Danni Perry’s flag display at the Royal Opera House sparked 182 performers to sign a solidarity letter that cancelled the Tel Aviv Tosca production, while Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Tel Aviv hotels, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Debt, a core tool of capitalism
Far from being opposed to it, capitalism depends on debt as a way of enforcing loyalty to the profit system from those that have the least to gain from it, explains JOHN GREEN
The debt phenomenon is not just found in the housing market and the student loan business, but everywhere you look. Capitalists depend on selling ever more products; if they can’t sell, they make no profit. That is why we are urged to buy ever more consumer items by slick advertising and seductive publicity.
YANA PETTICREW explains what’s behind the strike and how the entire sector rests on super-exploiting an unorganised workforce
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
BILL KIDD MSP says increasing Britain’s nuclear arsenal at this time is dangerous and expensive folly
ROGER McKENZIE asks whether the US’s shift to targeting everyone at once will instil greater co-operation among rising powers
BEING in debt and being unable to pay it off is one of the recurring nightmares for so many people and it has been the basis for many tragic lives in novels — most famously in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.
In David Copperfield, the clerk Wilkins Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison after failing to meet his creditors’ demands. His long-suffering wife Emma stood by him, despite his financial exigencies that forced her to pawn all her family’s possessions.
Micawber’s name has become synonymous with someone who lives in hopeful expectation but is always financially on the edge. This has formed the basis for the Micawber Principle: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”
More from this author
JOHN GREEN recommends an Argentinian film classic on re-release - a deliciously cynical tale of swindling and double-cross
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
JOHN GREEN is stirred by an ambitious art project that explores solidarity and the shared memory of occupation
JOHN GREEN applauds an excellent and accessible demonstration that the capitalist economy is the biggest threat to our existence
