Review of Aesthetics & Alienation, by Gary Tedman, Zero Books, 2012

By Iona Singh

Aesthetics & Alienation is rigorous, most of the chapters first appeared as peer-reviewed essays, and it is audacious in its assimilation of the clash between ideology and materialism, which Tedman elucidates in the early chapter ‘Ideology, the State and the Aesthetic Level of Practice’:

 “I am going to argue that ideas alone, even ideas networked in the mutually compatible interrelations of an ideology, cannot and do not (not solely) provide such a fusion of superstructure with infrastructure as would be truly capable of consolidating a society ravaged by inherent class divisions. For it appears to me to give too much potency to the stuff of ideology – to ideas – than a materialist should, perhaps, allow. “

Tedman wants to intervene here with emotions, rather than ideas, using an original conception of the term "aesthetic", the literal meaning of which is the heightening of human sensibilities and the opposite of anaesthetic, which is to dull them down. He analyses 'emotion' on a physiological and psychological level using Freud's concept of intuition and 'reflex' to endown this 'aesthetic' with a non-humanistic framework, separate from the transcendental and metaphysical history associated with the term. And in our current system it is the deadening of aesthetic sensibilities that "works up" physically derived alienation via the media, artworks, entertainment, and culture generally,  not on critical or intellectual levels but on the basis of desires and reactions and in practical and physical forms.

Feelings are ‘deep’, they have libidinal and unconscious elements, they are slower to change than ideas, and they straddle both the economic base and the superstructure. Consequently, as Tedman carefully describes it: feelings, sensibilities and aesthetics are the fundamental power sources that drive the reproduction of the means of production and hence enable Capitalism to continue.  

Tedman argues that the study of this qualifies as a new discipline and domain that he refers to as the Aesthetic Level of Practice. Once defined in this aspect the concept is then utilised in the book as a powerful addendum to shift and conjecture the work of a host of writers, including Marx, Freud and Walter Benjamin, as well as a number of historical events, and artworks.

The theoretical framework is set up first in Feelings and Ideas in Marx, Freud and Althusser and specifically in their undermining of two “pinnacles of bourgeois ideology”. The first being Freud's location of psychic forces that are beyond the conscious control of the indivdual and hence his shattering of the “self-aware unity of the thinking subject” - the myth that humans are psychologically Captain of their own ship. The second of these is Marx’s dethroning of ‘Man’ as the subject of history and no longer the central, wilful, driving force, because of the impact of the economic base and dialectical materialism. For Tedman, the amalgamation of these two critiques, the micro and the macro, opens up the territory that exists between psychology and politics that can only be bridged by the complex role of feeling. This expanse is so viable that bourgeois ideology has been moved to prohibit the realisation of it, by keeping key elements that compose it, mainly art and science, separate. Nevertheless, the outreach of this level, as Tedman explains it, is present in all affective domains: the media, education, entertainment and the arts, and in 'affective practices' - manners, class affiliations, modes of dress, which he then begins to examine the mechanics of.

There is an early necessary reflection on how nature and nurture fit in to this, in Notes towards a Foundation for a Subjectless Aesthetic. Here, cognitive classification for the concept is sought using the study of deaf children by the linguist Ann Senghas, to show that the aesthetic level is a ‘merging’ of visceral and intellectual faculties similar to those used in the development of language and like language this ability is stimulated by the environment. These findings are a counterclaim to the ‘innate’ humanist charge that overhangs discussions on feelings and the sentient; claims that were most famously made against Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, when he discusses emotional alienation within the mode of production. Hence Tedman’s chapter, Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts as a Work of Art reexamines this early classic and contests that Marx was himself on the path to understanding a non-humanist, materialist aesthetic component as part of the base and superstructure model.

In fact Marx’s awareness of the role of feeling resides not only in the ideas and writing in this text but also because of the three-dimensional structure of Marx’s own original construction of the text.  For Marx did not create this book in a linear fashion, as it has so far been published (and as book publishing will allow), but he designed it so that the structure of the book expresses its content in a sculptural, three-dimensional format. One example drawn from this by Tedman, using some of Margaret Fay’s original research, is how Marx organised the themes of Wages of Labour and Profit of Capital, in separate columns, on the same page side by side, with the theoretical contradictions between them revealed in these columns in adjacent positions. Eventually, some of the columns, overwhelmed by these contradictions, cancel themselves out and disappear all-together, and hence the shape of the work changes, suggesting that:

 “Marx must have been attempting to restructure his own material method of textual production in line with the results of his research.”

Is Marx making a work of art out of his ideas and forging them tactually and sensibly in order to communicate their influence to his reader, and does this work therefore perform on the aesthetic level? It certainly shows that Marx was aware of the feelings of the reader and that he could practice an engagement with the visceral and the corporeal to strengthen his intellectual points, rather than just ignoring these things as many writers do, or dulling them down, as in an alienating or biblical-narrative type framework. By the construction of the form of this work Marx demonstrates that sensory alienation and also non-alienation, major theoretical themes in the Manuscripts, are not just cerebral but tied to materials and shapes, design and general sensory environments.

