Twenty years ago, Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri exerted a powerful influence on sections of the left. It presented the idea that capitalism had evolved into a new global order, dominated by supranational bodies such as the World… Continue Reading
A review of Donny Gluckstein and Terry Sullivan, Hegel and Revolution (Bookmarks, 2020), £7. The thought of G W F Hegel might seem like an odd topic of conversation for Marxists. By the time he died in 1831, Hegel had… Continue Reading
The issues that have driven the “trade union debate” in International Socialism are fundamental to the left in Britain and most importantly to Marxists. The “problem”, often repeated in this journal and elsewhere, is simply this: the level of strike… Continue Reading
On a fine day in late April 2007, a group of us were gathered outside the Istanbul offices of Agos, an Armenian-language newspaper, the editor of which had been shot dead three months earlier on the pavement where we were… Continue Reading
Few figures from the history of Marxism appear so frequently in the press and in public debate as Antonio Gramsci.1 For example, in December 2019 the New York Times used Gramsci’s oft-quoted phrase “the old is dying and the new… Continue Reading
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were champions of women’s liberation, both in theory and in practice, in public and in private.1 Important work has already been published exploring both Marx’s and Engels’s writings about women and the family, and developing… Continue Reading
Along with 10.1 million other viewers, I awaited 10pm on 12 December last year and the broadcasting of the BBC/Sky/ITV general election exit poll of voters. “Here we go,” I anxiously WhatsApped a friend as the time-signal sounded. Ten seconds… Continue Reading
On 2 April 2019, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to resign.1 In scarcely more than one month, a massive popular movement that had emerged for the first time on 22 February managed to get rid of the ageing and… Continue Reading
From Algiers to Beirut and Baghdad to Khartoum, it appears that revolution is once again “the choice of the people”—as a slogan echoed by tens of thousands on protests in Sudan puts it.1 Meanwhile, the temperature of social and political… Continue Reading
It is tempting to see pandemics as unpredictable, cataclysmic incursions of nature into human society.1 Yet the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) is anything but a “natural” phenomenon. Epidemics and pandemics happen in a social, political and economic context,… Continue Reading