Marx and Engels described not the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848, but predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it.

We now live in a world in which this transformation has largely taken place, even though readers of the Manifesto in the third millennium of the western calendar will no doubt observe the continued acceleration of its advance. In some ways we can even see the force of the Manifesto‘s predictions more clearly than the generations between us and its publication. For until the revolution in transport and communications since the Second World War, there were limits to the globalisation of production, to ‘giving a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’. Until the 1970s industrialisation remained over­whelmingly confined to its regions of origin. Some schools of Marxists could even argue that capitalism, at least in its imperialist form, so far from ‘compel[ling] all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production’, was by its nature perpetuating, or even creating, ‘underdevelopment’ in the so-called Third World. While one third of the human race lived in economies of the Soviet communist type, it seemed as though capitalism would never succeed in compelling all nations ‘to become bourgeois themselves’. It would not ‘create a world after its own image’. Again, before the 1960s the Manifesto‘s announcement that capitalism brought about the destruction of the family seemed not to have been verified, even in the advanced Western countries, where today something like half the children are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in big cities consist of single persons.

In short, what might in 1848 have struck an uncommitted reader as revolutionary rhetoric or, at best, as plausible prediction can now be read as a concise characterisation of capitalism at the start of the new millennium.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 112-113.

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Gruppenbild mit Herren in Olivgrün: Generalinspekteur Carsten Breuer (re.) zeigt sich neben dem ukrainischen Verteidigungsminister Oleksij Resnikow (2. v. re.) und der deutschen Botschafterin Anka Feldhusen in Kiew. (Foto: Twitter@oleksiireznikov)

Deutschlands ranghöchster Soldat zeigt sich uniformiert an der Seite ukrainischer Militärs. Darf er das? Die Bilder kommen in Berlin nicht überall gut an – und sind für die Linke eine Provokation.

Es sind ungewöhnliche, fast schon historische – und umstrittene Aufnahmen. Die Fotos zeigen den neuen Generalinspekteur Carsten Breuer bei seinem hierzulande bisher allenfalls als Randnotiz vermerkten Besuch vor einer Woche in Kiew. In Flecktarn-Uniform ist der höchstrangige deutsche Soldat darauf zu sehen – im Kriegsgebiet, an der Seite des ukrainischen Verteidigungsministers Oleksij Resnikow und führender ukrainischer Militärs, ebenfalls in Uniform.

Craig Murray:

Now Protest Is a Moral Duty

Two other female policemen were filming with a large video camera from three metres away. Thirty yards down the road were large groups of burly policemen in fluorescent jackets, and beyond them the Tactical Support Group sat behind the dark windows of their mesh covered minibuses, fingering their shields and batons.

Facing Martin were the protestors. There were six of us, average age about 70. …  I felt perhaps proud, but rather puzzled, to be taken for a serious criminal danger to the city of Leicester.

Gregor Gysi

I feel I have my finger on the pulse of anti-fascist fashion. White hair is very au courant this year.

Tranquilliser use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would probably be described as post traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it ‘the Belfast syndrome’, a malady that was said to result from ‘living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary’. Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.

—Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing, (London: William Collins, 2018), 58.

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