Essays & Interviews
‘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.
What We Already Knew About Britain's Covid Failures
Dominic Cummings spent hours in front MPs giving a seemingly devastating indictment of the government's response to Covid, detailing how they ignored scientific evidence, lied to the British public and actively endangered them. Yet we didn't need Cummings' testimony to know this; the government's failures have been clear from the start of this crisis.
The left must resolutely oppose the US-led New Cold War on China
The techniques of the original Cold War have been updated and adapted for a new enemy in a new century, and while the political essence is the same it seems that every Cold War must have its own ‘third camp’ in the Western left – with China taking the place of the Soviet Union as the evil ‘social imperialist’ power to be opposed.
The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist
Solidarity with the Palestinian cause is meaningless if it dissipates the moment that the Palestinians resist their oppression with anything more than rocks. Those who are not under brutal military occupation or refugees from ethnic cleansing have no right to judge the manner in which those who are choose to confront their colonisers
Grey and sober Jerusalem
In an excerpt from his memoir, Out of Place, Edward Said recalls the Jerusalem of his childhood, when, ‘Already too tall and developed to look my age, nervous Tommies at the barbed-wire barricade peered into my satchel, and examined my zone pass suspiciously, their unfriendly foreign eyes looking me over as a source of trouble.’
Statues and gangs: fascist panic and policing
Bloated since the 1990s, there has been a continuous extension of activities categorised as criminal, of police capacity, and of police access to – and powers over – people. Bolstered by tough law-and order talk from the government, policing is increasingly unaccountable and moving rightwards.
Britain’s Covid-19 care home cull
Deprived of protective equipment and tests, threatened with funding cuts unless they accepted Covid-positive patients from hospital, along with the enforcement of ‘Do not attempt resuscitation’ notices, care homes and their residents have borne the brunt of government policy. This amounts to no less than social murder, one that was a long time in the making.