Whatever else it is remembered for, 2012 is likely to go down in history as the year when climate change began noticeably to change the face of the planet. The trends we are beginning to see mean that global warming… Continue Reading
Eighty years ago, on 30 January 1933, President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler to the position of Chancellor of the Reich.1 In the years preceding Hitler’s appointment the Nazis and their paramilitary units, the SA and SS,… Continue Reading
During the past years there has been an impressive wave of student movements.1 What has been distinctive about them is their tendency to be more radical politically in comparison to most forms of student protest in the 1980s and 1990s.… Continue Reading
At the most recent Labour Party conference party leader Ed Miliband caused a certain amount of consternation by praising Benjamin Disraeli (Tory prime minister 1868 and 1874-80), and repeatedly using Disraeli’s most famous phrase “One Nation”.1 Just to make sure… Continue Reading
A review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket, 2012), £22.99 This is a book in the grand style. This is true physically—getting on for 700 pages of text, 70 of notes and nearly another 70 of… Continue Reading
It has become a rarely challenged commonsense assumption that, as part of the globalisation process, there is an inexorable haemorrhaging of jobs from the “Global North” to the “Global South”. China and other countries in Asia are cited as prime… Continue Reading
As 2012 nears its end a pattern is emerging in the political and economic picture of Latin America. It is surprising and contradictory, a dramatic example of the gulf that can open up between rhetoric and reality. After a decade… Continue Reading
For 35 years Egypt was a laboratory for neoliberalism—a local state in which hegemonic world powers and financial institutions played out their strategies for the global economy. It was also a stage on which the United States and its allies… Continue Reading
The massacre of 34 striking miners at Marikana, near Rustenburg in North West Province, on 16 August 2012 marked a watershed in the history of South Africa, ruled by the African National Congress (ANC) since the end of apartheid in… Continue Reading
“The people who delivered [Obama] a second term…are those who were least likely to have benefited from his first”.1 Journalist Gary Younge’s comment on the re-election of Barack Obama in the United States sums up the contradiction at the heart… Continue Reading