 The ‘bourgeois’ humanist accusation levelled at Marx in his discussion of feelings and alienation in the text is countered here in favour of the bodily reality and formality of his writing, and the physical ‘shape’ and texture of it (the large landscape sheets of paper handsewn together by Marx play an important part in this). Tedman concludes:

“the EPM, is equivalent to an avant-garde left modernist artwork, but with a rather postmodern, hypertextual deconstructive, textual strategy”.

For Tedman, Marx's awareness of an aesthetic, sense level of practice is always present in his work (he furnishes examples from Capital) even if it is not as radically and artistically expressed as in this early work, understood as a radical new form for a radical new content.

Tedman reconstructed Marx's original design for the 1844 Manuscripts using large sheets of paper and has also published an ebook facimile of this using hypertext links and the original pagination. 

The origins of the aesthetic level are examined in the following chapters: East/West and the Marx-Zeno Dialectic, looks at the counter-feeling, logocentric tradition of Western philosophy. This is posed against the ‘other’ sensuous element of some Eastern philosophies and in relation to Marx’s interest, via Hegel, in the pre-Socratics, to throw light on the non-logocentric, feeling and hence aesthetic slant of his ideas.

The Origins of Kitsch and Counterfeit Dialectics examines the emergence of an aesthetic that is now integrated into everyday life - and how kitsch became the proscribed aesthetic of the ruling class and entered into the class struggle via the official status given to it by the French Academy. And from here on in it emerged practically, specifically through art objects, actions, behaviours, mentalities, and events, even whole periods (the Third Republic).

To examine this we are taken through the changes in the mode of production in Capitalism that led to the specific form of associated alienation for which kitsch is the formal, visual, psychological and artistic expression.  We see how it was specially promoted via the work of artists like Charles Le Brun, who was chosen in the 1600s to head up the group organisation of the French Academy of Art. Based in anthropomorphism, Le Brun’s work heralds the debasement of humanness and of the human senses, “the likening of humans to animals and animals to humans (homo faber).” …and helped to forge the substantiation of dehumanisation and alienation. Tedman submits that imbuing Le Brun with such power at this point in time created an important fulcrum for the state to fulfil its political desires in aesthetics.

Another example of struggles taking place specifically on the aesthetic level comes from the political context of the July Monarchy of Louis Phillippe, which is the theme of the chapter Paris 1844, Manet, Courbet, Marx. Here Tedman demonstrates a convergence of clashes and contradictions that appear to manifest on this date and place, various aspects of which are observed in the political, philosophical and artist production of these three protagonists.

The origins of artists like Le Brun in all epochs, whose work fits neatly into the correct type of aesthetic necessary for the needs of the dominating mode of production is revealed by Tedman’s intersection of the writings of Clement Greenberg, Louis Althusser and Walter B enjamin, which leads him to the conclusion that there is  indeed such an entity as Art Aesthetic State Apparatuses. He finds this:- in Althusser’s critique that bourgeois philosophers maintain a very strict distinction (bifurcation) between science and ideology which then filters down through education and specifically art education, coupled with a denial, on the part of these philosophers of knowing what philosophy is actually doing, as a practice; and, from Walter Benjamin’s criticism of those “undergoing a revolutionary development only in terms of mentality” and who distance their work from technique (the amalgamation of tactile and ‘feelings’ in materials) and hence its relationship to the current day mode of production and means of production. Artists who are like this, says Benjamin, have solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind and not as material producers; and while, says Tedman, Greenberg champions the formal materialism of American Expressionism (Rothko, Jackson Pollock) he still writes about it from a position of the unaccountable in tandem with the general line in educational art departments that ‘there is no accounting for taste’. And this point of view is the political and philosophical basis for the artist who is embedded in the Capitalist social relations of production. These relations are then refined and shaped by them in their specific field of production to become an aesthetic that emerges from the prevailing social fabric and from the controlling state bodies behind them, as Aesthetic State Apparatuses. This is also helped by the fact that the subject who is embedded in this environment as an artist functions partly unconsciously amongst the prevailing alienation of these conditions.

We find that a real examination of the physical and mental affectivity of these issues is prohibited because this would involve science over the prevalent denial of knowledge and a development of the relationship between science and art. The argument that these conditions begin very early in the formation of the subject, is also advanced in the chapters The Family as Aesthetic State Apparatus and Art and Education.

One of the final chapters Soviet Avant Garde Aesthetics: the Art ASA and Gender in the Russian Revolution uses the aesthetic level and the concept of aesthetic state apparatuses to analyse “base/superstructure interaction in the period of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Russia” about 1917.

Here, Tedman charts the breaking down of gender barriers that led to a flurry of woman artists, such as has not been seen before or since, and of changes to the arts, artworks, literature and design because of changes in the base. This is complex. The domains of art and economics, for example, although they are obviously linked, do not develop at the same rate, and in relation to each other they are, using Lenin's concept, “uneven”. A mechanism for the aesthetic level is thus honed in on in the writings of Malevich, which tended to be  quite meta-physical at times, though not always, (perhaps lost in translation also), and not quite in tandem with his more materialist artistic production. So we find that Malevich’s visual practice as it functions on the aesthetic level contradicts his intellectual theorisation, thus exposing a contradiction between the aesthetic level (his paintings) and what could probably be described as the ideological level (his conscious intellect and writings).

