Keep It Dense, Keep It Futile, Yeah?

"So you think people should have kids if they can't afford them?" I'm tired of this argument, I'm sick of how morally derelict it is.  Let's just dig a grave for it right now. What is it with people who espouse this argument? They appear to be far more concerned with what they think ought to be, grounded in their own authoritarian power-fantasy, rather than what actually is. Their ideals have been sold to them a thousand times over by a system that, only by chance, works for them. "I'm alright, Jack!" doesn't even need to pass their lips, it's always implied.  They make long drawn out moralisations over those in poverty with children as if that in itself somehow magically changes their circumstances. Money, to them, is the reason you should not have children, spoken as if you can simply override biological imperatives and the innate desire within us to procreate and nurture. It's as if the basic drives of nature itself have never matt

Leftists in the UK are in a historically unusual position, they have no real voice within Parliament bar a handful of backbench Labour MPs, mostly those of the Socialist Campaign Group. The problem is that the Labour party, since the time of Kinnock, has only made perfunctory gestures toward a meaningful transformation of democracy and the economy, and has only had a single truly left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  It's not that we don't have enough left-wing parties in the UK, far from it, it's that those parties have no chance of acquiring even a snifter of power due in large part to our electoral system of first past the post.  This system is badly in need of reform for the following reasons: Minority rule - Despite getting only 43% of the vote, the Conservatives have 56% of the seats.  Political diversity is suppressed - 57% of people did not vote for the Conservatives in 2019 and hence they are denied the representation of their choosing.   Not all votes are equal -  A v

A while ago I posted a video on my page which, I didn't realise at the time, was actually cut from a Labour election video from 2019. I didn't know this because all the pro-Labour bits had been pruned from the video. This is by the by, though, and not really the point of this article.  Whilst most comments and shares praised the content of the video, there were a couple that I found amusing until I further considered the implications. One read "Utter Marxist bollox", the other "We need UKIP as there [ sic ] for England". These attitudes are unfortunately by no means uncommon and are representative of our modern and highly polarised political spirit. So what is it that has turned people to this position? "Marxist bollox"? Most of those reading this will have a good idea of what Marxism actually is and how it is rhetorised by figures such as Farage to mean something else. But let's cover those points anyway. Firstly and basically, what is Marxism