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
On 16 August 2012 South African police shot and killed 34 striking workers at the Lonmin mine near Rustenburg.1 The massacre sent shockwaves around the world—and the implications of this political earthquake are far from played out. It is likely… Continue Reading
And when war is waged between two groups of predators and oppressors merely for division of the spoils of plunder, merely to see who will strangle more peoples, who will grab more, the question as to who began this war,… Continue Reading
What, if anything, do modern day socialists have to learn from Lenin? Capitalism is mired in its deepest and longest crisis since the 1930s, producing bitter discontent that in places overflows into mass resistance and even revolutions. With Stalinism all… Continue Reading
If the United States remains the command centre of global capitalism, a multiplicity of crises has been flashing up on its screens in the past few months. Let’s consider them in ascending order of importance from the perspective of US… Continue Reading
The British ruling class wheezed a huge collective sigh of relief at the Scottish independence referendum result. The No camp secured victory with 55 percent of the vote and the Yes side polled 45 percent. 97 percent of the electorate… Continue Reading
The Russian Revolution unleashed a vicious struggle between revolutionaries (above all the Bolsheviks based among the miners of the Donbass in the east), Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, and red and white armies. This sentence in Alex Callinicos’s analysis of events… Continue Reading
A review of Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford University Press, 2013), £25 At one point in his new study of George Orwell, Robert Colls, Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, insists that he is not trying… Continue Reading