The Conservative administration of Rishi Sunak, the fourth Tory prime minister in as many years, appeared to be limping into oblivion as our autumn issue went to press.1 A piece by the chief political commentator at the Financial Times compares… Continue Reading
Editor’s introduction I was going to open by writing that Michael Kidron (1930-2003) is best known as a Marxist economist, a leading theoretician of the International Socialist (IS) tradition and the foremost developer of the theory of the permanent arms… Continue Reading
Marxist political economy has a two-fold interest in the economics of defence.1 On the one hand, Marxism has proposed explanations for the extent and scope of defence spending in contemporary capitalism, drawing on theories of imperialism.2 On the other hand,… Continue Reading
Around 2.7 billion workers worldwide have been affected by full or partial lockdown measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic—around 81 percent of the world’s 3.3 billion workforce. The world economy has seen nothing like this. Nearly all economic forecasts for… Continue Reading
A new edition of Capitalism and Theory (Haymarket, 2018) has made a selection of writings by Michael Kidron available to a new audience in print for the first time in decades. Kidron was a founder and important early theorist of… Continue Reading
Chris Harman died suddenly on the night of 6-7 November 2009, on the eve of his 67th birthday. He had been serving his third stint as editor of International Socialism. I took over editing this journal after Chris’s death. Ten… Continue Reading
Introduction, by Alex Callinicos This is the transcript of a talk given by Michael Kidron and of the discussion that followed on Tuesday 5 July 1977, the first of two sessions (the second was called “The Crisis”) that he gave… Continue Reading
Introduction, by John Rudge Mike Kidron (1930-2003) was a towering figure in the history of the International Socialist tradition.1 When Mike died in 2003, Alex Callinicos wrote that he “made an enormous contribution to the Socialist Workers Party’s development during… Continue Reading
A review of David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (Profile Books, 2017), £14.99 In Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey uses his extensive knowledge of Karl Marx’s writings to review the sad… Continue Reading
It is now a full decade since the financial turmoil that heralded the beginning of the “long depression”.1 On a global scale, the recession that developed in the wake of the collapse of the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers in… Continue Reading