Chernobyl, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and truth in fiction
A review of Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, a 2019 mini-series in five parts on HBO/Sky. In an early scene of Chernobyl, a young pregnant […]
Category Archives: Cuban revolution
Essential workers
The virus and capitalist society – Part 2 Of all the capitalist governments attempting to emulate the Wuhan model of lockdown to combat the Covid-19 virus, New Zealand has fared […]
What is a social revolution and how does it come about?
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to watch Maestra, a short documentary about the 1961 mass mobilisation to eradicate illiteracy in the early years of the Cuban revolution.1 […]
Fidel Castro’s ‘moral armour’ and courage under fire
In one of the videos of Fidel Castro that have been circulating since the revolutionary leader’s death, a reporter is accompanying Fidel on the plane trip to New York, where […]
The naked class politics of Ebola
Just as a glass prism differentiates sunlight into its component colours, corresponding to the different wavelengths, the Ebola crisis ravaging three West African countries has produced three distinct responses, corresponding […]
Education, the professions, and a lousy compromise
The world’s oldest profession is – contrary to the popular saying – the scribe. The scribe arose together with the rise of written language and number in antiquity, because reading, […]
This is what a moral crisis looks like
Two staggering statistics illustrate the fact that the crisis afflicting the capitalist world is not just an economic crisis but a moral crisis as well. In the United States today, […]
A worker at large 