Essays & Interviews
Unravelling the Paper Tiger: Palestine Action’s Siege
From May 1st, Palestine Action will lay siege to Leicester’s Israeli arms factory. In this essay, they detail their tactics in combatting the broader supply chain in Britain to limit the destruction and death wrought in Palestine – calling for the mobilisation of the British left to achieve this goal.
Red Fightback’s Final Crisis
Red Fightback was a communist and anti-imperialist organisation that aimed to take oppression seriously, adopting an intersectional approach that sought to address patriarchy, racism, and ableism, in contrast to much of the left in Britain. But the project has come to a sudden end, leaving both its membership and onlookers confused about contradictions within the party and its seeming failure to combat oppression within its ranks.
COP27 and Imperialism: Weaving a Crown of Thorns for the Global South
While COP27 has been defined by greater inclusion of voices from the Global South, developed countries were vocal in their opposition to fund disaster relief efforts for developing countries – signalling the continuation of contempt towards popular anti-imperial movements and demands made from poor, working class peoples.
Against the Common Enemy: Godard’s Anti-Imperialist Cinema
Patrick Higgins recalls his encounters with the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away last week at 91, charting Godard’s evolving politicization from his disillusionment with the Hollywood studio system that inspired his youth to his collaboration with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
The Revolutionary Tradition of Kanafani's On Zionist Literature
Ghassan Kanafani’s political commentary was rooted in a broader revolutionary tradition of rebellion in the colonised world, which sought liberation through struggle for sovereignty and self-reliance. It is in this spirit that On Zionist Literature is not an appeal to the West’s collective conscience but is concerned with it only insofar as it facilitates colonial violence.
Paper Tories
All that the Tory candidates for the Leadership Election have to offer is more of the same – warmongering, escalating attacks on trans people, on migrant workers, escalating austerity and the cost-of-living crisis. Mao Zedong’s description of imperialism as a paper tiger remains strikingly pertinent.
Anti-Communism in Britain
Anti-communism has had a constant presence in Britain which has ebbed and flowed with perceived crises of the state and the capitalist economy. Evan Smith traces this history of anti-communism, exploring the episodes that have shaped British politics ahead of the Tory leadership battle and a Summer of strikes.
Multipolarity Then and Now: Reflections on the Non-Aligned Movement
The history of the Non-Aligned Movement and multipolarity are easy to describe as if it were simply a matter of international policy or diplomacy. But the newly emerging forces, social processes, upheavals, and mass mobilisations emerging against US hegemony in the past thirty years are not merely ‘geopolitics’; this is the real history of class struggle in the contemporary phase of global relations.
Time for real change? Sinn Féin and the recent Stormont election
Instead of celebrating the demise of the British institutions as a welcome step on the road to reunification, Sinn Féin find themselves pleading with their unionist partners in the administration of British rule in Ireland to return to Stormont. That the largest republican party is showing such commitment to the smooth functioning of the northern state should be worrying to anyone invested in reunification.
Starmer and Siege Social Democracy
Keir Starmer’s response to the cost-of-living crisis by doubling down on Labour’s appeals to 'law and order', attempting to outflank the Conservative Party from the right, demonstrates the relevance of Stuart Hall’s underutilised concept of social democracy 'adapted for siege conditions'.
Palestine Action: Resisting Imperialism From Within
Palestine Action’s numerous successful occupations, blockades, and attacks carried out on Elbit infrastructure – causing over £15 million in losses, shutting down operations for 105 days and preventing the manufacture of arms – has shone a light on what successful resistance can look like in the imperialist core.
‘Worse than Hitler’: Nazi revisionism in the service of US foreign policy
In routinely comparing its geopolitical rivals to Hitler, the US is able to obscure the broader political context of the given crisis and whitewash its direct role in causing it – allowing the West to maintain the fiction that it uses its military power for 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.
Raising their banner high: fascism, imperialism, and anti-communism at the Capitol Hill riots
The flags of U.S. client states, anti-communist regimes, and pre-revolution puppet states dotted the sea of MAGA hats and Confederate flags at the Capitol Hill mobs. Making sense of why requires understanding the convergence between imperialism abroad and fascism at home.
From Eritrea to Bolivia: who supported the Washington backed coup?
To be a revolutionary Eritrean in the diaspora demands one not be associated with the Washington State Department or uncritically support Isaias Afewerki. There is a transformative approach to transitioning Eritrea and it won’t work through collusion with the State Department, Human Rights Watch, or Amnesty International.
British communism’s patriotic disease
Left-wing patriotism in Britain carries the shameful legacy of the Second International’s self-destruction, and even a progressive patriotism presents a paternalistic narrative in which workers of colour are the ‘good immigrants’ who helped rebuild the nation rather than resisted colonialism.
Subjects
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- Third World
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