With Mastaneh Shah-Shuja's recent book Zones of Proletarian Development, the anti-capitalist movement has finally found its political theorist. But, asks Ben Watson, can the lessons she gleans from the movement of movement's successes compete with the organisational and motivational power of the party?

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.

A pertinent reminder that the so-called 'housing bubble' isn't just a matter of subprime foreclosures and repossessions: the buyers of the 'financial products' through which mortgage debt is abstracted and redivided at the outer limits of algorithmic calculation are none other than private pension funds, so that capital's 'no alternative' answer to the pseudo-problem of the 'demographic bomb' may yet manage to create a real 'pensions crisis' where none need have existed

Why the subprime bust will spread By Henry C K Liu

Suzanne Treister's art project and book Hexen 2039 investigates and links a number of occult phenomena to the military industrial entertainment complex. Cameron Bain examines the project and finds that there are empirical reasons for the continuing popularity of mysticism. Treister's approach, he writes, points not only to the surreal foundations of contemporary consciousness but also to a materialist study of power

What is it that typifies and stymies organisational cultures, be they enterprising or oppositional? The repression of psychical multiplicity and alterity into the strait-jacket of the Self, argues Howard Slater

The recent revelation of certain dogs' ability to predict their masters' epileptic seizures is certainly good news for sufferers. Melanie Gilligan looks at the implications for cognitive science and our understanding of the complex interactions between biological 'networks'.