A review of D L Raby, Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today (Pluto, 2006), £15, Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean—Axis of Hope (Verso, 2006), £14.99 and Michael Lebowitz, Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (Monthly… Continue Reading
A review of David Blunkett, The Blunkett Tapes (Bloomsbury, 2006), £25 With the publication of his supposed ‘diaries’, David Blunkett has achieved an impressive hat-trick: the former heads of the Metropolitan Police, the Prison Service and the Armed Forces have… Continue Reading
A review of Alex Callinicos, The Resources of Critique (Polity, 2006), £16.99 Alex Callinicos attempts to deal with important questions in this book. How is it possible for people conditioned by the structures of a certain society to go beyond… Continue Reading
A review of Henry Heller, The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815 (Berghahn Books, 2006), £36.50 Marx and Engels were born into a world shaped by the French Revolution—literally so in the case of Marx, who grew up in the Rhineland… Continue Reading
Daniel Bensaid is a leading member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) in France. This article takes up issues arising in a discussion on revolutionary strategy to be found in the LCRs theoretical journal Critique Communiste in March 20061 and… Continue Reading
What is really happening to world capitalism today? In this article I use diagrams and graphs to provide some snapshots of the present shape of the system, deliberately minimising wider theoretical issues, which I have dealt with elsewhere. The first… Continue Reading
One product of the demonisation of Britain’s Muslims by those forces desperate to provide a scapegoat for the fallout from the ‘war on terror’ has been a concerted effort to separate them out from the rest of society, to make… Continue Reading
London’s Evening Standard newspaper recently ran the front page headline ‘Ken Backs Terrorist on the Tube’. Most of the capital’s 7 million inhabitants will have been in no doubt who ‘Ken’ was. Almost uniquely among British politicians, London Mayor Ken… Continue Reading
‘There was a time when one in four of the world’s big ships were built on the Clyde and more than 1 million of the UK’s workers were coal miners. Today the supermarket giant Tesco’s employs just over 250,000 workers—making… Continue Reading
Many supporters of Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista party are shocked and disoriented. Three years ago it put itself at the front of Europe’s anti-capitalist movement. It spearheaded massive mobilisations after paramilitary police had attacked the Genoa demonstration against the G8, and… Continue Reading