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How Raymond Williams Redefined Culture

  “The essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook.”          Raymond Williams He made his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite

Britain: Mad Dogs and "Englishness"

  Nationalism "in any imperialist society is bound up with chauvinism, and Britain is an imperialist society, with England its historical core, which has always been defined by its status in the imperialist hierarchy, whatever William Hague says to the contrary.  Orwell’s efforts to situate the basis for socialism on the terrain of culture and “ Englishness ,” which admittedly had a certain proto-Gramscian quality in its approach to popular culture as a strategic factor in political struggles, surely represent the last serious attempt to articulate something like a left-wing “Englishness.”  It was certainly light years ahead of the mawkish, demagogic detritus that passes for the same attempt these days.  Yet it failed rather badly, for two reasons.  First, because it misjudged the class basis for any post-war socialism, estimating that the perpetual growth of a functionary and technician class would be the basis for a rational yet national post-capitalist system.  This isn’t how

Books

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."  — W. H. Auden   Some of the books I have read and I recommend: Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb Brutal Friendship - The West and the Arab Elite by Saïd K. Aburish Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States by Adam Hanieh Islam in Liberalism by Joseph Massad Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong What is Islam? by Shahab Ahmed Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad Egypt: Spies, Soldiers and Statesmen by Hazem Kandil Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Inside the Brotherhood by Hazem Kandil, 2015 Debt, The IMF, and The world Bank, Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 Man's Fate (or La Condition Humaine) by Andre Malraux 1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell Three Penny Opera by Bertolt Brecht The Autumn of the Patriarch by G. G. Marquez The Slave Trade by Hugh