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Karl Marx in Soho, 1851

A dozen sheets of paper, printed with double-spacing. It’s easier to read. It is a collection of streets in Soho, and Dean Street in particular. A list of dates of buildings and their uses, trades and occupations and the details of the 1851 census. At number 28 Dean Street is recorded Charles Mark, his wifeContinue reading “Karl Marx in Soho, 1851”

Waitresses of the world, unite

‘The plan never works out’, my friend the dust cart driver said, and laughed, knowingly. His plan is to return home to Africa and farm maize. But for now, he’s still driving the dust cart as he calls it. ‘But it’s no longer just a truck’, he continues, ‘it’s an office’. And describes the useContinue reading “Waitresses of the world, unite”

Paris & the Modern Workers

Arriving in Paris Paris appears suddenly; as if the train has travelled through a gate. Before we reached the gate, it was a landscape of rolling hills covered with grass and wheat and cheerful bunches of trees and stand alone farmhouses with whitewash walls and red tile roofs. Out in this countryside we flashed pastContinue reading “Paris & the Modern Workers”

The Impossibilities of Money

Paris rain. It gets everywhere. Even deep under the city in the Line 1 Metro there’s rain. On the umbrellas of those who’ve just got into the carriage. It drips onto the floor. The rain is on people’s shoes and hair. It’s on the bronze silk skirt of the young woman with the black hairContinue reading “The Impossibilities of Money”

Gateways

A Bulgarian shopkeeper who gave me a box to recycle paper, a physiotherapist from Kerala who described the history of the Communist Party there, a Rumanian woman on the street who explained she has always worked and paid her taxes and doesn’t care much for the way some people go on about immigrants, an AfricanContinue reading “Gateways”

The Liberty Tree

A few quite casual things started to come together. I’d been reading EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in preparation for a Radical Walk with the title of Praed Street & the Liberty Tree. I’m not quite sure why I picked Praed Street. It appeared, as it were, in a daydream. IContinue reading “The Liberty Tree”

In Search of a Pitchfork

It was in the waking up; of becoming aware again of human life-consciousness. The intensity of the dreams, alive and vibrant only moments earlier but now fading into the distant haze, echoes and mirrors of the extraordinary world of the sleeping, dreaming brain. This human life-consciousness should be the starting point of everything each day.Continue reading “In Search of a Pitchfork”

Canary Wharf: First Impressions

The Radical Walk, Canary Wharf & Marx’s Literary Style is on Thursday 16 May A short promotional film about Canary Wharf Impressions matter. This is a time of accelerated media production. An ever increasing number of image-objects, a relentless global expansion of capital, billions of packets of data each second moving almost at the speedContinue reading “Canary Wharf: First Impressions”

There is no wealth but life

There seemed to be no chance of an ambulance so I phoned for a taxi. If I hadn’t been in so much pain and unable to think clearly I would have caught the train and then a bus. That’s how I usually travel. At the bottom of the street I live in there had beenContinue reading “There is no wealth but life”

In the Court of King Capital

The Canary Wharf development on the Isle of Dogs is one of several excellent places to study Marxism. The key ingredients of the recipe to cook up ‘Capital’ are all easily found. The exploitation of labour, the bringing together of large quantities of raw materials, money, and the division of society into two main classesContinue reading “In the Court of King Capital”