Welcome xx

Love and appreciate you always. Not that angle though 😅 Was so good to see and hear you. Thank you for your wisdom, humour and clarity. You humanised the mainstream media for me when I first met you and I’ll never forget it. Proper (non work) catch up soon please xx

15. In the meantime, here's the dicussion we had about capitalism and other topics at @TheAusInstitute. Discussing stuff you just don't hear on the BBC. www.youtube.com/watch?si=JMs...

14. I would love to see the BBC commission a series of debates about capitalism, which seek to define it, explain it and contest it. But I believe it is now institutionally incapable of such a thing. If any BBC editors are reading this, please prove me wrong.

13. In other words, the manifest failure of the BBC, in common with most other outlets, directly assists the far right and enables its resurgence.

12. What the far right offers is simple but wrong explanations of issues that almost no one is explaining properly: it’s the fault of immigrants / Muslims / Jews / Black people / women / trans people. If there are no competing explanations that make sense, the door is wide open.

11. Because this is common to almost all media, people hear no effective explanations of the traps in which they find themselves, or the perennial social dysfunction that resists changes in government. This makes them highly susceptible to the siren voices of the far right.

9. BBC news and current affairs expend great effort on what they call “analysis”. But the analysis never digs below a certain level. In fact, you could expand the initial question: when did you last hear a critique of power structures on the BBC?

8. There’s a famous saying, attributed to about 20 different people: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Of course it is, if you haven’t defined capitalism. If we haven’t decided what it is, how can we imagine what its end would look like?

7. Much of the time, I can’t help wondering whether they know what it is.

6. How do capitalism’s defenders define it? Most of them don’t. In fact, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the very rare and feeble excuses for “debates” about capitalism, is that, in most cases, neither pro- nor anti-capitalists seek to define it.

5b. ".... use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, and to transform natural wealth, labour and money into commodities that can be accumulated.”

5a. In our book The Invisible Doctrine, Peter Hutchison and I propose the following definition of capitalism:
“Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting. It operates on a constantly shifting and self-consuming frontier, on which both state and powerful private interests ....

4. Capitalism is a specific and particular economic system, which can be dated to around 1450. It is far from the only means by which commerce can proceed. In fact, it’s among the worst of all possible models.

3. I suspect that if you asked BBC journalists to define capitalism, most would mumble something along the lines of “buying and selling things”. This is how people often understand it. But that’s not capitalism, that’s commerce, which has been happening for thousands of years.