A review of John Molyneux, The Dialectics of Art, Haymarket (2020), £17.99 This complex yet vivid and accessible book is an eagerly awaited contribution to debates about the social meaning and revolutionary possibilities of art. It represents a significant advance… Continue Reading
A review of Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, Random House (2020), £18.99. Owen Jones, This Land: The Story of a Movement, Allen Lane (2020), £20. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, Searching… Continue Reading
The following article by the French author Claude Serfati first appeared online on the A l’encontre website in December 2020.1 It deals with two laws that were moving through the French legislature as International Socialism went to press. The first,… Continue Reading
The question of how to characterise the societies that belonged to the Eastern Bloc between 1948 and 1989—Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungry, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia—has been contentious since they emerged after the Second World War.1 This remains the… Continue Reading
In the past two decades, China has emerged as the major challenger to the United States’s leading position in the global economy and, to a lesser extent, as the world’s foremost military power. Compared to the global reach of the… Continue Reading
A socialist ecological assessment of the Anthropocene reveals a fundamental pattern for biodiversity; living nature, from the virus to the whale, wraps itself around human social forms.1 Our long march from localised groups of apes to a globalised social humanity… Continue Reading
As 2020 began, a struggle by Indigenous Wet’suwet’en people against attempts to push a natural gas pipeline through their unceded territory sparked a spectacular wave of solidarity across Canada.1 For almost a month, freight and passenger railway traffic ground to… Continue Reading
On 6 January 2021, far-right protestors—many bearing Confederate flags, some open fascists—stormed the Capitol in Washington DC, seat of the United States Congress. Liberal and leftist commentators were quick to denounce the action, as a result of which five people… Continue Reading
Over the past decade, the Middle East and North Africa have experienced waves of popular uprisings that have turned the region into fertile ground for experiments in revolutionary mobilisation—and a laboratory for the horrors of counter-revolution.1 Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria,… Continue Reading
When the first full lockdown began in Britain, on 26 March 2020, it would have been hard to imagine that over a year later restrictions on travel and socialisation would still be the norm, face masks would be required to… Continue Reading