We live in a world of workers. Global social change in the last generation has seen workers become the majority class in the world for the first time in history. Between 1970 and 2010 the number of workers in advanced… Continue Reading
Some activists and theorists in the field of gender and sexuality have partly or wholly abandoned the designation LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and instead write and organise under the banner of “queer”. Queer theory and politics originated in… Continue Reading
On 7 August 2011 the Observer ran a column by Nick Cohen with the headline “No riots here, just quiet, ever-deeper misery”.1 After outlining the Tory attacks on working class people, he states, “These arrant insults ought to push the… Continue Reading
On 15 May 2011 thousands of people, mainly young, demonstrated all over the Spanish state under the slogans “For real democracy now” and “We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers”. The demonstrations explicitly rejected the participation… Continue Reading
“The future begins today,” declaimed Richard Armitage, US Deputy Secretary of State, the day after the 11 September 2001 attacks on Washington and New York.1 This kind of hype seems very distant now. For all the genuine emotion present in… Continue Reading
As it has remorselessly unwound, the global economic and financial crisis has passed through a succession of turning points. The first came when the credit crunch began in August 2007. Then there was the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September… Continue Reading
Making sense of the Arab revolutions is an urgent priority for the radical left. New Left Review 68 carries two pieces that seek to address this task. The first, by Perry Anderson, has a strange title, “On the Concatenation in… Continue Reading
Simon Choat, Marx Through Post Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (Continuum, 2010), £65 In this book, Simon Choat analyses the relationship between the ideas of four “post-structuralist” thinkers—Jean-Francoise Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—and the works of Karl… Continue Reading
David Knight, The Making of Modern Science (Polity, 2009), £17.99 There prevails in society the notion that the practice of science is somehow objective and neutral. However, when we look at the way funding is allocated and what research is… Continue Reading
Illan Pappe, Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto, 2010), £13 In this excellent book, the Israeli academic Illan Pappe breaks from his usual style to offer a mixture of personal stories, general overviews, historical… Continue Reading