“There can be no doubt that the One State idea gives its holders a moral satisfaction. Somebody told me: OK, perhaps it is not realistic but it is moral, this is where I want to stand. I respect this, but I say: this is a luxury we can’t afford. When we deal with the fate […]
In this post I present, first, a brief overview of the current period in Britain vis-à-vis racism and hate crime; second, the limitation of a dominant academic understanding of racism; and third, a historical exposition of the nature of racism which offers explanatory power for our contemporary era. I. Hate crime post the EU referendum Britain’s […]
“‘History’ has to be renegotiated and resignified in order to (re)create a sense of the past appropriate to the particular conjuncture and the political project for the future. […] in the case of English nationalism, the events selected include those which evince a sense of external threat over which ‘the English people’ triumph, especially events […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
“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 […]
“You cannot really describe what happened at that time, during this cultural revolution, that’s so special about it. But I would say there was an incredible curiosity for the future.” Paul van Dyk, DJ and producer, Berlin (Sub Berlin: Story of Tresor) “If I hadn’t had this Tresor family, I would have had much more problems […]
Foreword The writings of Marxists who have long past should neither be confined to their era of origination nor be reworked to the extent that eliminates from analysis of such work the context provoking them. Gramsci himself understood that ideas about the past may transcend the original context and communicate to us in the present, but only through rigorous empirical […]
Anaemic On A Bike 