Alasdair MacIntyre, who died on 21 May 2025, aged 96, was an influential philosopher. His most famous book, After Virtue, first published in 1981, is a landmark in moral philosophy. MacIntyre converted to Catholicism several decades ago but, in an earlier life, was an important Marxist theorist and a member of, respectively, the Communist Party, the orthodox Trotskyist group the Socialist Labour League and then the International Socialists (IS), later to become the Socialist Workers Party.
While a member of the IS, he served for a brief period, in 1960-2, as co-editor of this journal, alongside Michael Kidron. MacIntyre is listed as a member of the editorial board until 1968, when he resigned and moved to the United States, having become increasingly sceptical about the possibilities of working-class revolution. A decent selection of his early articles and book reviews can be found as part of the online Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism maintained by the Marxist Internet Archive. The issues for the relevant period are available here: www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/index.html
The 2022-3 strike wave in Britain involved a significant rise in the overall number of days “lost” to strike action, reaching levels not since the 1980s. Data on strikes has been collected and compiled since the 1890s. However, there have been significant changes in how the data is acquired, compiled, analysed and reported over the years. Dave Lyddon, who has also written for this journal, has recently published an article in Industrial Relations Journal discussing the problems resulting from some recent changes to the way strikes are measured.
One change is that, from 2015, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) broke with the long-standing practice of recording a new stoppage if there was a gap of a month in strike action within a given dispute. Changing this introduces discontinuities into the data and is particularly relevant given the pattern of stop-start strike action, with big gaps between strike days, that has featured in some recent disputes.
A second change took place in 2022, when data collection resumed after being halted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Strikes coordinated against several employers or involving several unions pitched against a single employer were now counted as multiple different stoppages, rather than a single stoppage as before. This meant, for instance, that some NHS strikes—such as those in late 2022 and in 2023, where different NHS employers were targeted—are recorded as multiple strikes despite really being part of a single dispute. These problems are exacerbated by the way the data is now presented in ONS reports. This is all bad news for people trying to make sense of patterns of industrial action.
The latest New Left Review to arrive with us, the March-April 2025 edition, is a bit of an oddity. It leads with an interview with Ross Douthat, a conservative New York Times columnist, followed by a piece on Germany by Wolfgang Streeck, who is sympathetic to Sahra Wagenknecht, who broke with Die Linke to run candidates combining left-leaning economic policies with right-wing stances on issues such as immigration and Trans rights in the recent election.
It is a relief, therefore, to reach a piece by veteran Marxist political economist David Harvey, reminiscing on his various intersections with the socialist economist Piero Sraffa. Sraffa’s work was highly mathematical and complex, but it contributed to the so-called “Cambridge capital controversy”, in which Sraffa and others argued that the concept of capital used by neoclassical economists involved circular reasoning. Sraffa was not just critical of neoclassical economics but also laid the basis for criticisms of David Ricardo’s work, which had influenced Karl Marx. Unfortunately, in the post-war decades, there was a tendency to conflate Ricardo’s labour theory of value with that of Marx, leading to all manner of confusions. As Harvey points out, the distinctions introduced by Marx are important here, as a range of Marxist have argued since the 1970s. One does not have to entirely agree with Harvey’s version of Marxist political economy to share his view of capitalism as a deeply contradictory totality.
In his new article published in Third World Quarterly, Gianni Del Panta challenges the notion that Tunisia’s food crisis is merely the result of “external shocks”, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, he argues that any analysis has to consider three factors: the country’s outward-looking economy, the state’s financial imbalances and the impoverishment of the working classes—each tied to Tunisia’s integration into global capitalism. The article could have been more critical of dependency theory, which dominates much of the political economic scholarship on North Africa, and of the current government of Kais Saied. However, by highlighting (and starting to theorise) the responsibility of Western imperialist states and institutions, Del Panta still makes an important intervention.
JC & SR