Editor’s introduction I was going to open by writing that Michael Kidron (1930-2003) is best known as a Marxist economist, a leading theoretician of the International Socialist (IS) tradition and the foremost developer of the theory of the permanent arms… Continue Reading
An interesting debate has been taking place within and around the journal New Left Review. This was provoked by a piece in the November-December issue, by Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley, entitled “Seven theses on American politics” (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-seven-theses-on-american-politics). While making… Continue Reading
A review of Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx (translated by Kevin B Anderson and Karel Ludenhof) (PM Press, 2022), £15.99 The need for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist society based on human need… Continue Reading
A review of The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain 1660-1800, James D Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2022), £75 From the 16th until the 19th century, the multifaceted process known as enclosure transformed England’s rural landscape.… Continue Reading
A review of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, Angela Saini (Harper Collins, 2023), £20 Unsurprisingly, Angela Saini’s latest book has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from people who want to challenge sexism and who recognise the destructive global impact… Continue Reading
A review of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, Oliver Eagleton (Verso), £12.99 Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown—a roll call of past Labour Party prime ministers hardly conjures up hope for… Continue Reading
On 17 July 1930, Archibald Fenner Brockway, a leading member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), stood on the floor of the House of Commons and attempted to raise the question of the massive scale of repression unleashed in India… Continue Reading
Race is once more central to British politics—from Black Lives Matter to the ethnically diverse Tory government’s obsession with deporting refugees, and the rise of a far right claiming that white people are being oppressed by “wokeness”. Several new books… Continue Reading
August 2023 marks the bicentenary of one of the most important revolts by enslaved people in the history of the British Empire, taking place in what was then Demerara (later part of British Guiana, now Guyana) on the Caribbean coast… Continue Reading
Several issues in 2023 have helped spark renewed interest in the potential for revolutionary socialists in Britain to engage in electoral work.1 These include the continued rightward shift of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer; the presence of various left-wing… Continue Reading