Aesthetics & Alienation offers the chance to examine relationships between the state, the status quo, and sentient emotion, the latter of which is argued as the most necessary element for ‘glueing’ the other elements and hence the base/superstructure and the social system, together. This is a basis for understanding how feelings can be and are directed by the industries and institutions that primarily specialise in their arousal: the media, the arts, design and education. The essays are anchored in convincing arguments and research that give credence to the proposed ‘scientificity’ of the method and the enquiry. With so much discussion in many domains, perhaps the conjecture steps a bit ahead of itself sometimes and of the reader, but this is always reeled back quite quickly and the overall points are eloquently concluded.

From my own point of view this book offers an inspiring improvement on the gossipy narrative that grounds most art history and that I have always found inadequate, and of the possibility of substantially linking art to other fields. Hence the poor dandyish ‘flimsy’ and ‘bourgeois’ subject no longer stands, sadly, alone but becomes engaged in a whole fabric of connected knowledge including politics. Aesthetics & Alienation delivers real philosophical and political credibility to the role of feelings which concerns every discipline, social science and aesthetic practitioners like artists, designers and architects. Until now these latter have seen little inroad into the huge traditional body of philosophy and science that can really offer support to the scientific materiality of their own disciplines, and signficantly place them in relation to other subjects that they are intuitively, if not officially in the academic sense, intertwined with.

Gary Tedman's facsimile version of Marx's original construction of The Notebooks 1844, Karl Marx: The Hypertext Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is available in Kindle format from Amazon. Amazon link here

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.

Big Merla

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pQ1EjNRFsZw

To Tackle Climate Heating International Socialism is Needed

We have recently lived through a period in France (where I live) of repeated heatwaves with daytime temperatures sometimes exceeding 40C and nighttime temperatures offering little respite, and with associated droughts. In the Gironde region and the Var massive wildfires occurred, with thousands evacuated and many people losing their homes to the flames. The ‘megafire’ in Gironde threatened the city of Bordeaux. Today as I write there are or have recently been wildfires in Greece, France, Croatia and the UK, as well as in the USA, Spokane, and Canada, British Columbia, and workers are having to labour in unbearable heat extremes because most nations do not have upper temperature limits for work. It is probably the case that these so called heatwaves are the new normal, and if they join up, summer will become hell unless something is done urgently, but it has to be said, now, no matter how urgently we act, stopping fossil fuel burning abruptly, while it is absolutely sensible and needed, will not be able to immediately prevent or reverse the impact that past energy use will have, unfortunately.

40C is hard to deal with. In our home we used a fan constantly. Some of our upstairs rooms were too hot to stay in, and going outside was not advisable. And we have modern insulation and double glazing. It was quite a scary experience going to get our shopping in the car because of what might happen if you broke down in that heat. Supermarkets with car parks without shelter we tried to avoid because they made your car ridiculously, dangerously, hot. We live in the Morvan, and the direct sunshine was impossible to survive in during these periods. At one point we thought we might have to escape down to the cave, which being part buried in the solid rock stayed cool. Only the old stone part of our house remained OK with the shutters permanently closed. Many of our plants in the garden died, as if burnt to a crisp by the rays of the sun even though I had tried to put them in at least partial shade for most of the day. At one point, rather late on, President Macron came on the news to give us an address about the crisis, specifically in the Gironde. For most of his speech you could not hear him because of some humming machine, the TV station eventually switched to another report that had already been aired, then later came back to his speech, the audio was a bit better now but that was the end of it anyway. 

I caught that he mentioned a few times that the crisis was ‘unprecedented’. This phrase is used a lot these days by politicians concerning the climate disaster. Yes, it was perhaps surprising that it has arrived so soon, but the crisis has been foretold by scientists repeatedly, and we have had many previous forest fires in France, even one in 1949 in the Gironde that was bigger.

The current ruling classes and their politicians are obviously incapable of facing up to the climate catastrophe facing all of us, called human induced global warming caused by fossil fuel burning for energy and industry, and which has led recently to such deadly heatwaves and fires. This demonstrates to us very clearly that what is needed is an international plan for energy, implemented concretely over the years ahead. 

But what does this mean? It means what is needed is socialism, - in other words, it means we need (at least) nationalized, socially owned energy and transport industries in the biggest capitalist nations, so that these industries can be made to work in cooperation and coordination with each other instead of competing, so as to end the use of fossil fuels, so that we can all move to renewable energy infrastructure. 

But unfortunately, this is what the scientists that constantly warn us about global warming avoid saying or are not allowed to say, for reasons that are perhaps understandable but are unsettling; socialism is a political economic system that capitalism and its champions of the free market and its politicians are vehemently opposed to, and these capitalists generally hold to the idea that the free market will provide the solutions to this crisis, in the end. 

This has not happened so far of course, and does not look like it will ever occur, and we are already out of time.

