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Richard Barbrook is an academic in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages at the University of Westminster.
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Richard Barbrook is an academic in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages at the University of Westminster.
Barbrook was born in Nottingham in 1956 and grew up in Canterbury, where his father taught US politics at the University of Kent. [1]
He studied for a BA in Social & Political Science at Downing College, Cambridge, an MA in Political Behaviour at University of Essex and a doctorate in Politics & Government at University of Kent. [ citation needed ]
Barbrook joined the Labour Party in 1980, aligning himself with the Labour Briefing left within the party. [1]
In the early 1980s, he was involved with pirate and community radio broadcasting. Helping to set up the multi-lingual Spectrum Radio station in London, he published extensively on radio issues during this period. [2] [3]
Having worked on media regulation within the EU for some years at a research institute at the University of Westminster, much of his material was published in his 1995 book Media Freedom. In the same year, he became the coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at Westminster's Media School and was the first course leader of its MA in Hypermedia Studies. [4]
Working with Andy Cameron (interactive artist), he wrote the essay "The Californian Ideology" [5] [6] a pioneering critique of the neo-liberal politics of Wired magazine. His other important writings about the Net include "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy", [7] "Cyber-communism", [8] "The Regulation of Liberty", [9] and "The Class of the New".
In 2007, Barbook moved to the Social Sciences School of the University of Westminster [10] and published his study of the political and ideological role of the prophecies of artificial intelligence and the information society Imaginary Futures.
The Media Ecology Association selected Imaginary Futures as the winner of the 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book of the Year in the Field of Media Ecology. [11] Barbrook is a founding member of Class Wargames and co-wrote the script to the group's film: Ilze Black (director), Class Wargames Presents Guy Debord's The Game of War. [12]
During the 2016 Labour leadership election, he wrote Jeremy Corbyn's Digital Democracy Manifesto. [13] In May 2017, he assisted in the development of the viral 2017 general election videogame CorbynRun. [14] In November 2017, Barbrook began working with the Labour Party on digital democracy and games. [15] His work focuses on preparing the Labour for government through crisis planning and role-playing of future scenarios that may occur after a potential Labour election win. [16]
The Third Way, also known as Modernised Social Democracy, is a dominantly centrist political position that attempts to reconcile centre-right and centre-left politics by synthesising a combination of economically liberal and social democratic economic policies along with centre-left social policies.
Christian socialism is a religious and political philosophy that blends Christianity and socialism, endorsing socialist economics on the basis of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. Many Christian socialists believe capitalism to be idolatrous and rooted in the sin of greed. Christian socialists identify the cause of social inequality to be the greed that they associate with capitalism. Christian socialism became a major movement in the United Kingdom beginning in the 19th century. The Christian Socialist Movement, known as Christians on the Left since 2013, is one formal group, as well as a faction of the Labour Party.
Red-baiting, also known as reductio ad Stalinum and red-tagging, is an intention to discredit the validity of a political opponent and the opponent's logical argument by accusing, denouncing, attacking, or persecuting the target individual or group as anarchist, communist, Marxist, socialist, Stalinist, or fellow travelers towards these ideologies. In the phrase, red refers to the color that traditionally symbolized left-wing politics worldwide since the 19th century, while baiting refers to persecution, torment, or harassment, as in baiting.
Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who was Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North from 1983 to 2024. He identifies ideologically as a socialist on the political left. An independent, Corbyn was a member of the Labour Party from 1965 until his expulsion in 2024.
The soft left, also known as the open left, inside left and historically as the Tribunite left, is a faction within the British Labour Party. The term "soft left" was coined to distinguish the mainstream left, represented by former leader Michael Foot, from the hard left, represented by Tony Benn. People belonging to the soft left may be called soft leftists or Tribunites.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
Post-capitalism is in part a hypothetical state in which the economic systems of the world can no longer be described as forms of capitalism. Various individuals and political ideologies have speculated on what would define such a world. According to classical Marxist and social evolutionary theories, post-capitalist societies may come about as a result of spontaneous evolution as capitalism becomes obsolete. Others propose models to intentionally replace capitalism, most notably socialism, communism, anarchism, nationalism and degrowth.
"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism". In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.
Paul Mason is a British journalist. He writes a weekly column at The New European and monthly columns for Social Europe and Frankfurter Rundschau. He was Business Correspondent and then Economics Editor of the BBC Two television programme Newsnight from 2001, and Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News from 2013, becoming the programme's Economics Editor in 2014. He left Channel 4 in 2016.
