New Left Review continues its heavyweight analysis of the United States. Following Mike Davis’s detailed appreciation of the deeper forces behind Barack Obama’s re-election, Perry Anderson kicks off its latest issue (II/81) with a more long-term historical interpretation.1 Affirming a… Continue Reading
The world economy has experienced four systemic crises since the emergence of capitalism as a global system; the years 1873, 1929, 1973 marked the commencement of the first three. As Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy write: “Each of these earthquakes… Continue Reading
I want to respond to a claim Sheila McGregor has made in two recent articles concerning the history of sexuality.1 Since the 19th century Marxists have argued that the development of human society began with a long period of “primitive… Continue Reading
Download this extended online version of the article as a PDF here Times are hard and there is an upsurge of class feeling. This feeling is not necessarily the same as class consciousness, and it often takes unfamiliar forms. But… Continue Reading
This year marks the anniversaries of two key events in science. Sixty years ago Jim Watson and Francis Crick revealed their famous “double helix” model of the structure of DNA, the “molecule of life”. And ten years ago saw the… Continue Reading
The National Health Service (NHS) has barely been out of the news in recent months: the publication of the Francis Report on the events at the mid-Staffordshire hospital, which has now been put into administration; the measles outbreak in south… Continue Reading
A striking feature of Egypt’s Revolution is the extraordinary number of people engaged in struggles in the streets and workplaces, and in formal and informal organisations. The absolute numbers, together with the proportion of the population involved and the continuity… Continue Reading
The recent calls for the British left either to “reclaim Labour” (Len McCluskey) or to build a new party capable of emulating Syriza’s successes in Greece (Ken Loach) demand serious consideration on these pages.1 At their core these proposals reflect… Continue Reading
As Taksim Square, the centre of Istanbul, came under occupation by thousands upon thousands of mostly young Turks, the rest of the country, the government, the world and, indeed, the protesters themselves watched in amazement. As I write, it is… Continue Reading
Mainstream British politics seems stuck in a weird time loop in which it is doomed to repeat the 1990s. The Conservative-Liberal coalition government is headed towards a car crash. This could come in May 2015, when the scheduled general election… Continue Reading