Certainly, the technology for renewable energy has been invented and already implemented in instances, but this has been in a piecemeal, slow, and reluctant manner, as well as also in a fake way, such as to signal virtue and sell more products to expand and increase capitalist growth, for example electric cars stop emissions at the car, but still rely on the production of electricity usually by fossil fuel burning, and they produce more emissions in their manufacture process. So, while the proof of concept has shown us that renewable energy, such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, does work, the political will to make the transition has not been sufficient and has failed. 

Why? This is because the politicians are not really in full charge of our destiny, even while elected, their class determines what can be done, and their class leadezrs are the big capitalists who make their wealth out of fossil fuels. Clearly there are too many vested interests in continuing the use of fossil fuels, too many jobs involved in these industries as well as too many secondary jobs that rely on these jobs. Capitalists, big businesses, corporations, cannot, even if they wanted to, just discard their profitable industries because of this.

What must we do therefore? Only economies that can command their most essential industries and resources can cope with the necessary task of planning and implementing this future. Only these, socialist, economies will be capable of cooperating internationally rather than competing and, as is often the case, going to war with each other over energy. This is why it is the most urgent task in each advanced capitalist nation that the political parties of the progressive sides understand this and begin to hurriedly work towards socialism.

I say this knowing of course how this will sound to many like a throwback to an earlier stage of history that the media led us to believe was over, and that capitalist democracy is victorious and the ‘only game in town’. But we now know imperialist competition is not over, and thus war is not over. However, the will to resist imperialism seems to have been sapped, I suggest by the media. But previously, during periods of war we, such as in the UK, have successfully implemented socialist policies when needed, even in our capitalist economy, and we should indeed think of ourselves as on a war footing regarding the climate emergency.

For us, the climate must now be understood as an essential part of carrying forward the class struggle, because the bourgeois class will, as has become obvious, fight against this movement tooth and nail and with all of their ruses and clever media. They will make this task seem unpopular, unfashionable, and seem to be untenable, or will divert this movement onto fake paths that seem superficially to be progress but which are not and which will still support the use of fossil fuel. If we do not enter this struggle, we will be shirking our responsibility and shrugging our shoulders at the terrible catastrophes that will inevitably, and sooner than later, befall our species.

I write this with quite a lot of pessimism, given the current state of things, not really expecting this to happen anytime soon, but I have at least spoken and thus saved my soul.

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/14/why-is-andy-burnham-so-reluctant-to-talk-about-climate-crisis

Review of the film The Odyssey, 2026

by Gary Tedman

Homer wrote, or compiled (from songs), The Odyssey as a follow up to The Iliad, which is the story of the sack of Troy - Ilion was another name for Troy. Parts of the Iliad story are retold in the film. Homer’s book does not begin with the preparation for or the start of the war, it begins instead with the hundreds of ships of the Achaeans, to us better known as the Greeks, pulled up on the beach, and with the siege of Troy having already begun a while ago. In the film as in the book there is a strong sense of time having already passed.

OK, this is not a history lesson, but some things I needed to clarify for myself in the writing of this review: ‘Achaeans’ was the term for the people who shared the Greek language and a similar culture, Greece is the name we have for the relatively modern nation state which did not exist during this period, in which there were only city states, like Athens. However, Homer was writing for this Greek language audience, to which he is obviously biased. It is also important to note that what we call the gods of the Ancient Greeks, or the ‘Greek gods’, belonged in reality to the Achaeans and were not shared with the Trojans as far as we know, but in Homer’s books the adversaries shared the same Greek gods, which were assumed to be ruling over all peoples.

The Odyssey film begins with the war already having been won, but at some cost, by the famous subterfuge of the hollow wooden horse, and there now seems to be only two black ships on the beach, the one of Odysseus, and Agamemnon’s. Although they have achieved a victory, there is an ominous feeling to the proceedings. The plot concerns Odysseus’ trials as he tries to lead those Achaeans still under his command home after having been away for years.

The activities of the gods feature quite a bit in The Iliad: of Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Thetis, Hera, and so on. They seem like an extended Greek patriarchal family with added superpowers. Achilles, the great runner, is for instance a demi-god. And this brings a problem also for the Odyssey film and the director Christopher Nolan - of how to deal with the real and the imagined.

Nolan obviously opted for a treatment of the subject in a similar realist way to his other war film, Dunkirk, but does this work? - Perhaps Homer was also aware of this problem, all that time ago. For instance, in The Iliad book there is a peculiar passage where the author-narrator tells us about not being able to make the reader aware of the simultaneous events in the battle at different gates of the beach encampment protecting the boats of the Achaean myrmidons from the Trojans, who have come out of the city to attack them. These are the actions of mere mortals. But Homer evidently has no trouble telling us about what the gods are doing, and how they interfere in the lives of these warriors, which seems contradictory, for, surely an author who knows what the gods get up to can also know what ordinary men do, even if they do it at the same time in different places? I therefore wonder if Homer is deliberately revealing something to us about the writer’s art? A modernist element in Homer?

