There Rises A Red Star

Now that I've had some time to process it, I think it's fair to say that the Netflix film Don't Look Up does a fair job of satirising the class structure of our modern world. I’m told that it's supposedly satirising the media response to the climate crisis but I think there's more to it than that so I want to look at the film from a different angle to all the other reviews and analyses I’ve seen. There are stark parallels with reality that I want to draw attention to without spoiling the film. Hence this analysis handily doubles as a political analysis of our current state of affairs The film starts off with a joke: “When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like the rest of the passengers” In the film, the media are realistically portrayed as incompetent, complicit in our current state of affairs and full of talentless posh wankers. The sort of hack journalists who are hired for their ability to forgo any sort of ...

There are few people these days who care much about the geopolitics of decades past. They see little to no importance in it and emphasis is instead, rightfully, placed on the here and now. But the past has many lessons it can bequeath to us, it holds secrets that have only recently been unveiled by the passing of time. There is a famous quote from Chilean socialist, Pablo Neruda - " You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming ". You may have seen this recently used by the Labour Party under the direction of Jeremy Corbyn. The dream of a democratic socialism, a socialism that is not revolutionary but enacted by currently existing legal and democratic means, was finally realised in Chile in 1970. Despite an opposition that was funded and supported by the US, Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity party was elected to power by the people of Chile. They immediately set about a program of reform - nationalising the commanding heights of the economy including...

Whilst on a jaunt to Camden last Saturday, a mate started talking to a Venezuelan chap at a food stall. Soon enough, the Venezuelan chap bought up how much he hates Karl Marx and socialism. I didn't bother to interject because, well, the guy was working and it wasn't really appropriate to do so. I mean, who wants to be accosted by a hairy Marxist when they're trying to work?! Afterwards, my mate said to me "Did you hear that? How much he hates Karl Marx?" "Yeah", I said, "But Marx or Marxism doesn't really have anything to do with Venezuela. The revolution was based on the values and theories of Simon Bolivar, it's a form of socialism unique to South America". I could've gone on about US imperialism but, frankly, I was more in the mood for going to the pub for a pre-gig drink. The retort was, of course, "That's his lived experience though! How can you dispute it?" It got me thinking about the value of such discourse ce...