In February of this year the Tory employment minister, Chris Grayling, launched an astonishing attack on the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) while live on national radio. Responding to a campaign against a government “workfare” scheme which puts unemployed people to… Continue Reading
David Cameron chose to open 2012 with one of those tactical misjudgements increasingly typical of the overconfident, untested politicians of the coalition. On this occasion the subject was the timing and content of a future referendum on Scottish independence. Under… Continue Reading
Undeniably the global economic and political crisis has accelerated a broad process of political radicalisation visible, for example, in the impact of the Occupy movement during the winter of 2011-12. But these developments have not stilled the question of how… Continue Reading
Panos Garganas, editor of the Greek newspaper Workers Solidarity, spoke to International Socialism about the latest developments in the country. The kind of figures that we now have for the economic crisis in Greece are absolutely horrifying – 7 percent… Continue Reading
The urgent sense of imminent catastrophe that gripped much of Western capitalism during the second half of 2011, eased off a little in the past few months. This is not so much because anything fundamental has changed. More than anything… Continue Reading
In a recent and reasonably popular biography, Tristram Hunt charges Friedrich Engels with a series of class and gender contradictions: he condemned prostitution but enjoyed it himself; he looked askance at marriage and yet married Lizzy Burns on her deathbed;… Continue Reading
The tag “Beat Generation” mostly refers to a generation of authors and poets, although it is a very flexible epithet. You could easily include various contemporary painters, musicians and so on.1 They were a pioneering example of a shift in… Continue Reading
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.1 In the two and a half… Continue Reading
The revolutions in the Middle East burst like thunder across a region long considered beyond change and are being undertaken by people long considered incapable of acting in their own interests. The idea that revolutions are the stuff of history… Continue Reading
“It is midnight in Cairo”, intoned the BBC reporter on the Ten O’ Clock News bulletin, “and still tens of thousands are in Tahrir Square. One chant echoes again and again: ‘Go, go, go’. But this time it is not… Continue Reading