Nolan’s realist treatment is caught between trying to depict a historical reality that we presume must have existed, and the mythology of the actors within this history, and which is in the handed down stories of Homer and which form an integral artistic part of those stories. Simply put, the problem is, does the artist, writer, or film director, refer to the Greek gods as affecting the lives of these fighters, as really existing gods, or not? If not, we still need to get some idea of how these gods operate in the imaginations and alienations of these heroic figures, do we not? Because these imaginings would have helped shape their feelings and thus also take part in determining their actions, even in the real history of Troy.

Is it a timely film? It is plainly anti-war. The aftermath of the horrors of war figure here in indirect ways, revealing guilt and an unclear search for redemption. The viewer or the reader does not really find out why Troy was being attacked. There are hints in the film about an economic struggle over trading routes to the east which do not exist in Homer as far as I can tell. Historic Troy, which was not long ago discovered, was on an important sea route, the Dardanelles, near the entrance to the Sea of Marmara, which itself is connected to the Black Sea by what is now the strait of the Bosphorus (Thracian Bosporus). Currently we have the war between the US and Iran involving the Strait of Hormuz waterway.

The reason for the war given in the account of Homer is Helen, the most beautiful mortal woman, who was either, taken forcibly, or removed willingly, from her husband, by Paris and ensconced back in Troy. All this also involves the intrigues of the gods of course, but it still seems to us, today, too feeble an excuse to launch a thousand ships and destroy a city state. The Helen story could be allegorical of course, symbolizing the Trojans unfairly stealing the Achaeans trade and obtaining beautiful booty that they felt that they should have. Homer does not dwell on Helen much, although she seems wise and a little regretful. It would have been in any case an historical economic fact that this society, being slave based, and agrarian, would have required occasional conquest and plunder to add riches to it, as well as to excuse its faults by blaming evil foreign forces.

Homer’s The Iliad book is full of the top commanders wearing resplendent custom-made armour, with bronze, silver, and gold decorations, worn by the heroes, wielding amazingly wrought weaponry, which the sides fight over and strip as a spoil when they have succeeded in killing them. But The Odyssey film shows little of this splendour, it seems deliberately grubby, gritty, and dark, with no make-up evident on the actors, even the pores of the actors can be seen, which is unusual. Probably the ordinary soldiers, not professionals in the modern sense, in reality had to make do with their more humble gear and were modestly attired and evidently even needed to be cajoled and corralled into battle by their noble commanders, but I suspect the leaders did look pretty impressive even in the mundane real world of the Bronze age, but not so this filmic Odysseus. Otherwise, Matt Damon achieves all that is needed of him in the role, he is good at this sort of thing, if perhaps too recognisable, Jason Bourne in a Greek helmet.

Nolan does not show us the gods, but he does hint at them sometimes, a little, by some camera techniques if I am not mistaken, but also when he does have to show us the mythical manifestations and appearances, given they are a mainstay of the story, like the one eyed giant or the siren, he does it in the aforementioned realist manner, which is peculiar: the giant has a twisted face, malformed, he seems merely disabled, rather than having a central alien-like eye. I found myself wanting some CGI for once (maybe there was some, I don’t know, but I wanted it to be more obvious). If ever there was a justification for some extravagant special effects, this was it, I felt, it required a spectacle. But the opportunity was not taken up. I found myself pining a bit for Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation such as in Jason and the Argonauts.

Nevertheless, the movie was gripping, even without attaining the epic quality that Dunkirk did sometimes succeed in. It made me want to read The Odyssey again. I had read an abridged version when I was young, but apart from the famous bits I had forgotten most of it.

A few translator’s observations on 'The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944'

Bloomsbury Academic 2025

Translated and edited by Iona Singh

Sick of thinking my own thoughts and writing them down, the possibility of trying to get into someone else’s thoughts and writing them down instead interested me. I knew Lucien Febvre’s work and his subtle approach to the role of feelings from A new kind of history, Sensibility and history and History and psychology (RKP 1973). These are fantastic essays, unique in their field, the kind you dream about when trying to understand the social and political affects of art and design, for example, and they can be applied way beyond the realms of historical studies. And Febvre, in these essays kept mentioning this person Bloch, he died in the war, shot by the Germans, and was a great loss.

When I first began as a French to English translator, some years before, I had the naive idea that some of the ‘Frenchness’ of the original language should be maintained in the translation, if possible, even if this was not quite correct English. A slight miscommunication with the editor of a Publisher I was translating several books for convinced me they wanted a literal translation of the tenses used in French. English and French are different in this way, the imperfect tense, for example, is used more frequently in French. I’m embarrassed to say this now, but I followed this through and the translation read like the events were ongoing and in the present, like the editorial of Hello magazine. Luckily, the misunderstanding was soon straightened out, forgiven, and I never did that again!

This is one set of innumerable choices that the translator must make to determine not just how to interpret the meaning of the original writing but also the way it is expressed, I would call this the politics of translation. Is a text to be translated formally or officiously or is it casual, should I use slang words or stick to polite terms, middle class or aristocratic phrases and how literal do you need to be in the translation in order to really convey what the writer wants.

