Will AI solve the Cost of Living Crisis?

 No.

Why do Communists and the Left always have to be Shouty Humanists in the Media?

For reasons to do with the way the media functions in democratic capitalism as a state apparatus,* this apparatus only allows communists to appear in the media as ‘shouty humanists’, in other words they must seem to place sentiment and moralism before science, and passion and emotionalism before reason, entirely going against the grain of classical Marxism. This is of course a way to prove in practice to the audience all the usual falsehoods about communists, from the mild reproaches of them being well meaning but inevitably wrong idealists to always angry totalitarian dictators.

This strategy has worked very well for the bourgeoisie for years now, even to the extent that leaders of most of the western communist parties usually follow this rule, and such conforming individuals are able rise to the top of these parties for this reason. The question is how this happens; there are two essential ways that such eventualities come to be: The first is by the simple process of reward and punishment, those individuals who follow these rules are rewarded by the system, mostly obliquely, and given more airtime and so on and thus seem more apparently successful than their opponents. Secondly, there is an unconscious following of these rules in the general sense, with persons with affective practices that behave 'obdiently' felt to be more socially positive. The latter is because of the underlying alienation from labour in capitalism.

Any Marxist will know that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao, were fairly personable people in terms of their personalities. They were witty, highly intelligent and had the ability to write many books. They were theorists of communism but also studied the contemporary philosophy and sciences and were up to date with the most advanced scientific theories in diverse fields. Marx for instance could both read, speak, and translate on sight multiple languages. Of these figures, only Lenin and Mao became the leaders of actual political parties.

However, since this time, such individuals have, I think, been prevented by various means. To start with, in politics in general there has been a pervasive anti-intellectualism and suspicion of those who ‘know stuff’ in favour of those whose demeanour is more spontaneous and passionate. For instance, there has been, e.g. in the UK, on the left Arthur Scargill (miners leader), and Neil Kinnock, and currently in France there is Jean Luc Melenchon of LFI, or there was Georges Marchais of the PCF. In all these cases their political positions have been presented in the media in shouty humanistic terms (I am aware that Kinnock was hardly a communist of course).  We could of course debate whether these individuals were sincere or not, but really this is not the point. Also, one must be aware of politics in at least more than one democratic capitalist country to truly see how this is a pattern, a technique.

- The media has been a modern technical mass media since at least the rise of the Nazis, and it has been able to use mass techniques and has a lot of practical knowledge based in how to sway feelings, and make it seem as though certain things and positions and people are popular, and they are capable of pushing certain things that they as a class want, but can make that pushing seem like audience pull, as if it is the democratic will of the authentic masses. The new social media despite its great promise has only made this more intense through the constant intervention of troll farms and biased computerized algorithms.

This brings me to the concept of Affective Practices and to the idea of contradiction within an affective practice. Which means, whilst it is possible for a person to express ideas that are rational or Marxist, it is at the same time possible for this same individual to behave affectively in a manner that goes against this. I would venture to say that this is even the norm for most of the media figures on the political left who get near to socialism.

The techniques of how the bourgeois class deal with this problem of appearance, and what is essentially the process of political branding involves a body of knowledge that has been built up over decades in the apparatuses of the media which they either own or direct via the state.

* The theory of the media that allows me to say these things (rather raw and newly formed I admit) I have worked on elsewhere, likewise the concept of alienation that I am using here can be read about and is supported in my book Aesthetics & Alienation. Note that here I have only been able to say these things in a schematic fashion, unfortunately

Gary Tedman

Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Was An Anti-Communist CIA Operative who Kept Feminism From Discussing Class . Excerpts and paraphrasing from HR News article REPOSTED BY Iona Singh

Republished from HR News HR NEWS FEB 24, 2026

See link to HR News https://hrnews1.substack.com/p/feminist-icon-gloria-steinem-was

Declassified Cold War Ties Show How U.S. Intelligence Shaped Feminism’s Focus On Gender Over Class

In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union hosted a series of World Youth Festivals — mass international gatherings designed to export communist ideology to young activists worldwide. The CIA responded by quietly funding American liberal organizations to send students abroad to counter Soviet messaging. When Ramparts magazine exposed this program in 1967, it found the agency had secretly bankrolled dozens of American civil society groups — student organizations, labor unions, cultural institutions — under the banner of anti-communism. 

