Keep yourself on the loop and stay updated.
A big variety of articles and resources.
So what is 'the state'?
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Why understanding the state is crucial
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What do we mean by 'the state'?
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Exploring some definitions
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Key features of the modern state
Putting the jigsaw together
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How the UK state comes together
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Looking at core institutions
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Key contradictions in state rule
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Role of political parties in the state
Power and the constitution
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Historical origins of the UK state
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How the constitution embodies power
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How the UK government rules
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Parliament's subordinate role
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Judiciary and other parts of the state
What's in a theory?
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Why theories matter
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Pluralism or how the state can (or should) work for all
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Elitism. A powerful group is always in control
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Marxism. The state privileges capitalism
When, how and why is
the state capitalist?
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Why capitalists need the state
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How does the state support capitalism?
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How does the state rely on capitalism?
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Contradictions within the capitalist state
The neoliberal state
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Neoliberalism and its discontents
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Putting the neo in liberalism: a little history
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Neoliberal state policies and practice
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Social consequences
Hegemony aka ‘authorised thinking’
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Role of dominant ideas in sustaining power
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Antonio Gramsci's contribution
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The transmission belt
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Building counter-hegemony
The state and democracy
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So, what do we mean by democracy?
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Defining representative democracy
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Where our rights come from
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What your rights get you
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What your democratic rights don't get you!
From liberal to illiberal democracy
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From liberal to illiberal democracy
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Democracy is outsourced
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Neoliberalism to new authoritarianism
Beyond the system: the case for revolutionary change
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Democracy chained
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State as a barrier to progress
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Why reforming the state won't work
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The case for a democratic revolution
Capitalism - A system in crisis
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Climate chaos
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Biodiversity loss
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Pollution
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Inequality
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Precarious jobs
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Economic meltdown
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Authoritarian government
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Populist politics
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Mass migration
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Injustice
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Alienation
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and now the pandemic
Defying the system
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The major oppositional movements and campaigns
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How their targets relate to the capitalist system
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How they challenge conventional politics and oppose mainstream economic theories and practices
So what is the system? It's called capitalism
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Goods and services produced for profit
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Class divisions
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Private ownership
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Primary objective is to create profit
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A Social and legal framewrk defining ownership and employment
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A system beset by periodic crises
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Two world wars, facsism, a series of revolutions ...and the age of the pandemic
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Two distinct periods since the second world war
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Keynesian recovery and collapse, Neoliberal recovery and decline
What makes it work
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How Marx cracked the mystery of profit
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How the drive for profit affects the class struggle
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The labour theory of value
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The commodity
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The role of competition
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Productivity
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Growth
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Accumulation and debt
Your data, their profit
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Ownership by equity funds
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Domination by a handful of TNCs in each sector
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Rise, mining and marketisation of data
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Platform capitalism and AI
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Stratospheric rise in debt and debt volatility
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Frequent crises of production & finance
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Exploitation of people and planet
Neoliberalism - ascent and decline
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Neoliberalism - key features
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Extreme concentration of wealth
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Decline in wages share of GDP
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Weakness of trade unions; precarious working
Climate Chaos: A threat to our existence
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Extreme climate events - where we are, where we are going
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Web of life under threat - destruction of species & complex eco-systems
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Impact on human society - loss of agricultural land, water supply crisis
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Forced migration, hunger, war over resources
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Pandemic - it's an ecological issue
A system beyond reform
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Doughnut, circular economy & green new deal
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Why capitalism can't be decoupled from growth
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Populism and a roll back of social gains
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An anarchic system out of control
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Conclusion: it's beyond reform
Exiting postmodernism
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New Materialisms and Object-Oriented Ontology
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Analytic vs. Continental philosophy
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Relativism and social practice
Postmodernism: a fatal attraction
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Challenging systems and power structures
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Capitalism's effect on contemporary culture
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Why are people attracted to postmodernism?
Marx and Engels: exiting capitalism
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Turning Hegel upside down: uniting the dialectic with materialism
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The development of capitalism – the basis for Marx’s concepts
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Philosophy as a tool for analysing social reality: the concepts of alienation and labour
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Marx and Engels brought theory together with practice
Hegel rescues the dialectic
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Hegel rescues the dialectic
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Hegel's basic concepts
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On your Marx
The Ancients lay foundations
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The main strands: idealism and materialism
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Materialism and dialectics early roots in Greece, India and China
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The midwife of European philosophy
Perception and contradiction
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External world; perception and knowledge, being and nothing
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Where does movement come from?
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Who's afraid of contradiction?
A theory of Knowledge: How we know what we know
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What is a theory of knowledge? You already have one!
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The "iceberg beneath our thoughts"
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Some fundamental ways of knowing
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Challenging accepted "truths"
Early Enlighteners
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Scotland and England weigh in as the homes of modern materialism
My thinking toolbox
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Understanding key terms and why we need them
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Epistemology and Ontlogy - what do they mean?
Understanding for revolution
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Knowledge as a spiral path of discovery
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From living perception to abstract dialectical concepts to ideas and then to practice
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Walking the walk together to change the world
Philosopy and Revolution
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What's theory got to do with it?
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Uniting the opposites
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Getting ahead of the curve
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Ideas and Ideals become a physical force
Scandalous thinkers
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Descartes and Spinoza
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The tumultuous 17th century – a battlefield of ideas
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A new class – the bourgeoisie – comes to power in the Netherlands and England
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Philosophy seen through the prism of religion
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Netherlands a haven for freethinkers
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Social and religious/philosophical revolutions
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Philosophers on the run from the Inquisition seek havens abroad
A system at war with itself
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Evidence that the rate of profit declines
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What the rate of profit measures
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Marx's explanation for the decline
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How this explains the drive for growth
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The contradictory pressures on investment
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The inevitability of crisis
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The additional impact of covid
Climate Chaos: A way forward
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Eco-system is changing
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Why did COP fail
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Internalising externalities
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The net zero fraud
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Nationalism and war
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