The piece that follows comes from a talk I gave back in the spring at the Marx is’ Muss conference in Berlin. I was together in a panel with a member of the RAR organising committee, the artist and designer Ruth Gregory. This afternoon, I will celebrate one activist, who helped to shape Rock Against [ ]
After my illness last year, I didn’t think I would ever return to work. The illness cost me something; I’d been feeling for many months a tiredness so heavy that it demanded an explanation. After my diagnosis, I was in hospital for six weeks. Chemotherapy, I endured by sleeping at it and the hot summer [ ]
When you write the history of the last hundred years, there’s always a source if you just dig deep enough. People leave traces, them or their friends, there’s such an abundance of written material. Go back further, though, and it’s different. There are people who held Archimedes’ lever in their hand and used it to [ ]
The second and concluding part of my list the best anti-fascist novels published in Britain over the last century. Following on from my previous post, here are the top 25 the best-written, most complex, most interestingly anti-fascist novels I can think of. Am interested, as ever, in what would make any other reader’s top [ ]
The following list excludes short stories, translations, autobiographies with no meaningful content as fiction, books with an enemy which was a bit like fascism but not fascism really, stories set in fascist Italy or Nazi Germany which don’t take that setting seriously, stories with Nazis in where they are just fanatical antagonists, and stories where [ ]
This piece returns to an argument I’ve made elsewhere, that fascism is “a specific form of reactionary mass politics”. And that if you read the history of interwar Marxist theories of fascism then whoever you begin with (Trotsky, Gramsci, Bordiga, Guérin, Thalheimer or Zetkin, whoever…), all address this same, central, analysis. In this piece, I [ ]
In May 1641 Parliament killed one of King Charles I’s favourites, the Earl of Stafford; later the same month they abolished the Court of Star Chamber. If you want to grasp today’s slogan “No Kings” and the memory on which it draws here’s the place to start with the tyrant Charles, the dregs of his [ ]
The inspiration for this talk was Robert Chapman’s idea of health fascism, and their argument that the far right grows by idealising a lost past of individual and collective health. That left me wondering if the left has our own notion of “health communism”. Obviously, there’s the book of that same title, which came out [ ]
Three experiences inform this piece of writing: words Mike Kidron told an interviewer in 1964 (“not Trotskyist but Trotskyist-derived”), a piece a friend of mine Colin wrote last year (“how did these revolutionary socialists become so similar to the Stalinists of their youth?”), and words another lefty spoke to me an event last weekend (“I [ ]
In September, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor will be bringing out the above, this year’s big book on fascism. Given Klein’s well-earned public reputation, as well as the genius of her book Doppelganger, this book is likely to be popular with activists. For people who want to get a taste of its contents; there’s the [ ]