Essays & Interviews
Reflections on the ‘Global Student Intifada’
In May 2024, the student movement in Gaza saluted the global student movement – acknowledging student organisations across the globe as a vanguard integral to the Palestinian Liberation movement – but with the crucial caveat that it must escalate its tactics. While the ‘student intifada’ has invigorated the Western solidarity movement and sections of the left in general, the student movement still remains ill-equipped to rise to that challenge.
‘No one way works’: An Interview with Ira Terán and Emrys Travis on Trans Marxism
In this interview with Ira Terán and Emrys Travis, Sylvia McCheyne discusses what exactly trans Marxism is, how it is so often a foil against mechanical applications of dialectics, and why it is so important to organising and what comrades in the UK and elsewhere can learn from trans struggles.
George Habash on Martyrdom, Revolution and Resistance: ‘We Will Overcome’
At a critical moment, Habash’s 1973 speech reminds us that a resistance movement grounded in an oath to the martyr can never die.
Whitewashing Imperialism: the Western ‘Left’ and Venezuela
Detailing how US-based intellectuals on the left are always ready with critiques that deliberately obscure the imperialist siege against Venezuela every time Bolivarian Revolution is faced with renewed threats to its survival, Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz investigate these ostensibly left demands that the Maduro government cede power to the fascist-led opposition that seeks its destruction.
‘Decolonisation Isn’t Just a Buzzword’: An Interview with the University of Birmingham Liberated Zone
In this interview, Alfie Hancox sits down with Alma of the University of Birmingham Palestine solidarity encampment to discuss how the camp began, developed internally, and now their desire to engage with the radical tradition of the university, including the legacy of Stuart Hall, to take their anti-colonial and anti-racist activism into the wider city.
Sunderland and Middlesbrough Race Riots and Anti-Fascist Resistance
Describing their personal experience of the riots in Sunderland and Middlesbrough, Sophia Alderson affirms that, although the demonstrations in Newcastle and other cities were inspiring and a much needed salve for the immediate threat of fascism on the streets, the left must organise wherever the fascist threat materialises and not abandon communities to fascism.
Up in Arms: Why Educators Must Resist the Arms Industry in Our Schools and Colleges
The defence industry should not be in our schools; far from teaching students about innovative ways to engineer technology for the future, representatives of these firms normalise the role in which they play in the global political economy, reproducing war in the service of the neo-colonial system – begging the question of how educators can resist imperialist ideology within the school system.
‘A Productive Language’: On Western Intellectual Paradigms and Refaat al-Areer
Placing Refaat Al-Areer's life alongside the likes of Hanna Mikhail and Fathi al-Shiqaqi as examples of Amilcar Cabral's class suicide in action, Ameed Faleh assesses the way that Palestinian intellectuals have sought to advance the Palestinian liberation struggle through their work, battling against attempts to foreclose it through normalisation and peace talks.
Lines for Redevelopment: Developer-Funded Public Art, Gentrification, Displacement and Exclusion
Detailing the 24 works of art along The Line, a route of artworks that begins at the Olympic Park in Stratford and finishes at the O2 arena on the Greenwich Peninsula, Henry Broome relays the function of public art as a gentrifying force as he connects to local struggles against the forces of capital.
‘A Bond of the Same Nature’: Cartographies of Affiliation in the Global South
Tracing Palestine’s gradual role as a vanguard for Third World struggles, Suleiman Hodali details how the diverse set of triumphs, lessons, and tactics of resistance in the country formed a set of theories and practices for resistance against imperialism upon which others modelled their own forms of struggle.
Two Logics of War: Liberation Against Genocide
Unable to defeat the Palestinian armed resistance in successive battles, Israel has turned instead to intensifying its genocidal violence against unarmed Palestinians as the means to restore its necessary equation of material and ideological force.
‘Got Fuck All’: Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes’ Dissident Republicanism
Marking the 15th anniversary of Brendan Hughes’ death, a short anthology of his writings – The Dark: Selected Writings of Brendan Hughes – bears testimony to a life which took Hughes from urban guerrilla, political prisoner, hunger striker and folk hero to reluctant dissident and outcast, told in its protagonist's own words.
‘Sides Not Solutions’: Zionist Propaganda in UK Schools
Investigating teachers’ resources used in UK classrooms, Alex Turrall details the misleading and disingenuous ‘both sides’ messaging in its materials, presenting Palestinian and Israeli perspectives as equally valid while being funded by and connected to a conspicuous number of Zionist organisations and individuals.
Anti-Zionism as Decolonisation
In this essay, Leila Shomali and Lara Kilani, two Palestinian writers, detail what it means to be anti-zionist, laying out foundational concepts and definitions as they explore essential strategies and tactics for a militant decolonial movement against settler-colonialism.
Misreading Palestine
In this article, Max Ajl deconstructs two widely repeated but false tropes related to Palestine: the first being the misguided notion that Netanyahu conspired with Hamas to maintain the Palestinian national division and empowered the movement in Gaza, and the second is the oft-repeated falsehood that Israel and its parasitic lobby drives America into irrational warmongering against its own interests.
‘An unyielding will to continue’: An Interview with Abdaljawad Omar on October 7th and the Palestinian Resistance
In this interview, Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar discusses the intergenerational character of Palestinian resistance and its aims on the 7th of October, what international solidarity means to Palestinians, and how narratives of progressive intellectuals in the West are often anti-intellectual and reactionary.
‘The situation in the North of Ireland remains a colonial one’: An interview with Odrán de Bhaldraithe
Ahead of its publication on the 22nd of June, Louis Allday spoke to Odrán de Bhaldraithe about Neglect in the North of Ireland, a book that details the manifest neglect in the North’s economy, its politics, housing, and healthcare, the root of which is clear: British rule.
Forty years on from the Bradford 12
In this wide-ranging interview with Ebb Magazine to mark 40 years since the acquittal of the Bradford 12, Tariq Mehmood, co-founder of the United Black Youth League, discusses how Black Power in Britain presented an insurgent challenge both to state racism, and to the failings of the organised left on questions of race, immigration and imperialism.
‘Imperialism runs deep’: Interview with Robert Biel on British Maoism and its afterlives
In this interview, Robert Biel recounts his experiences of the British Maoist movement in the 1980s, the positive lessons that can be drawn from it, and the need for Marxists to transcend Eurocentrism and connect with diverse struggles against oppression.
A People’s Green New Deal: An interview with Max Ajl
In this interview, Max Ajl offers his perspective on the issues of ecologically unequal exchange, the Palestinian national liberation struggle, China’s model of agrarian revolution, Andreas Malm’s ‘ecological Leninism’, and the prospects for North-South convergence around environmental justice.