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 John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Monthly Review Press (2020), £30. Since John Bellamy Foster published Marx’s Ecology in 2000, the idea that Karl Marx had little to say on environmental issues has… Continue Reading
A spectre is haunting the world—the spectre of pandemic.1 Invisible to the eye, and indeed even to all but the most powerful electron microscopes, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has nonetheless created panic around the globe. It has brought the world economic… Continue Reading
In 2013, during his time as Mayor of London, Boris Johnson gave a lecture to city bankers in which he said: Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality… Continue Reading
A review of Krishna Dronamraju, Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (Oxford University Press, 2017), £22.99. On 22 April 2017 thousands of people around the world joined demonstrations in defence of science. Many of them were, and… Continue Reading
Science matters to socialists.1 For one thing, it’s impossible to be an effective activist in the 21st century without having some awareness of the impact of science on society. The threat of global warming, the replacement of jobs by computers… Continue Reading
This year marks the anniversaries of two key events in science. Sixty years ago Jim Watson and Francis Crick revealed their famous “double helix” model of the structure of DNA, the “molecule of life”. And ten years ago saw the… Continue Reading