Blog

Loren Balhorn interviews author and filmmaker Klaus Gietinger about his new book, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg.

There has been a resistance to Brexit causing 'hard borders' around Northern Ireland. But, as Luke Butterly argues, the reality for those who do not meet the criteria of 'Irishness' or 'Britishness' is that there has been a hard border on the island for many years.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the death of one of Britain's foremost black socialist intellectuals, A. Sivanandan, whose work changed the way we think about race. In this essay, Fathima Cader reads his work via his novel When Memory Dies, which charts the struggles of three generations of Sri Lankans.

Contemporary capitalism is faced with an organic crisis in the fullest possible sense of the term, one that encompasses not just the political and economic contradictions Gramsci described but also the biological terrain upon which social life ultimately depends.

After President Macron’s speech and with the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement continuing, Etienne Balibar explains its origins and examines some of its political implications.

Of all the types of intelligence which arrived either on the printed page or by word of mouth in Afro-American societies, none was more eagerly anticipated or potentially explosive than news which fueled hopes of black emancipation. 

It's back! Verso staff pick their favourite non-Verso books of the year.

Attempts to identify Trump with fascism have proliferated across the political spectrum. In the latest number of New Left Review, Dylan Riley argues that the comparison serves rather to illuminate the specificity of today’s political situation – and the incoherence of Trump’s form of rule.

2018 has seen a vast rise in anti-Semitic violence globally. Similarly, violence against trans people, and trans women of colour in particular, has continued to rise exponentially. Is there link between the simultaneous rise in anti-semitism, the resurgence of the far-right, and the rise in transfemicide? In this article Joni Alizah Cohen analyses the structure of Nazi ideology for the key to understanding the present crisis.

Are there any continuities between the gilets jaunes protests in Paris and the 2005 insurrection in the banlieues? In this interview with Joseph Confavreux, Alain Bertho discusses the differences and similarities between the two historical moments, and situates the gilets jaunes movement within a broader history of urban riots. 

Macron has always presented himself as beyond traditional political categories. In this interview with the Huffington Post, Toni Negri argues that the gilets jaunes movement, which can be characterised as neither Left nor Right, has now challenged Macron on his own representational ground, and forced centrist populism into its first great crisis. 

Louis Althusser critiques Michel Verret's response to the May 1968 uprisings, and in so doing indirectly critiques the French Communist Party's handling of the situation. Available for the first time in English.