Steinem’s CIA Work 

Steinem was recruited by CIA officers C.D. Jackson and Cord Meyer into this program. She founded and directed the Independent Research Service (IRS) — a front organization tasked with sending American students to the 1959 Vienna World Youth Festival and the 1962 Helsinki festival to counter Soviet influence. An operation that was almost entirely bankrolled by the CIA: approximately $85,000 for Vienna alone. 

Steinem ran the organization from 1959 to 1962 and remained on its board as late as 1968–69. When Ramparts broke the story in 1967, Steinem confirmed her role to The New York Times without apology, describing the CIA as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable” and stating she would do it again. 

The Feminist Movement and the Class Problem Steinem entered feminist organizing in 1969–70 with no prior record in any women’s group, no feminist publications, and no history of organizing working-class women. Within two years, she was the most recognizable face of American feminism — co-founding Ms. magazine in 1972 and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. A ridiculous state of affairs given the number of femininist academics and writers with reputable publications and achievements in the field. The feminism she came to represent was explicitly focused on gender — equal access to institutions, reproductive rights, professional advancement — and explicitly avoided class as a framework.

The mainstream of second-wave feminism under Steinem’s influence was built around the concerns of white, college-educated, professional women. It did not center poverty wages, the absence of universal childcare, or the conditions of working-class and domestic labor — all of which disproportionately burdened poor women and women of color. Socialist feminists and radical feminists of the same era — including the Redstockings, Black feminists in the Combahee River Collective, and figures like Barbara Ehrenreich — argued consistently that gender liberation without economic liberation was a half-measure that served elite women at the expense of everyone else. 

That critique was largely excluded from the mainstream feminist conversation that Ms. and the NWPC represented. The 1975 Redstockings Investigation In May 1975, the Redstockings — a radical feminist collective founded by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone — published a detailed investigation into Steinem’s CIA ties and their implications for the movement. 

They documented her IRS directorship, the CIA funding, and the network of relationships surrounding the launch of Ms. magazine — including the role of Clay Felker, who helped fund the magazine’s first issue and had himself worked as an editor on an IRS publication during the CIA-funded Vienna operation. Redstockings argued that Ms. functioned as what the CIA termed a “parallel organization” — an institutional presence that channeled feminist energy into an acceptable liberal framework and away from the class-based and anti-capitalist currents that were equally alive in the movement at that time. The investigation was widely circulated in feminist circles and prompted Steinem to write a six-page letter defending herself — but never to address the structural question directly: why did the most-platformed feminist publication in the country systematically avoid class? 

Suppression of the Record 

In 1979, The Village Voice reported that Random House had removed the Redstockings chapter documenting Steinem’s CIA history from their forthcoming book Feminist Revolution — following legal pressure connected to Steinem and figures in her network, including Katharine Graham and associates of Cord Meyer. The chapter was never published by Random House. Betty Friedan, herself a critic of the direction Steinem represented, publicly stated the questions deserved a full accounting. The pattern — liberal feminist establishment uses legal and institutional leverage to suppress a working-class feminist critique — was a demonstration of the very dynamic Redstockings had identified.

What This Produced 

The feminism that reached mainstream America through the 1970s and 1980s — the feminism of glass ceilings, professional representation, and individual advancement — was shaped decisively by Steinem’s network and platform. It produced real gains for professional women. It also produced a movement that could be absorbed into corporate culture with minimal disruption: companies could hire women executives, run feminist ad campaigns, and face no structural challenge to the low wages, absent benefits, and exploitative conditions that defined the working lives of most women. That outcome was the product of specific choices about what feminism would foreground and what it would leave out — choices made by people whose institutional formation was explicitly anti-socialist, and whose rise was funded, at its origins, by the agency most dedicated to containing the American left. 