David Stanley Hill is a British Marxist politician, academic and educational activist. He is Research Professor (Emeritus) in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford, England, and also visiting professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and in the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University, London. He was an elected Labour Party councillor for East Sussex County Council and Brighton Borough Council in the 1970s and 1980s and has been a candidate in thirteen local, national and European elections since 1972, most recently as Parliamentary Candidate in Hove and Portslade in the 2015 general election for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). In Britain, he is currently a member of the Labour Left Alliance, the Socialist Labour Network, and the Campaign for a New Workers Party.
Seumas Patrick Charles Milne is a British journalist and political aide. He was appointed as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications in October 2015 under Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, initially on leave from The Guardian. In January 2017, he left The Guardian in order to work for the party full-time. He left the role upon Corbyn's departure as leader in April 2020.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and supports a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach towards achieving socialism. In practice, social democracy takes a form of socially managed welfare capitalism, achieved with partial public ownership, economic interventionism, and policies promoting social equality.
Far-left politics, also known as the extreme left, are politics further to the left on the left–right political spectrum than the standard political left. The term does not have a single, coherent definition; some scholars consider it to be the left of communist parties, while others broaden it to include the left of social democracy. In certain instances—especially in the news media—far left has been associated with some forms of authoritarianism, anarchism, communism, and Marxism, or are characterized as groups that advocate for revolutionary socialism and related communist ideologies, or anti-capitalism and anti-globalization. Far-left terrorism consists of extremist, militant, or insurgent groups that attempt to realize their ideals through political violence rather than using democratic processes.
The Labour Party is a political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as being an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. The Labour Party sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum. In all general elections since 1922, Labour has been either a governing party or the Official Opposition. There have been six Labour prime ministers and thirteen Labour ministries. Since the 2010 general election, it has been the second-largest UK political party by the number of votes cast and number of seats in the House of Commons, behind the Conservative Party and ahead of the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. The party traditionally holds the annual Labour Party Conference during party conference season.
Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf in the 1980s to describe the mixture of "great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy" that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism. In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.
Cyber-utopianism, web-utopianism, digital utopianism, or utopian internet is a subcategory of technological utopianism and the belief that online communication helps bring about a more decentralized, democratic, and libertarian society. The desired values may also be privacy and anonymity, freedom of expression, access to culture and information or also socialist ideals leading to digital socialism.
Class Wargames is a situationist ludic-science group based in London. Founded by Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett in 2007, the group has since reproduced Guy Debord's Le Jeu de la Guerre and proceeded to tour Europe, Asia and South America. In contrast to the electronic version of Debord's game, created by the Radical Software Group, Class Wargames is based on a real rather than digital version of the Game of War and allows for convivial interaction through which anyone can become a situationist.
Transhumanist politics constitutes a group of political ideologies that generally express the belief in improving human individuals through science and technology. Specific topics include space migration, and cryogenic suspension. It is considered the opposing ideal to the concept of bioconservatism, as Transhumanist politics argue for the use of all technology to enhance human individuals.
Christian Fuchs is an Austrian social scientist. From 2013 until 2022 he was Professor of Social Media and Professor of Media, Communication & Society at the University of Westminster, where he also was the Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). Since 2022, he is Professor of Media Systems and Media Organisation at Paderborn University in Germany. He also known for being the editor of the open access journal tripleC: Communications, Capitalism & Critique. The journal's website offers a wide range of critical studies within the debate of capitalism and communication. This academic open access journal publishes new articles, special issues, calls for papers, reviews, reflections, information on conferences and events, and other journal specific information. Fuchs is also the co-founder of the ICTs and Society-network which is a worldwide interdisciplinary network of researchers who study how society and digital media interact. He is the editor of the Open Access Book Series "Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies" published by the open access university publishing house University of Westminster Press that he helped establish in 2015.
Aaron John Bastani is a British political commentator, journalist and author. He co-founded the left-wing media organisation Novara Media in 2011, and has hosted and co-hosted many of its podcasts and videos. After a 2014 video for the publication, he popularised the term "fully automated luxury communism", which describes a post-capitalist society in which automation greatly reduces the amount of labour humans need to do. He wrote the book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, about the subject in 2019. Bastani has written for The Guardian, London Review of Books, openDemocracy and Vice, and is known for his Twitter activity.
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