These were all questions I needed to mull, especially when translating the writings of Marc Bloch. In the beginning it still seemed charming to retain a little of his French expressions and grammar, but by the time I had finished, over years, I ended up understanding that I only needed to convey what Bloch actually MEANT and that alone. And often these charming Frenchisms got in the way and definitely had to GO.

Translating a work awards a great deal of power, leverage and responsibility to an interpreter. For me the best way to honour that was to grasp the sentiment of what Bloch wanted to say, the feeling, as well as the language. I decided it needed to be like Bloch chatting out loud and explaining it. His writing has a chatty element and by the end of the process, every time I read it, I could hear him saying the words out to me in English (with an English accent)?!

It helps a translator to understand what they can about the personality of the translated. When I began stumbling through Bloch’s long sinuous sentences (even his biographer Carole Fink mentioned these as difficult) and pairing them with the stiff war time photos of a middle-aged Bloch and his grand position in French education, I was intimidated into reading and translating his texts literally and formally, which came across as a bit boring and slightly pompous. But with perseverance the nuances emerged and I realised it was in fact ME reading these things into the work. If his writing is a bit polite and formal at times it needs to be adjusted against the politeness and formality of the epoch which is finally therefore negated to reveal that Bloch, who was mainly addressing young people, students, and academics from outside the mainstream discipline of history, was trying to convey things on their level. From then on, the sentiment of what Bloch actually MEANT and how he meant to say it became much clearer.

And how did he mean to say it? After Bloch’s death in the war Lucien Febvre recalls him recounting an argument wearing ‘that slightly amused look on his face’. And that image clicked with me, because on removing those starchy barriers whether from Bloch’s own pages or from inside my head, that comment dovetailed with the texts to reveal that Bloch was funny. That the contradictions he points out are befuddling puzzles he’s trying to solve, and they often quite amuse him.

The difficulty of trying to get to this as a translator, to facilitate his words as if he is enunciating them, (some of the chapters in the book are transcriptions of lectures) and informally speaking to his class, became the main challenge. When translating from French, the words chosen from the available English are not, of course, to be translated on their own, they are part of a line of words, and sentences of words, and each of these, adjusts the others. The meaning, starts as a fluid dynamic, moving through the intellectual variables of space and time, but gradually in view of the wider text, this is homed in and any inexactitudes whittled away until the meanings are contained within their correct limits and the spirit, irony, and humour finally comes clean.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Marc Bloch chatting to me over many afternoons while the thread of his language was checked and rechecked - even if I couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes little paragraphs that caused so much trouble at the time still come back to me out of the blue. Ancient words in French I did not know but now will never forget, and I’ve talked about them so much to my husband that he won’t forget them either. And now the book is published it's a bit of a shame to leave my talkative old mate behind.

A reviewer of the book mentioned that Bloch’s voice ‘shines through’ from within the edition but made no reference to the role of translation in this. Bloch’s voice does shine through, but not of its own accord as some transcendental force that asserts itself under any circumstances, it shines through by the material mechanics of translation, the processes of understanding what that voice is and of eventually ridding it of anything that stifles it.  

Iona Singh

The paperback edition of The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944 is available from 20 August 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/selected-writings-of-marc-bloch-9781350513433/ and Amazon.

Iran War Notes

Netanyahu, the leader of Israel, sounds reasonable in his speech and his answers to the press questions, he has a nice voice, and is always composed. This is 19/03/2026 during the war on Iran by the US and Israel. The war was started by these powers without warning during negotiations with Iran. The justification has varied for the US and Trump, flipping between the apparent nuclear threat, to the killing of protesters by the Iranian authorities, to regime change.  Now, as Netanyahu speaks, he refers to Iran’s conventional weapons that it has developed, describing them as a way for Iran to develop and protect nuclear weapons. So now, also, Iran may not even develop conventional weapons, as far as these powers are concerned. In effect this means that Iran may not have a state, be a state, an authority with power.

The argument that these allied powers were encouraging an uprising by the Iranian people rings hollow, now, because the bombing, such as of needed infrastructure and the oil storage facilities around Tehran, which affects Iranians badly, does not engender sympathy even from the rebels.

On a news programme, Trump expressed surprise that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz as part of its retaliation. The strait is a narrow point in the vital global trade route for shipping, especially of fossil fuels. This in itself is surprising, both that he did not expect it, and that he would admit to not expecting it. But Trump is hard to pin down, he sows confusion and appears to operate on whims. The attack on the giant gas field shared between Iran and Quatar. Was this known by Trump or not? Who knows. Trump seems to deny knowing it, perhaps because it would not be liked too much by Quatar, a supposed ally.

It seems incredible that the leaders of Iran especially, after all this time, do not seem to realize that the US and Israel work together, they are a ‘double act’ so to speak. Or maybe they just go along with the illusion. Israel manages to assassinate Iran’s leaders almost at will, but still Iran seems to be capable of defending itself with its missiles and drones.

