After discussions prompted by recent national moves towards left regroupment, along with considerations around publishing capacity and the generative potentialities of collaboration, the editorial boards of Ebb and Prometheus are merging. Managed by the combined boards, Prometheus Journal will become Prometheus Magazine, a regular physical magazine and online publication, while Ebb will continue as Ebb Books, the combined project’s book-publishing arm.
Madeleine Norman, of the Filton 18, reflects on their time in prison after a suicide in HMP Low Newton. In prison, as in occupied Palestine, the spectre of death is constant, and Norman emphasises that as much as death has the ability to galvanise resistance we cannot wait for more death for people to join the struggle.
Moulded by its own fealty to the Treasury, rentier capital, and a declining Atlanticism, Starmer’s vision for the British economy is an attempt to kickstart growth that is weighed down by its own contradictions. In this article, Jonas Marvin details this growth mindset that is hindered by its own authoritarianism amidst the breakdown of the US-led global order, the decimation of living standards, and the growing impact and realisation that runaway climate change is here to stay.
In May 2024, the student movement in Gaza saluted the global student movement – acknowledging student organisations across the globe as a vanguard integral to the Palestinian Liberation movement – but with the crucial caveat that it must escalate its tactics. While the ‘student intifada’ has invigorated the Western solidarity movement and sections of the left in general, the student movement still remains ill-equipped to rise to that challenge.
In this interview with Ira Terán and Emrys Travis, Sylvia McCheyne discusses what exactly trans Marxism is, how it is so often a foil against mechanical applications of dialectics, and why it is so important to organising and what comrades in the UK and elsewhere can learn from trans struggles.
Reporting back from the three assemblies at The World Transformed that attempted to diagnose and overcome the impasse of the British left, Lewis Hodder details the varying levels of class consciousness of the crowd that coalesced around criticism of the leadership of the new left party.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant’s Health Communism is both a wake-up call and call to action driven by clear analysis and radical demands, urging us to raise the bar beyond ‘saving the NHS’. Recognising that, under capitalism, we are not all sick but ‘none of us is well’, the populations that capital has marked as ‘surplus’ must be centred in our struggle for global health justice.
Health Communism
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Verso Books, 2022
9781839765162
Like Orwell, Paul Mason has fallen victim to a kind of fatalism: the belief that in the end hope lies not with the proles, but with the bourgeois state that is able to overcome fascism - reflecting trends within the British left unable to contain their admiration for Starmer’s ‘ruthless pragmatism’.
How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance
Paul Mason
Penguin Books, 2022
9780141996400
Ezra Otieno of Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League writes how Caroline Elkins' study of the violence of the British Empire illuminates the colonial legacy that remains in Kenya and informs its present internal contradictions and, fundamentally, how independence in the country is still a mirage.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
Caroline Elkins
Bodley Head, 2022
9781847921062
If you want a conclusion to Lenin's question ‘What is to be done?’, you may be disappointed by Althusser’s book. Written in 1978 but ultimately unfinished, the book focusses on the emergent Eurocommunism and their focus on civil society rather than the state but Althusser's critique remains largely moralistic.
What is to be done?
Louis Althusser, trans. by G. M. Goshgarian
Polity, 2020
9781509538614
Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution details the political economy of the vast historic links between dynastic families, Christian fundamentalist groups, various lobbying and campaign groups, and an overarching counterrevolutionary in America and, in this review, Harry Holmes recognises the crucial parallels – and crucial differences – in Britain and its economy that must be understood and confronted.
Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance
Melinda Cooper
Zone Books, 2024
9781942130949