Along with 10.1 million other viewers, I awaited 10pm on 12 December last year and the broadcasting of the BBC/Sky/ITV general election exit poll of voters. “Here we go,” I anxiously WhatsApped a friend as the time-signal sounded. Ten seconds… Continue Reading
On 2 April 2019, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to resign.1 In scarcely more than one month, a massive popular movement that had emerged for the first time on 22 February managed to get rid of the ageing and… Continue Reading
From Algiers to Beirut and Baghdad to Khartoum, it appears that revolution is once again “the choice of the people”—as a slogan echoed by tens of thousands on protests in Sudan puts it.1 Meanwhile, the temperature of social and political… Continue Reading
It is tempting to see pandemics as unpredictable, cataclysmic incursions of nature into human society.1 Yet the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) is anything but a “natural” phenomenon. Epidemics and pandemics happen in a social, political and economic context,… Continue Reading
Zuerst auf Englisch erschienen in International Socialism 142—https://isj.org.uk/whats-wrong-with-privilege-theory/. Aus dem Englischen von Rosemarie Nünning. Können Menschen, die selbst nicht unterdrückt sind, Teil des Kampfs für Befreiung sein? Sind alle Weißen mitschuldig an Rassismus oder können sie im Kampf für die… Continue Reading
December’s Monthly Review leads with an article by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman on “Capitalism and Robbery”. The authors address the concept of “expropriation”, the processes of robbery, including the dispossession of the peasantry, the effects of… Continue Reading
I am very grateful to Paul Le Blanc for responding to my article “In Defence of Party Building” and for his detailed discussion of its contents.1 As Paul and I well know, such expressions of “thanks” are commonly a formal… Continue Reading
A new edition of Capitalism and Theory (Haymarket, 2018) has made a selection of writings by Michael Kidron available to a new audience in print for the first time in decades. Kidron was a founder and important early theorist of… Continue Reading
What means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of the productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for… Continue Reading
In 2013, during his time as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson gave a lecture to city bankers in which he said: Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality… Continue Reading