What, if anything, do modern day socialists have to learn from Lenin? Capitalism is mired in its deepest and longest crisis since the 1930s, producing bitter discontent that in places overflows into mass resistance and even revolutions. With Stalinism all… Continue Reading
If the United States remains the command centre of global capitalism, a multiplicity of crises has been flashing up on its screens in the past few months. Let’s consider them in ascending order of importance from the perspective of US… Continue Reading
The British ruling class wheezed a huge collective sigh of relief at the Scottish independence referendum result. The No camp secured victory with 55 percent of the vote and the Yes side polled 45 percent. 97 percent of the electorate… Continue Reading
The Russian Revolution unleashed a vicious struggle between revolutionaries (above all the Bolsheviks based among the miners of the Donbass in the east), Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, and red and white armies. This sentence in Alex Callinicos’s analysis of events… Continue Reading
A review of Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford University Press, 2013), £25 At one point in his new study of George Orwell, Robert Colls, Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, insists that he is not trying… Continue Reading
A review of Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty–First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), £29.95 In January, Oxfam’s “Working for the Few” report tore apart the idea that wealth “trickles down” and revealed that just 85 billionaires now own more… Continue Reading
A review of Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (Saqi, 2013), £17.99, and Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Haymarket, 2013), £14.99 These important books make a… Continue Reading
We stand at an unusual place in history, both in Britain and internationally. It is more apparent than ever that while humanity possesses the means to abolish want, we live under an anarchic system that viciously assaults the working class… Continue Reading
The paradox of the present situation is that capital is weak—but the radical left is much weaker. Alternatively, capital is economically weak, but much stronger politically, less because of mass ideological commitment to the system than because of the weakness… Continue Reading
On 4 August 1914 social democratic deputies in both the German Reichstag and the French Chamber of Deputies voted unanimously for war credits.1 Among those who voted on that day were deputies who had, less than a week earlier, met… Continue Reading