I. Introduction On Saturday 14th May 2016 I attended the Sheffield TUC’s “Europe IN or OUT? The Big Debate”. Maxine Bowler of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) was the main speaker on the top table for the ‘out’ position. In my contribution from the floor I began by stating my critique of the European Union as […]
“I’m old school and I believe that many cyclists still seek a bike that’s made to last. I continue to believe that being durable is a positively good thing!” (Andy Blance, co-founder of Thorn Cycles) The Thorn Audax is a nippy bike. It is remarkably lightweight for steel (approximately 10.9 kg) and has a gear […]
At the age of nineteen, soon after I joined the organisation Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, I remember entering the students’ union at Newcastle University while being heckled by a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, who called me “a fucking Zionist”. I confess, at that moment, I had no idea what the word Zionist meant, but I gathered immediately […]
If you would like to buy the book “Why Socialist Feminism?”, please click here. (Image from Wikimedia Commons: Wallpaper at Jaume I’s building playground at Ciutadella campus from University Pompeu Fabra against patriarchy and capitalism.)
“Not just in China, but everywhere in the world without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or the side of socialism. Neutrality is mere camouflage; a third road does not exist.” Mao Zedong, 1949 “I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism […]
“It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up […]
I knew Carl during our student activist days. I can still recollect our intense political conversation in a noisy upstairs room of a London pub that led to him joining the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in 1997, of which he was a member for around two to three years. His politics remained firmly on the Left throughout his […]
Click here to read my critique of Judith Orr’s editorial – “Lies from the top as the Tories push for war on Syria” – from the Socialist Worker newspaper (01/12/15). For more on the Socialist Workers’ Party‘s anti-war politics as it has operated over time in the Stop the War Coalition, you may like to listen to my podcast: ‘An […]
“It wasn’t until some years later – when I realized the full scope and dimension of the massacres – that I comprehended the concealed nature of the ice lurking deep beneath the hypnotic and dynamic femininity of Gandhi’s non-violent exterior.” Lenny, in Bapsi Sidhwas’s Cracking India The Partition of India in August 1947 had, at its […]
Is there any other European city so tensely laden with a history like Berlin’s? My photo essay offers some reflection on how Berlin’s past, present, and future is dialectically mapped onto its urban landscape. One moment in this history belongs to Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). The below extract is from the last known political article written by […]
Anaemic On A Bike 