With over 1.4 million members, Unite is Britain’s biggest union, representing more than a fifth of all trade unionists in the UK. A mainly private sector union, it is also well represented in parts of the public sector—local government, the… Continue Reading
It is now six years since the first rumblings of the earthquake that was the global financial crash and the Great Recession. On 9 August 2007 BNP Paribas announced that it was closing down two of its funds of US… Continue Reading
Counter-revolution now haunts the Arab world. But it takes diverse and confusing shapes. In Syria, for example, it appears as the regime headed up by Bashar al-Assad and as the United States, which has been threatening military action against it.… Continue Reading
The world economy has experienced four systemic crises since the emergence of capitalism as a global system; the years 1873, 1929, 1973 marked the commencement of the first three. As Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy write: “Each of these earthquakes… Continue Reading
I want to respond to a claim Sheila McGregor has made in two recent articles concerning the history of sexuality.1 Since the 19th century Marxists have argued that the development of human society began with a long period of “primitive… Continue Reading
Download this extended online version of the article as a PDF here Times are hard and there is an upsurge of class feeling. This feeling is not necessarily the same as class consciousness, and it often takes unfamiliar forms. But… Continue Reading
This year marks the anniversaries of two key events in science. Sixty years ago Jim Watson and Francis Crick revealed their famous “double helix” model of the structure of DNA, the “molecule of life”. And ten years ago saw the… Continue Reading
The National Health Service (NHS) has barely been out of the news in recent months: the publication of the Francis Report on the events at the mid-Staffordshire hospital, which has now been put into administration; the measles outbreak in south… Continue Reading
A striking feature of Egypt’s Revolution is the extraordinary number of people engaged in struggles in the streets and workplaces, and in formal and informal organisations. The absolute numbers, together with the proportion of the population involved and the continuity… Continue Reading
The recent calls for the British left either to “reclaim Labour” (Len McCluskey) or to build a new party capable of emulating Syriza’s successes in Greece (Ken Loach) demand serious consideration on these pages.1 At their core these proposals reflect… Continue Reading