The biggest financial crisis for 79 years, followed by the most expensive nationalisation of all time; a combination of recession and inflation with completely unpredictable effects; a new explosive flashpoint of international tension, this time on the Black Sea midway… Continue Reading
The following statement was issued by the Coordination of the International Socialist Tendency on 13 October 2008. The extraordinary waves of panic that have swept through global financial markets in the past few weeks have filled ordinary working people around… Continue Reading
For the past two or more years, especially since the September 2006 coup, Thai society has been hypnotised into forgetting about the real social and political issues. Instead, the whole of society and, most tragically, the social movements have been… Continue Reading
Apologists for imperialism have virtually stopped mentioning Iraq. They keep as quiet as they can about the horrors produced by the US and British sponsored Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. But they crow openly about the Boy’s Own derring-do of our… Continue Reading
Neil Faulkner, Rome: Empire of the Eagles (Pearson, 2008), £21.99 Neil Faulkner’s new book should be a welcome publication for the readers of this journal, following his earlier articles here (for example in International Socialism 109 and 116). 1 Its… Continue Reading
Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System, (Pluto, 2008), £40 Boris Kagarlitsky is a prolific commentator on modern Russia who has also written on wider trends in global capitalism. It is impossible to read a book… Continue Reading
Gerry Mooney and Alex Law (eds), New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry (Policy Press, 2007), £22.99 This book arrives at a time when the bewildering doublespeak beloved of New Labour reaches ever giddier heights. Who knew… Continue Reading
George Paizis, Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution (Francis Boutle, 2007), £12.50 Marcel Martinet was born in France in 1887. In his lifetime he would witness huge social transformations. Technological advances around the turn of the century meant big changes… Continue Reading
Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2007), £14.99 After three decades of debates on human evolution dominated by Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, it is a great relief to read a… Continue Reading
Bob Jessop, State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach (Polity, 2008), £17.99. State Power presents the most recent developments in Bob Jessop’s three decades long research project on state theory. Inspired by his reading of Marxism, Jessop has become one of the… Continue Reading