Carlyle, Gabriel

Lots of people seem to be very excited about Extinction Rebellion (XR)’s ‘declaration of rebellion’ and its plans to ‘bring…

It must have been a strange sight: the ex-suffragette leading a procession of soldiers marching four abreast down Whitehall, under the banner ‘Lift the Hunger Blockade!’

The Women’s International League (WIL) had been demonstrating in Trafalgar Square on 6 April 1919 against the continuing blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary. WIL was the British section of an international peace group, the International Committee of Women for Permament Peace (ICWPP), which had been established at…

In John Carpenter’s celebrated 1988 sci-fi film They Live, a drifter living in a shanty town discovers a special pair of sunglasses which reveal a terrible secret that explains the huge disparities in wealth and power that surround him.

Wearing them, the hero is able to see reality as it truly is: his world is being run by aliens working alongside a wealthy human elite (‘the 1%’). Moreover, the aliens are manipulating ordinary people’s thoughts and perceptions to conceal this…

On 28 June 1916, Karl Liebknecht – Germany’s most famous anti-war campaigner – was put on trial for treason for his opposition to the war. That same day, some 55,000 munitions workers left their workplaces to march in perfect discipline through the streets of Berlin, shouting ‘Long live Liebknecht!’ and ‘Long live peace!’. About 120 miles to the west, in Brunswick, an estimated 60 per cent of the workforce in some 65 factories also joined the strike.

Astonishingly, these events had…

'How did the workers' councils emerge in Germany? They emerged from the big strike movements of the last years, in which we – who have always been strong opponents of the war and who have lived with tortured souls for four years given the pressure and the lies the German people were exposed to – were the driving political force. We convinced the people in the big factories who shared our ideas to act as workers' councils; they did so under enormous danger.' - Ernst Däumig, 19…

At the end of March, I travelled to Stafford to attend the second Fossil Free UK national gathering as a representative of Divest East Sussex – one of scores of local groups campaigning to get universities and local councils to ditch their investments in the fossil fuel industries (coal, oil and gas).

I’d arrived insanely early. Rapidly exhausting the delights of the town centre, I retreated to a bench in Victoria Park, beside the river Sow, where a young man with a guitar…

According to longtime activist and author Jeremy Brecher, ‘we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency’ to prevent catastrophic climate change. In this short and timely book he attempts to explain how and why this insurgency has emerged and seeks to ‘[lay] out a strategy for climate insurgents in the US’.

The ‘why’ of the insurgency is a relatively straightforward matter. PR aside, governments and corporations have thus far failed to take…

PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series continues with this showcase for the writing of the legendary science fiction (SF) writer and memoirist Samuel R. Delany, featuring the title novella, Delany’s famous 1998 essay ‘Racism in Science Fiction’, and an interview with Delany by series editor Terry Bisson.

Clocking-in at seventy-two pages, The Atheist in the Attic centres on the famous November 1676 meeting between the philosophers Leibniz and Spinoza (the latter the atheist…

There can be few more dogged campaigners than David Polden.

When I arrived at the Jobs and Climate conference on 10 March at 10am, the start of the 45-minute registration period, the seasoned 77-year-old peace campaigner was already there, distributing flyers to the general public. Believing that the event would start at 10am, David had been there since 9.15am. Given that no one else had arrived during the intervening period, it was a miracle that he hadn’t given up.

…

It’s not always a good sign when the most frequent comment one finds oneself scrawling in the margins of a book is ‘Really?’

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last five-plus years will be aware that today’s digital technologies – first and foremost the internet itself – present wide-ranging challenges to some of our most cherished rights and institutions. Mass government surveillance of the internet threatens our privacy. Google has built an unassailable and unaccountable…

‘By the age of fourteen months,’ George Monbiot writes ‘children begin to help each other, attempting to hand over objects another child cannot reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing some of the things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people’s violations of moral norms.’

We are supremely social mammals, ‘blessed with an amazing capacity for kindness and care towards others’, and yet today ‘an epidemic of loneliness is sweeping the…

Evan Sleeping at Camp 18, Juneau Icefield Research Program, Alaska. Photograph courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.

Lucas Foglia, Human Nature
Nazraeli Press, 2017; 92pp; £50

In one of his most famous rants, the comedian George Carlin claimed that: ‘there is nothing wrong with the planet .… The planet is fine. The people are fucked.… The planet…

2 October is the official UN International Day of Non-Violence (no, I didn’t know either). So what better way to spend it than in London with the folk from Pax Christi, the international Catholic movement for peace, at the first of their four ‘Nonviolence Works!’ seminars? (The other events took place in Leeds, Birmingham and Liverpool.)

Arriving, I bumped into PN contributor Henrietta Cullinan and…

Sean Michael Wilson’s latest non-fiction comic book – written in conjunction with the political philosopher Brad Evans – surveys a wide variety of thinking about violence, by 10 figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon to Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky.

Unfortunately, most of the treatments are – perhaps necessarily, given their brevity – fairly superficial. I suspect that some of the showcased thinkers (for example Judith Butler) have…

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
12 July – 22 October 2017; Tate Modern; 10am – 6pm daily; £15, £13.10 concessions, under-12s free.

Mark Godfrey & Zoe Whitley
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
Tate Gallery Publishing, 2017; 240pp; £29.99

‘The fantastic…