Sources: Gloria Steinem, New York Times (1967); Redstockings press release and research report (1975); The Village Voice (May 21, 1979); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (1999); Daniel Brandt.

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Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and the Role of Feelings in History

by Iona Singh

The first difficulty with history, the one that hits you like an arrow, is the human factor: how should feelings be involved in recording the past.

For example, how should historians themselves deal with their own feelings, and should feelings be allowed to endow historical accounts of events and people, not only of the individuals involved, but in their relationship to each other, as groups and communities that have commonality according to class and culture, and even across populations.

Obviously, everyone experiences a variety of feelings according to how their life has gone and how they react emotionally according to forces, circumstances, psychology, expectations and traditions, making any comprehension of the feelings involved in a history of this potentially infinitesimal and mentally confusing. Hence, understanding the role of feelings and emotions, the emotional life of the past has caused great difficulty. 

Arguments between modern historians, since Ranke, put very generally, veer towards making history an ‘unemotional’ collection of information, empirical facts, minimising or negating feelings on the part of the historian in favour of data. Or the school that opposes this by contrast, stating there is no such thing as empirical history because all history is churned out by historians and is therefore entirely subject to the feelings and persona of historians; that history can only be a kind of reflection of who the historian is.

Bloch and Febvre solved the dilemma between these two spheres with their remit that history must have a notion of feeling built into it, providing that this conception of feeling is entirely scientific according to their historiography and method. They reiterate in fact, that history requires the sensory, sensible element of feeling in order to be scientific at all.

How did they arrive at this?

Bloch and Febvre* understood the historian as limited by their own species, which lends her or him the ability to have empathy, sometimes profound empathy for other members of their species (and others as well). To the extent that the human historian can emotionally conjecture - provided they first research the historical circumstances, situations and events as thoroughly as possible - as to how and why individuals, groups and communities behaved, felt and reacted, even if they lived 1000 years ago. Any precision here comes from the amassing of information by the historian, doing as thorough a job as possible, to enable them to construct an emotional ‘environment’ within which lived and felt the lives and communities of the past. 

Jules Michelet and Augustin Thierry, predecessors of Bloch and Febvre, heralded immersion into the study of the adventures of people and their customs and social life. They provided Bloch and Febvre with the tools to shift the concept of an ‘idea’ coming from a single individual, to a collation of ideas and feelings (unconscious communication is alluded to here)  dispersed beyond the individual to groups and communities.  

On a wider scale, Bloch and Febvre's concept of feeling or sensibilities as they called them, go beyond historical studies to provide assistance to the general question of empiricism versus idealism. A problem that existed/exists in most disciplines and in its purer form in philosophy. The issue of how ‘ideas’ and the rational relate to the ‘empirical’, the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’, is understood here by adding a conciliatory element; a sensuous processor that brings together and facilitates internal and external information - the visceral human faculty of sensibilities. Although acknowledged in prior historiographical arguments, sensibilities are presented by Bloch and Febvre in the specific form of a scientific method for history. Engaging thus the material human nervous system, the evolution of the body, emotionally and linguistically (which can also be construed in the work of Chomsky and Freud among others), in a systematic and fundamental schema, and hence as scientific. As such this science has common ground with other sciences that also shape Bloch and Febvre's work (examples of these are found in Bloch's essays in my book): psychology, physiology (nourishment), technology (the effect of radio transmission and the history of time keeping), biology, geography and physics.

Other influences on Bloch and Febvre on this path may have been Marx’s inclusion of the role of feelings in his ‘1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ and in 'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon'.And their ideas run parallel to Walter Benjamin's text ‘The Author as Producer’, all themes more recently covered by Gary Tedman’s conception of an aesthetic level of practice (Tedman, 2012, Zero Books).

