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 ...
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 ...
Bob Crow, June 13 1961 - March 11 2014 Bob Crow: a loss for the working class The death of Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union and one of the most intransigent fighters for the rights of trade union members, represents a serious blow to the working class movement. Comrade Crow died ...
CS National Executive member Callum Williamson reviews The year of dreaming dangerously Slavoj Žižek: dictatorship The year of dreaming dangerously attempts to “locate the events of 2011 in the totality of the global situation, to show how they relate to the central antagonism of contemporary capitalism” (p1). Slavoj Žižek attempts to do this by addressing the rise of ...
CS member Ben Lewis was invited to the Durham Union Debating Society to debate the above motion with various establishment thinkers (and the Stalinist Harpal Brar). These are the edited notes for his speech1. Even a cursory glance around our world is enough to see it is in serious trouble. Many of the tensions and contradictions ...
A student nurse explains how students are used to fill the gaps in the NHS In a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago, he implied that student nurses are lucky because they don’t have to pay for their qualification, as opposed to other university students. Although he wasn’t coming from a Marxist perspective he ...
CS spoke to Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, about the ‘credit crunch’ and what it tells us about the dynamics of capitalism today You have described the latest capitalist downturn as a “turning point” for capitalism as a whole, which is in some ways similar to 1929. Can you expand on this? In fact, one can read ...
Nick Jones reviews N Klein, The shock doctrine London 2007, pp576, £25 Naomi Klein largely came to prominence during the early 2000s within the context of an anti-capitalist movement broadly characterised by its militancy, if not its political coherence. Described by the New York Times as a "movement bible", Klein's book No logo highlighted the role ...