Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003) was one of the last of the engagé writers of Southern Europe, left wing intellectuals produced by the large Communist parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Prolific journalist, essayist and novelist, he was an outstanding interpreter… Continue Reading
Kevin Murphy’s book Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory is a landmark in the study of Soviet history.1 Based on painstaking research in four factory specific archives, it is, as the publisher claims, ‘unquestionably the most… Continue Reading
A review of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Untold Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005), £25 Chang and Halliday1 set out their agenda from the book’s opening words: ‘Mao Zedong, who for decades held absolute power over one quarter of… Continue Reading
As George W Bush weighs up the odds of military action against Iran, one factor his administration will be taking into consideration is instability in Pakistan. This longtime US client state lies at one end of the arc of instability… Continue Reading
The Enlightenment was an intellectual and social movement which, like the Renaissance and the Reformation before it, characterised a specific historical period, in this case beginning in the middle decades of the 17th century and ending over 200 years ago,… Continue Reading
Roland Denis is active in the Venezuelan Movement of 13 April. Chris Harman and Maina van der Zwan interviewed him in Caracas at the end of January 2006.1 We began by asking him about the development of the movement at… Continue Reading
For the last ten years the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal has been in the grip of a civil war, with the king and his Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) on one side, and the Communist Party of Nepal—Maoist (CPN-M) and their… Continue Reading
We have analysed three faultlines in the world system in recent issues of this journal—the morass in which the US finds itself in Iraq, the wave of insurgency sweeping South America and the resistance to attempts to push through neo-liberal… Continue Reading
Recent writing on North Korea from South Korea’s internationalist left North Korea is often in the news these days, albeit relegated to the inside pages of the papers, while English-language books on the country have proliferated in the last few… Continue Reading
The last few years have not been kind to Antonio Negri. Empire,1 his most famous book, produced in collaboration with Michael Hardt, heralded the death of imperialism. The authors claimed that the old logic of warring nation-states had been replaced… Continue Reading