About 20 years ago I spoke on “Marxism and religion” at the Socialist Workers Party Easter Rally in Skegness. I began, roughly, with the words, “Today, in Britain, religion—fortunately—is not a major political issue.” Unfortunately, this is no longer the… Continue Reading
The ancestor of modern cheap food policies, the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1846, was spurred by growing unrest within the swelling cities of an industrialising economy. In 1848 that unrest burst out into a series of… Continue Reading
In broad terms the story is easily told. Labour’s Ken Livingstone was defeated as Mayor of London by Conservative Boris Johnson because the Labour Party is on the slide and the right in British politics has got its act together.… Continue Reading
*Panos Garganas, editor of the Greek newspaper Workers Solidarity, spoke to International Socialism about the country’s strike wave The social and political trajectory in Greece seems very different to anywhere else in Europe. There have been two years of near… Continue Reading
The victory for the coalition around Silvio Berlusconi in Italy is much more serious than the Tory gains in Britain’s local elections. It has produced a government in which the hard right have been making the running. The leader of… Continue Reading
The Tories were crowing after May’s local elections and the Crewe & Nantwich parliamentary by-election. With 44 percent of the local election vote, victory in the London mayoral election and a 17.6 percent swing away from Labour to take Crewe… Continue Reading
“Auguries For A ‘Vile’ Decade” was the headline of a Financial Times column by its veteran commentator Samuel Brittan in May.1 He was quoting Michael Saunders, a Citigroup analyst, on the prospects for British capitalism, but generalised the prediction to… Continue Reading
Two years ago Nepal went through a classic revolutionary experience. A mass urban uprising combined with the struggle waged by revolutionary guerrillas, who had been operating in the countryside, to bring down the royalist government. In recent months, the non-revolutionary… Continue Reading
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso, 2007), £24.99 This is one of the most important books of the past decade, although its impact would have been greater had its 600 dense but sometimes repetitive pages… Continue Reading
Niveditya Menon and Aditya Nigam, Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (Zed, 2007), £12.99 This book, written by two academics who are also campaigners, offers the best survey of recent Indian history that I have seen. It begins with a… Continue Reading