Aaron Edwards, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Mainstream Publishing, 2014), £20 On 3 July 1967 the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, under the command of Colonel Colin “Mad” Mitchell, reoccupied the town of Crater in Aden.… Continue Reading
Andy Ridley’s review of my book on genocide, Final Solutions: Human Nature, Capitalism and Genocide, charges me with two principal errors: psychologism and, less centrally, a mistaken analysis of the social basis of Nazism. Taking the second one first, Ridley… Continue Reading
The concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not an opposite of “pure” theory, but—on the contrary—it is the culmination of genuine theory, its consummation—the point where it breaks into practice. Lukács: Lenin: A Study in the Unity of his… Continue Reading
A review of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2012), £20 As the world commemorates the centenary of the First World War (with limited awareness of its meaning) a… Continue Reading
A review of Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013), £19.99 Postcolonial theory has been the dominant intellectual trend within academia relating to studies of imperialism, decolonisation and the legacy of empire for the last two… Continue Reading
Good sense, for Antonio Gramsci, was the “healthy nucleus of common sense”.1 This article tries to make sense of what Gramsci meant by good sense, and seeks to develop his understanding of good sense into a resource we can use… Continue Reading
A review of Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Haymarket, 2014), £19.99 Growing anger and activism around the issue of women’s oppression have seen the return of many arguments from the 1970s and 1980s… Continue Reading
On 16 August 2012 South African police shot and killed 34 striking workers at the Lonmin mine near Rustenburg.1 The massacre sent shockwaves around the world—and the implications of this political earthquake are far from played out. It is likely… Continue Reading
And when war is waged between two groups of predators and oppressors merely for division of the spoils of plunder, merely to see who will strangle more peoples, who will grab more, the question as to who began this war,… Continue Reading
What, if anything, do modern day socialists have to learn from Lenin? Capitalism is mired in its deepest and longest crisis since the 1930s, producing bitter discontent that in places overflows into mass resistance and even revolutions. With Stalinism all… Continue Reading