A review of Raquel Varela, A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution (Pluto Press, 2019), £19.99 Portugal’s revolution of 1974 to 1975 was the most powerful and inspiring example of a revolutionary process to have taken place in Europe since… Continue Reading
When the manuscript of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four landed on his desk in late 1948, writes a biographer, his publisher fired off an internal memorandum stating that it “represented ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally’.… Continue Reading
A review of Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning (University of California Press, 2019), £27 Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of… Continue Reading
A review of Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), £22.32 Kohei Saito’s book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism is based on extensive and painstaking research.1 As well as Marx’s published… Continue Reading
John Molyneux: “The comrades in Southampton don’t like this stuff about building the party.” Tony Cliff: “I don’t like it either; it’s horrible. Unfortunately, it is necessary”—conversation with Cliff in summer 1968. In February/March of this year the International Socialist… Continue Reading
A review of Evan Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Haymarket, 2018), £24.99 Evan Smith’s book deals with the Communist Party of Great Britain and anti-racism from 1945 to the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Aiming for… Continue Reading
The Anti Nazi League and the mass movement it generated in the late 1970s is one of the great achievements of the revolutionary left in post-war Britain. The experience is particularly important today with the growth of the far right… Continue Reading
The far right is on the rise across the globe and the gains made by women since the 1960s are in their sights. The leader of the world’s most powerful nation is a proud misogynist, boasts about the sexual harassment… Continue Reading
“We meet at 4pm: revolution time.” This sentence in a call by the Sudanese Professionals Association on its Facebook page for mass protests on 12 April probably makes little sense to those who want to reduce the role of the… Continue Reading
The 17th century Catholic thinker Blaise Pascal suggested that we imagine believing in God as a wager: Let us weigh up the gain and loss involved in calling heads that God exists. Let us assess the two cases: if you… Continue Reading