The Euston Manifesto
That’ll teach me to make silly jokes! A few issues back, in a fit of self-indulgent whimsy, I mocked some ex-comrades of ours who had abandoned socialist politics to enlist in George W Bush’s neo-conservative crusade to bring bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism to Iraq. In a little skit, I had one of them confuse the Communist Manifesto with “the Bourgeois-Democratic Manifesto”. Now they and others have in all seriousness produced what I conjured up as an absurdist joke — a “Bourgeois-Democratic Manifesto”. Politics today, as many have already noticed, has become satire-proof...