The question is, does Israel and the US really want to degrade Iran to the extent that it represents no threat? Do they not need a good excuse for war every now and then? And what do they really expect from regime change if it were to happen? Not a progressive revolution of course, they do not want a competing progressive democracy or socialism in this fossil fuel rich location, they would prefer the return of the Shah type of aristocracy, it is easier for them to make deals with and exploit.

None of the ‘analysts’ of this war drawn on by the western media bring into the account of this conflict the role of class. The US military bases strewn throughout the region exist because the regional royalty, their ruling classes want them, because they help them control their own working classes. Iran is the different one, the exception, it had a revolution but went one step forwards and two steps backwards, it ejected western interests and deposed the Shah but installed the clerics and absolute religious authority. But it does not have the US bases and is unfriendly to US regional influence, and Israel. It is therefore not entirely untrue that Iran does not represent a threat to the world if it develops nuclear weapons.

But it is also true that we are always threatened by the nuclear weapons in the hands of people like Trump and Netanyahu, and Hitlerism grew out of a democracy, so what is different about Iran? Iran must not have nuclear weapons according to the western powers for a hidden reason, because it is near all the oil and the main trade route for it. For this reason, the Middle East in general must be kept virtually medieval, and it must be reduced into this condition periodically by the imperial powers. It must be made and kept barbaric. This is simple capitalist imperialist competition at work.

What, in any case, is the specific difference with Iran having nuclear weapons to other countries that have them? Aside from the argument that they are crazy, Netanyahu claimed in his speech that if they had nuclear weapons, they would blackmail the world. Is this true? Apart from trying to know what is in the psychology of the future Iranian regime if it had nuclear weapons, what would be their actual, material, advantage? After all, they would only be in the same position as every other nuclear power. If they were to use the bomb, there would be mutually assured destruction, and no winners. Clearly the only real difference would be that other nuclear powers would not be able to sway them with threats so easily, the nuclear powers would lose influence in this region, which in the end is to lose profits.

Regarding the accusation of craziness, Iran has Islam as a state religion, unlike for instance Judaism in the state of Israel. The west implies that this state religion is especially unhinged. History does not prove this, yet every religion has its extreme evangelists who can become state terrorists. At this moment it is the democratic west led by Trump and Netanyahu that is being terrorist, but on a grand crusading imperialist scale that makes the label seem weak and inappropriate. Religion is dangerous because it is faith, and faith knows no bounds.

Coming back to earth, by missing out class in their analysis, the leaders of the west also miss out the thorny issue of their own workers not being able to afford to buy fuel for their cars to get to work and the cost of living is rising again. These are ostensibly at least democracies, which have public opinion, which in the US is opposed to this war. In the Middle East what the working classes think and feel is a mystery to them, at least as far as they let us see. Iran attacks the neighbouring Middle Eastern countries that host US military bases from which they are being attacked, as they obviously would. These attacks must affect the class relations in these countries, causing some wobbles. Thus, it is not only Iran that could develop regime change given this war and its unsettling conditions.

Generally western leaders, in an amazing show of brazen hypocrisy, denounce Iran for attacking these countries (i.e. defending itself) and remain quiet about the unlawful surprise attack by Israel and the US on Iran, which started this war. Brazen hypocrisy is clearly the name of the game these days, it is presumably a rather strange way to try to hang onto a vestige of moral high ground, but they cannot refer to international law anymore, which died with Gaza. This might be seen as the law of the jungle, but in the jungle it is simpler, there is less connivance, subterfuge, espionage, backstabbing, etc., all the hallmarks of human economic contradictions and struggle.

And all this fighting is over fossil fuels, all this extra pollution, at a time when we least need it, when the planet is warming alarmingly due to the burning of these fuels. Truly the global bourgeois classes seem to want to cement their reputation as totally unfit to rule.

 

The western Bourgeois classes flummoxed by Trump’s Imperialism

 So Trump, the US president, jealous at Putin’s imperialism, starts his own adventure in his own ‘back yard’ (as the press call it) in South America, as US armed forces kidnap president Maduro of socialist Venezuela, strangely meeting little resistance, according to reports. After this, we again find the US president threatening to take over Greenland, possibly even forcibly. This now has a new significance for other western leaders. They were generally quiet or supportive on Trump’s illegal action in Venezuela, but the Greenland threat got them worked up a bit more. Greenland, belonging to Denmark, a Nato member. Nato, a military alliance, has a pledge to defend any member against external threats, but now the threat is the biggest member of Nato, its de facto ruler. What would they say now?

Well, at least a few half-hearted comments about Greenland meant they did not have to remark all that much about Venezuela. But now of course Putin in Ukraine is not so morally different to Trump in South America. Clearly the liberal western press was having an awkward moment finding its ethical high ground. Still, the bottom line, the standard frame, was to support the US, the leader of the Free World. They look for excuses for the leader of the Free World to be so obviously outright authoritarian and imperialist.

Putin in fact has more and better excuses for imperialism in Ukraine, given what happened in WWII and the millions of Russians who were killed by the German Nazis, the invasions of Russia usually being via Ukraine with assistance from some Ukrainians. So, we see that what interests the bourgeois classes and its western media is not really some special democratically based morality, but the interests of its bourgeois class owned corporations who are helped to global success by the force of the US military. In a sense what this means is a return to the capitalist normality of imperial competition, which was only interrupted a little bit by the post world war consensus that such wars should never happen again.

