As Alok Sharma, Tory minister and president of the United Nations’ COP26 climate conference, closed proceedings, he was moved to tears.1 “I apologise for the way this process has unfolded and I am deeply sorry. I also understand the deep… Continue Reading
Production is the essential condition for any functioning human society, and collective human labour the foundation of production.1 These basic facts are typically buried under an overgrowth of ideology but the Covid-19 pandemic has helped to strip this back, placing… Continue Reading
David Harvey has, for some time, been among the most prominent Marxist political economists and an important figure in popularising Karl Marx’s Capital through his writings and online lectures. Over the years, Harvey has shifted seemingly ever further from a… Continue Reading
A review of Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, Kaan Kangal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), £44.99 Was Friedrich Engels an “enemy within” who did a fundamental disservice to Marxism? Did he make a mistake by trying to apply Marxist principles… Continue Reading
A review of First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy, David Broder (Verso, 2020), £16.99 Back in the 1970s, Italy was arguably the European country in which the clash between capital and labour was at its most… Continue Reading
On 6 October 1960, the film Spartacus opened in New York City’s DeMille Theatre.1Time Magazine celebrated “a new kind of Hollywood movie: a superspectacle with spiritual vitality and moral force”.2 Long-standing New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was less… Continue Reading
Could the workers’ movement of Brazil have become a global epicentre for resistance to the intensification of the neoliberal onslaught on trade unions, pay, jobs and hard won welfare, pensions and health rights in the 1990s?1 Neoliberalism thrived on the… Continue Reading
“Be sure to send me the equivalent of my cloth in silver so that I can buy barley.” A woman in Assur to her husband in a distant trading colony, about 1900 BCE. “You are perpetually pressing oil, grinding barley,… Continue Reading
A review of Black British History: New Perspectives, Hakim Adi (ed) (Zed, 2020), £18.99 Black People in the British Empire, Peter Fryer (Pluto, 2021 [1988]), £14.99 Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, Peter Fryer (Pluto, 2018 [1984]),… Continue Reading
The year 2019 saw the long overdue publication in English of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, its Russian original having been published in the Soviet Union in 1952 (albeit in censored form).1 Its appearance is particularly welcome to the English-speaking reader because… Continue Reading