Those interested in the legacy of George Orwell should look out for the next issue of George Orwell Studies (volume 10, number 2). For the tenth anniversary issue of the journal, John Newsinger, a member of our board, has conjured up an “interview” with a spectral Eric Blair (Orwell’s birth name), who “comments” on the world as it is today.
Substack has become a useful place to read commentary from many left-wing authors. Our own Richard Donnelly, author of an important analysis of the fascist Tommy Robinson in our previous issues, has been developing his analysis in a series of useful pieces. You can read them here:
https://theunrecoveredcountry1.substack.com/
Recent issues of New Left Review have had some juicy articles. “A topography of the New Dollar Imperialism” (issue 157, Jan-Feb) by Costas Lapavitsas and Nathan Sperber’s thought-provoking “Beyond neoliberalism?” (issue 157, Mar-Apr) are both discussed in the economic analysis in this issue. Issue 157 has also an interesting interview with Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian, offering insights into the current conflict, while Rohana Kuddus presents a portrait of “Indonesia’s Trump”, Prabowo Subianto.
International Socialism editor Joseph Choonara and regular contributor Bob Carter have published a piece in Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association. Unusually for a mainstream sociological journal, it uses a Marxist perspective to address theories of social class, specifically the drift away from approaches that link class to work and employment. It takes issue with the recent trend to view class through the lens of culture, often using a bowdlerised version of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of social and cultural, alongside economic, capitals. The article is open access, and you can read it here: https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385261446192
For those working in British universities, the past couple of years have been full of anxiety, horror and, sometimes, struggle. There is a huge wave of redundancies taking place, with some important localised strike battles taking place in response. Unsurprisingly, authors have been trying to make sense of what is going on. Two examples are Stefan Collini’s “Squadron of pigs” in the London Review of Books (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n10/stefan-collini/squadrons-of-pigs) and Lorna Finlayson’s “Irreversible” on New Left Review’s blog, Sidecar (https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/irreversible).
The wider crisis at universities also involves repression against left-wing students, particularly in the context of the Palestine movement. The Middle East Research and Information Project has dedicated an entire issue to this topic, which is freely available online: https://www.merip.org. The focus is on the United States, but the issue also includes an important contribution by Jannis Julien Grimm and Lilian Mauthofer on the situation in Germany (https://www.merip.org/2026/04/the-palestine-test-for-german-universities).
Hungary’s parliamentary election has resulted in the defeat of Viktor Orbán, bringing his 16 years in office to an end. His project represented a right-wing authoritarian transformation of the state and has been celebrated by the international far right. In Spectre, Anita Zsurzsán examines Orbán and Péter Magyar, who succeeded him. She analyses how Orbánism was born out of the crisis of liberal capitalism and shows why Magyar—a right-wing figure unlikely to address the structural causes behind Orbánism—will not bring any real change. Zsurzsán, however, could have stressed more strongly that Orbán’s defeat marked a real setback for the likes of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage (https://spectrejournal.com/the-hungarian-spring).
JC & SR