On 9 November 2014 Palestinian activists in villages near Jerusalem made a symbolic breach in Israel’s apartheid wall, their way of marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.1 The Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees said: “No matter… Continue Reading
Four years after the Arab revolutions of 2011 the hopes that the uprisings kindled seem to have been all but extinguished. Libya, Syria and Iraq present grim variations on the theme of “failed states”.1 Meanwhile, a United States-led military coalition… Continue Reading
Republic Day is celebrated with great pomp and outpourings of state-sponsored nationalism in Turkey every 29 October. Moscow-style military parades, boy scouts and girl guides and school delegations carrying huge Turkish flags used to roam through all the country’s cities… Continue Reading
The emergence of so-called populist parties as a response to increasingly discredited political elites is a European-wide phenomenon. In most cases these parties have emerged on the right, if not the far-right. Not so in the Spanish state where Podemos,… Continue Reading
Antonio Gramsci writes: The “normal” exercise of hegemony on what has become the classic terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent that balance each other in various ways, without force violating consent too… Continue Reading
The Umbrella Movement, which involves every walk of life in Hong Kong, is entirely different from Hong Kong’s previous mass protests in the past few decades. This is due to its unprecedented methods of struggle, massive disruption of public order,… Continue Reading
A review of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2012), £20 As the world commemorates the centenary of the First World War (with limited awareness of its meaning) a… Continue Reading
A review of Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013), £19.99 Postcolonial theory has been the dominant intellectual trend within academia relating to studies of imperialism, decolonisation and the legacy of empire for the last two… Continue Reading
Good sense, for Antonio Gramsci, was the “healthy nucleus of common sense”.1 This article tries to make sense of what Gramsci meant by good sense, and seeks to develop his understanding of good sense into a resource we can use… Continue Reading
A review of Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Haymarket, 2014), £19.99 Growing anger and activism around the issue of women’s oppression have seen the return of many arguments from the 1970s and 1980s… Continue Reading