Jon Amsden published these penetrating comments on the meltdown mailing list earlier today. McCain is gambling with the global system, a shrewd move because if he loses he wins. i.e. Whether this bailout finally goes through or not, sometime soon capital is going to need the US worker onside. Even if there is sooner rather than later a run on the US dollar, McCain will still be the populist who stuck by the workers when all  around him were bent on feeding big capital's crack habit.

Giving a critical survey of the documentaries of Adam Curtis, Andrew Fisher evaluates the claims to 'realism' and political neutrality made for his work against the critical methodologies of Guy Debord and Georg Lukács

My job is not to try to change the world, but to describe it.¹

Contemporary curators are loving the alien, the sacred and the cultic. But far from challenging contemporary social mores, this Other-worship is just an orthodox postmodern denigration of human agency, argues J.J. Charlesworth

In the second of a two-part analysis of neoliberalism in the subcontinent, Neil Gray looks at the material economi

Marx's concept of 'species being' is for some a way of re-connecting with fertile currents in the communist left. Howard Slater explores Frére Dupont's recent book Species Being and Other Stories as a vehicle of exodus from left orthodoxies

But this negation carries within it a yes which is greater than itself

– Octavio Paz

The collapse of Lehman Brothers has got the mainstream media hitting the panic button and talking of systemic crisis. But the crisis isn't just spreading to the real economy, it began there, argues Jon Amsden

In May of this year, Brian Marks made a valiant attempt to tie together inflation, the current crisis in financial markets, and struggles of the world working class. Marks wrote:

When rivalry still openly reigned between the Obama and Clinton camps of the Democratic Party, Ulrich Gutmair spoke to Sci-Fi writer and pioneer of cyberpunk, William Gibson, about American politics, the online age and Voodoo

UG: You invented the term cyberspace when only a few people were online, on an early version of the Internet. What is the most fascinating thing for you on the net today?

Countering media representations of the food crisis as unexpected, George Caffentzis argues that its essential role in thwarting resistance to neoliberalism's enclosures and austerity measures was thoroughly predictable

As western audiences increasingly switch off from generic reporting of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Imogen O'Rorke finds the news-unworthy testimonies at Tate Modern a much needed corrective

Angela Mitropoulos and Bryan Finoki present an incursion, in text and image, into the contemporary borderlands

Sociologist Giovanni Arrighi invokes the political economy of Adam Smith to claim that China's 'labour intensive' mode of production is the future of capitalism. It's also the past, argues Daniel Berchenko

Is Indianness just a German ideology? In the first of a two-part analysis of neoliberalism in the subcontinent, Neil Gray traces the history of Hindu cultural nationalism, from a colonialist mystique of pure spirituality to today's fascist pogroms and economic polarisation

3-5pm, Sunday 3 August 2008. Upstairs at Publish And Be Damned self-publishing fair, Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London E2. Free, no booking required.

Does private-public funding and management of culture mark the death of institutional and critical autonomy? And is direct censorship an anomaly, the most visible form of a wider constriction of cultural freedom, or the shape of cultural policy to come?

Reporting on t