Those who have had such high hopes in Podemos will surely see them dashed, says Daniel Harvey It is difficult to overstate the artificiality of Podemos as a populist project. That applies to its deliberately vague name (meaning literally ‘We can’, which is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s original election campaign). Leaks also reveal the shallow process ...
Russell Brand Revolution Century, 2014, pp384, £20 It is a terrible force of habit (and probably a shameless indication of my inbuilt confirmation bias) that, whenever I pick up an otherwise unknown book with the word ‘revolution’ in the title, I invariably flip straight to the index. I am looking for one thing: Marx, the bewhiskered ...
Very recently I was elected by the students at the University of Birmingham to serve as a first-year guild councilor for the University’s guild of students. Unlike most left candidates in student elections, I refused to adopt a reformist agenda. As a Leninist, I perceive elections to be first and foremost an opportunity to agitate ...
Communist Students were out for Wednesday’s Free Education demo, Callum Williamson reports on the event and the need for the left to come up with a strategy for quiet times Considering the betrayal of the NUS bureaucracy (which it is alleged, actually called around Students Unions to discourage mobilising for the event after dropping its initial ...
Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Does capitalism have a future? Oxford University Press, 2013, pp192, £14.99 As its title suggests, Does capitalism have a future? is an attempt on the part of five prominent sociologists to discuss the prospects for the system of capital, and the likelihood of its replacement by a new social ...
The recent spat in the NUS over Islamic State is indicative of the political disorientation of the student movement, writes Charles Gradnitzer In July, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty member Dan Cooper brought a motion headed ‘Iraqi/Kurdish solidarity’ to the National Union of Students national executive council.1 The motion, which sought to “condemn the IS and support the ...
Die Linke is plumbing ever greater opportunist depths, writes Ben Lewis The twists and turns, the international alliances and intrigues in the unfolding human tragedy that is the Islamic State’s barbaric siege of Kobanê pose many challenges to both bourgeois and working class political ideas. Hence we have the spectacle of US bombing in support of ...
Communists on campus are still swimming against the tide, reports Ben Lewis The annual start-of-the-year freshers’ fairs, where students new and old get a glimpse of some of the weird and wonderful societies, clubs and associations they can get involved in at university, provide a decent opportunity for the scattered forces of the far left to ...
As the long process of rebuilding Gaza ‘begins’ once again, it may often seems as though the Palestinian people are doomed to suffer an endless cycle of slaughter and impoverishment. Israeli Antizionist Author and member of Left Unity’s Communist Platform , Moshé Machover has a better grasp of the situation than most. We sent Communist ...
We would like to welcome students to our website, particularly to those who have just begun their time at university and may have come across the publication for the first time at Freshers’ Fayres up and down the country. We find ourselves at a time when – despite the obvious instability of the world, growing social ...
Ndongo Samba Sylla The fair trade scandal: marketing poverty to benefit the rich Pluto Press, pp208, £16 There has been very little discussion around the inadequacies of so-called ‘fair trade’ (FT). As Marxists, we know, from a theoretical standpoint, that capitalistic commodity exchange can never be ‘fair’, but how many of us can provide concrete examples ...
David Cameron’s incompetent campaign against Jean-Claude Juncker has exposed his lack of bargaining power within Europe, says Eddie Ford Just as the Corn Laws haunted the Conservative Party throughout the 19th century, Europe acts as a running sore for the modern-day Tories. Desperate to steal the clothes of the UK Independence Party and appease the Eurosceptics ...
Communist Students were stirring things up at this year's conference of the National Union of Students Members and supporters of Communist Students made a stand for principled Marxist politics at the 2014 conference of the National Union of Students, where CS member Robert Hayes was standing for the ‘block of 15’ individually elected members of the executive. The ...