Groucho Marxism
Questions and answers on socialism, Marxism, and related topics
Category: Psychology
-
I have suffered from depression for most of my life; and I am not alone. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, approximately 1 in 6 adults in the UK experience mental health problems like depression or anxiety in any given week. Furthermore, according to data from the NHS Business Services Authority, around…
-
In a previous blog post I argued that spiritual and political awakening are two sides of the same coin. I also mentioned the main problem with going such an awakening: namely, that it makes it painfully obvious when others haven’t. It can start to feel as though you are the only awake person in a…
-
A month ago today I received an unexpected Christmas present: a book by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman entitled Moral Ambition. I had read and enjoyed Bregman’s first book, Utopia for Realists, so I was keen to give this one a go as well. Fast forward a month and, having just finished reading Moral Ambition,…
-
I recently went through a rather unpleasant experience at work. I had applied for a professional qualification and as part of the application process was invited to what was labelled a ‘career discussion’. The point of this, I was told, was to go through my career history with a member of the relevant professional body…
-
It’s end-of-year review time at the company where I work. This is always a stressful time and one which inevitably leads to disappointment for many people, particularly those who don’t get the rating / pay rise / promotion they were hoping for. Thankfully I am not one of them, having long ago given up any…
-
A debate is currently being waged over the use of gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘they’ and ‘them’, especially when they are used to refer to individuals who identify outside the traditional gender binary. This is part of the wider debate on trans rights, which for reasons that are difficult to fathom seems to have some…
-
In a previous blog post I proposed an explanation as to why some people seem to have a vehement dislike for those of us on the left. According to the conception put forward there, these people, who I referred to as ‘bourgeois centrists’, hate us leftists because of the damage our well-thought-out, evidence-based arguments inflict…
-
On Thursday this week, two Jewish people were killed and three left in a serious condition after a car ramming and stabbing attack outside a synagogue in Manchester. The attack occurred during worship on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar. As I write this details of exactly what happened are still…
-
I recently returned from a long weekend visiting my family home in Devon. Driving back through the village where I grew up, I was surprised to see St. George’s Crosses painted on one of the village’s two zebra crossings. On the journey home through Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, seeing St. George’s Crosses and Union Flags…
-
Antisemitism sadly appears to be on the rise again, and there has been no shortage of coverage of this in the mainstream media. For example, writing in The Spectator last week, Brendan O’Neill stated that ‘Britain is experiencing one of the worst eruptions of anti-Jewish hatred in decades’; and this is just one of dozens…
-
In January this year, Donald Trump began his second term as President of the United States. Unlike last time he was elected, when he had to rely on the hopelessly antiquated electoral college system to get him over the line, this time he won by a landslide, winning the popular vote. Immediately upon taking office…
-
Being a leftist feels like a thankless task sometimes. Over the years I have been called naive, ignorant, intolerant, arrogant, racist, a cultist, a terrorist, and probably many other things I have chosen to forget, simply for putting forward and defending left-wing views. It’s bad enough when these insults are made by strangers, but often…
Groucho Marxism 