A review of Martin Empson, Kill all the Gentlemen: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside (Bookmarks, 2018), £14.99 When Karl Marx analysed the birth of capitalism he drew attention to what he called the primitive accumulation of capital.… Continue Reading
A review of Judith Orr, Abortion Wars: The Fight for Reproductive Rights (Policy Press, 2017), £12.99 Abortion is as old as womanhood. Throughout history, abortion has been a necessary and accepted part of women’s lives. However, rights to abortion have… Continue Reading
Mark O’Brien’s article in issue 157 of International Socialism, “What has Happened to the British Labour Movement and What Does it Mean for the Left in the Unions?”, adds to the debates in this journal over the last number of… Continue Reading
Last summer the British Museum devoted a major retrospective to the printmaker and painter Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). He is perhaps Japan’s most influential and internationally renowned artist, viewed by some as the father of modernism.1 These days most of us… Continue Reading
A review of Horst Haenisch, Faschismus und der Holocaust: Versuch einer Erklärung (Edition Aurora, 2017), €8.50 The Holocaust is unusual in gaining more prominence as more time has passed since it occurred. Two reasons for this stand out. Few expected… Continue Reading
The failure of the October Revolution to spread throughout Europe, and beyond, in the years after 1917 is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Indeed, many of the catastrophes that subsequently beset humanity including both Stalinism and… Continue Reading
A review of Iain Ferguson, Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (Bookmarks, 2017), £9.99 The current crisis in the National Health Service is at its worst in the field of mental health. Since the Conservative government was elected… Continue Reading
In its positive aims, however, this form of [petty-bourgeois] socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of… Continue Reading
Fifty years ago Russian tanks rolled across the Czechoslovakian border. They brought the upheavals of 1968, that year of global revolt against war, oppression and capitalism, into the heart of officially “socialist” Eastern Europe.1 Students took to the streets, fought… Continue Reading
In February to March 2018, tens of thousands of university workers in the University and College Union (UCU) at 65 institutions in higher education took 14 days of strike action, in what was the biggest universities strike ever. The strike… Continue Reading