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
The dominant fact about British politics is the slow decomposition of the Conservative-Liberal coalition government. The fundamental reason for this is the failure of chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne’s deficit-cutting strategy. In advance of his Autumn Statement on 5… Continue Reading
The global capitalist crisis has now reached its half-decade point, and the months leading up to this unhappy anniversary saw the publication of a number of interesting papers on Marxist political economy. Here I will briefly survey some of them,… Continue Reading
Throughout the crisis sensationalist claims have emerged on both the right and the left that the crisis would lead to a catastrophic and immediate rise in joblessness or, conversely, that it is really not that bad. This article examines exactly… Continue Reading
A review of Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: The 2001 Bradford Riots and Beyond (Vertical Editions, 2011), £13.99 Visiting Bradford in 1986, the novelist Hanif Kureishi observed that “Bradford seems to be a microcosm of… Continue Reading
A review of David Fernbach (ed), In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings by Paul Levi (Brill, 2011), €99 Introduction by John Rose David Fernbach’s selection of the writings of Paul Levi allows us not only to reassess the… Continue Reading
For Marx, the proximate cause of crises is the fall in the average rate of profit (ARP).1 An increasing number of studies has shown that this thesis not only is logically consistent but is also supported by a robust and… Continue Reading
John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), like that other key text of autonomist post-Marxism, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s Empire (2000), cut with the grain of the global anti-capitalist mood at the beginning of the millennium.1 More… Continue Reading
A review of Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class (Verso, 2011), £9.99 Owen Jones’s best-selling Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class has deservedly been praised as an accessible and refreshing engagement with the issues of class… Continue Reading