Iona Singh

* See Lucien Febvre's essay 'Sensibilities and history', RFP 1973.

What are Bonds? And What do they mean in the current Crisis?

Bonds are also called gilts in the UK and treasuries in the US, it is a financial security which is considered less volatile and safer than stocks for instance, and they are thought to offer a more reliable income stream. They are when an investor loans money, normally to a government, for its safe keeping and return when it ‘matures’. During its stay it can earn the lender a rate of return in interest, fixed or variable, which is known as a coupon. The coupon is for a fixed time, long, medium, or short term, with different benefits attached. After the term, the original loan returns to the lender. The government can use the loan for various social projects.

Bonds produce what is called a yield, the total return on capital. The yield is the coupon rate plus the secondary market rate for the bond. When bond prices go up the yields go down in financial value, they have an inverse relationship. If the interest rates in the market go up, any new bonds that are issued have correspondingly higher coupon rates. So, to attract buyers of bonds, existing bonds with the lower coupon rates need to drop their price, which pushes up their yield to the market level. Thus, the reverse is also true. If bond prices increase on the market, the yields go down relatively. A buyer of a bond on the market can pay less for a bond than it originally was bought for, meaning they obtain a higher current yield given they get the same income flow. Investors can therefore buy bonds at a premium or at a discount, and whichever they buy will determine the yield they receive in income.

What determines the overall performances of the bonds is the wider market and the way it treats the risks of lending to the institutions and governments. Bond ratings are a way that credit rating agencies can assess the credit quality and risk level of bonds.

At the moment there is a global government bond sell-off on the capitalist market, probably due to inflation, the huge government deficits, and the war between the US/Israel and Iran, although the inflation as such is a legacy not of this war specifically, but of the past giant global financial crises which led to bail outs and vast money printing (so called quantitative easing), and which devalued the existing circulating currency, created ‘cheap money’ surplus, and later causing this ‘correction’ as inflation, and this inflation was indeed itself a factor that led to wars, such as also the Ukraine Russia war.

The current global sell off increases the borrowing costs for governments (yields rise) who have to offer higher coupon rates to investor buyers of their bonds. Countries that would like to spend to combat recessions caused partly by inflation are therefore being restricted in their financial movements because of the bond markets, which are also themselves reacting to the inflation and fears of further rises in the inflation rate and other crises. The standard response of governments is tax increases and spending cuts, but of course with already high inflation and following on from previous years of austerity this would be very painful for people.

The US administration also recently, July 31, 2026, intervened in global financial markets (a fairly rare move) to help Japan prop up the value of their currency, which was at a forty-year low, by selling dollars and euros to buy yen. Japan is the largest foreign holder of US government debt. This intervention was at least partly designed to protect the functioning of the US bond market: the US was concerned that Japan’s efforts to raise the value of its currency would affect the US economy by making US government borrowing more expensive in the bond market, because to free up money to buy yen, the Japanese government had been selling US government treasuries, or bonds. As we now know, selling the US bonds in large quantities raises the yield the US government must pay to the bondholders. So, the US thought to remove this necessity of Japan by buying yen.

Trump sees a weak yen as an unfair trade advantage making its goods more attractive on the global market. Interest rates in Japan are below US rates and have not kept pace with inflation, a fact which the US leaders do not like, and the intervention is seen by analysts as a move to force the Japanese to raise its interest rates. However, Japan relies on energy imports from the Middle East, the war raised the prices of this oil and so added to inflation. Japan tried to sweeten this for its consumers by spending billions subsidising fuel costs, but also the Japanese cost of living is high, and the government had to subsidise food. It has an aging population. Japan’s total public debt now stands at more than 200% of its GDP.

Did this intervention work? In the short term it may have worked, but in the longer term it has been less obviously beneficial, and the effect was short lived. The selling of euros by the US for yen was for the Europeans an unwelcome surprise, while other US policies tend to strengthen the dollar making the intervention redundant and contradictory.