And so, what does this mean? It means we are heading towards another world war; this is always where imperialism ends up, as we should know by now. However, knowing this and doing something real about it are two different things. Our politicians act as if they are living on a different astral plane, their morality and arguments are from an earlier time, outdated as soon as they utter their well-worn phrases, and otherwise quite bizarre, they do not face up to what is happening. But they cannot, not because they do not have this knowledge, but because they are embedded in a system where they depend on the corporations and the military who are pushers of imperialist conquest. They are not in fact our elected representatives, even though of course they act out this role, they are really members of the media state apparatus of the bourgeois class, their job is to perform for this class, to play the role of democratic freedom, a kind of covering up of imperialism with a sugar coating.

 

Ukraine Russia War – Fascist Corruption

Recently some of the Ukrainian president’s closest friends, confidantes, and advisers, as well as people in his political party, have been strongly suspected of corruption by the internal agency, called Nabu, that not so long ago Zelenskyy tried to prevent from doing its job through legislation in Ukraine’s parliament, only to be made to reverse this by massive protests. The corruption involves alleged kickbacks from contracts for the big Ukrainian energy company, Energoatom. One of the suspects fled the country, allegedly to Israel, just hours before his home was raided in the investigation, apparently being tipped off. This was Timur Mindich, the old friend of Zelenskyy and former business partner in his media production company, Kvartal 95, which helped Zelensky get elected and gain power, as well as providing a team of close advisers afterwards, all helped by money and political encouragement from the west.  Another close friend, adviser, and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, who was inseparable from Zelenskyy until now and was the key figure in the so-called peace negotiations with foreign governments, was Andriy Yermak. Yermak also worked for Zelenskyy’s media production company, as a lawyer at first, from 2011. Other figures involved are Ukraine’s ex deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernishov, who was also under suspicion in another case of corruption, the justice minister Herman Halushchenko, and the energy minister Svetlana Hrynchuk, plus a good number of other less well-known individuals. All of these were members of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People political party. Yes, the name seems somewhat ironic to say the least.

The western media state apparatus does not dwell much on these matters, although they report it, the person who appears to be the focal point of the corruption, president Zelenskyy himself, completely evades their suspicion, even their speculation, when you might have expected otherwise. So much money and praise has been heaped upon this fascist leader, now no longer elected in Ukraine but essential to the western media, that they cannot easily retrace their steps. It was similar with Aung San Suu Kyi, you may recall. But that moment when the Canadian parliament, with Zelenskyy in attendance, gave an actual old Nazi two standing ovations, was obviously highly emblematic.  

The bourgeois state media spin on this is that it demonstrates that Ukraine is a society with a democracy on the right path to solving its enormous corruption problem, as if this were just a fly in the ointment, it is after all the only way to paint it positively for them. It is a standard response that excuses everything. If they lose a conflict, they will also say it was due to the mass peace campaigns, which "show how vibrant our democracy is." 

We will not dwell on how western workers might feel about their money and weapons being gifted to a foreign fascist leadership while they are deprived in the cost of living crisis, but ask how must the poor Ukrainian workers feel being sent to the front and risking their lives, and often dying, for these people. They are suffering in the energy blackouts caused by Russian bombing, but having their money and energy siphoned off to fill the pockets of their own corrupt leaders, in the midst of this war, rather than support the effort, must be extremely galling. This again is not mentioned, even speculated on, by the western media state apparatuses, who dutifully follow their bourgeois class’s imperialist aims.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/4/17/why-is-a-heroine-of-ukraines-revolution-charged-with-murder

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/what-will-the-sacking-of-zelenskyys-no-2-change-for-ukraine

"Several months later, NABU published tapes exposing large-scale corruption within the president’s inner circle. Although, initially, the chief of staff was not directly implicated in the scandal, reports were soon leaked that the “Ali Baba” mentioned in the tapes was none other than Yermak. The recordings also suggested that it was Yermak who may have ordered the security services to launch the attack on the anti-corruption agencies back in the summer, though no formal charges have been brought against him.

Even after not only the opposition, but also some of the president’s allies began demanding Yermak’s resignation, Zelensky fought to the bitter end for his chief of staff. "

https://left.eu/ukraine-government-turning-blind-eye-to-fascism-in-its-ranks/

"As Mr Korotkykh's case demonstrates, the ultra-nationalists have proven to be effective and dedicated fighters in the brutal war in the east against Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces, whose numbers also include a large contingent from Russia's far right.

As a result, they have achieved a level of acceptance, even though most Ukrainians are unfamiliar with their actual beliefs.

The volunteer Azov Battalion is a case in point."  *

* The idea expressed in this article by the BBC writer that Ukrainians are somehow more unaware of what Nazis are is somewhat ridiculous, given the history of their country, and its invasion by Nazi Germany. They would have at least as good an understanding as UK citizens, except it would be likely influenced by the years of imperialist imposition by the late Russian Soviet Union and later Russia.