summarises and comments on his listing of pragmatic interventions to this end. I have always found a tension… Read More »
Eric Olin Wright is sadly no longer with us, but we are fortunate to have his new book, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, to remember him by and to work with. In this first of (maybe) two or three blogs, I consider briefly his typology of strategic logics in relation to… Read More »
I have argued now and again for a left strategy comprising: (1) ‘permanent reform’ and (2) ‘alliance formation’. In other words, a strategy that (re-1) commends the left to start – as boldly as possible – with what is achievable, and then builds on these reforms towards socialism, and (re-2) acknowledges the essential salience of… Read More »