Blog

With Bernie entering the Democratic primary race, here's a look back on his long political career fighting for the working class. 

The case of Shamima Begum, the nineteen year-old who ran away to Syria from her home in East London in 2015, is now well known. Yet, the most striking thing about it is not the enactment of the deprivation of her citizenship but the scale of media attention it has received. In this essay, Nisha Kapoor puts the actions of the British state against Begum in its political and historical context.

From Habermas to Honneth, critics have been keen to portray Foucault as a paradox-prone thinker. Thomas Lemke argues that we should embrace the recurring contradictions in Foucault's thought as symptoms rather than inherent problems.

"There is one demand on which all the Yellow Vests unanimously agree: Macron Resign!" Alèssi Dell’Umbria reports on the Gilets Jaunes in the context of France's infamous social movements.

In this edited extract from The Reform of Europe, Michel Aglietta considers Europe's future in the new age of global politics, and the long-term developments that Europe should help foster as an extension of its own political self-assertion in a multipolar world.

Alain Brossat on the rise of the new far-right.

Marx famously noted, following Hegel, "that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice...the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." Today's splinter from Labour of 7 sitting MPs to the new "Independent Group" seems to pale in comparison to that other defection to the right in 1981, of the Gang of 4 which formed the Social Democratic Party. In this classic article, written during crisis in Labour precipitated by the SDP split, Stuart Hall analyses the ideology of social democracy and the meaning of the SDP.

The book Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis has given rise to diverse criticism from commentators such as Helena Sheehan, Adam Tooze and J.W. Mason, whilst Yanis Varoufakis himself responded on his blog to a series of critiques. Éric Toussaint examines these exchanges in greater detail. 

Enzo Traverso on the elusive meaning of France's new horizontal populist movement. Can the Yellow Vests achieve their aims without reference to the red flag?

Molly Smith on striking in solidarity with sex workers.

At the height of the crisis of the 1970s Tom Nairn published his collection of essays The Break-Up of Britain, which soon became a key intellectual reference point for the Scottish and British left. Post-Brexit, could those same trends that Nairn predicted would lead to the break-up of Britain be returning? In this article, Scott Lavery asks what Nairn can teach us today.

The frequently invoked will of people has been one constant of discussion around Brexit, often used to dismiss the idea of a second referendum. But what do we mean by the people's will? In this article, Peter Hallward looks to the legacy of Rousseau.