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Gary Smith says Britain’s net zero policy has exported jobs and imported virtue. But what he’s really defending isn’t working-class power, this is fossil capital in a hard hat. Decarbonisation without class politics is a gift to Farage. But the answer isn’t more oil. It’s public ownership, planning, and a transition built by workers, not against them.
Live Aid was forty years ago. Today, we are haunted once again by the images of starving children (and now, starving adults) in Gaza. But this time, it doesn’t seem to register. No concerts. No campaigns. No national reckoning. Why? Because the system can only process suffering when it’s stripped of politics. Ethiopia’s famine was framed as fate. Gaza’s is a siege, and Britain is complicit. That’s the difference.
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
Frank Furedi claims the public has been silenced, while shouting from the pages of the Daily Mail. What he’s really mourning is the loss of uncontested dominance: the fantasy of a Britain where dissent means agreeing with him. This isn’t analysis, it’s a staged panic, designed to justify repression and launder far-right talking points as common sense. Britain isn’t a tinderbox. But pieces like this are trying hard to make it one.
Kemi Badenoch wants to be Britain’s Javier Milei. Let that sink in.
The protests outside migrant hotels aren’t spontaneous. They are engineered. Stoked by far-right groups, amplified by the right-wing press, and legitimised by political cowardice, what we’re witnessing is a strategic campaign to turn fear into power. When the police protect anti-racists, it’s called provocation. When the far right throws bottles, it’s “community concern.” The hotels are just the excuse. The real target is the idea that Britain could ever belong to all of us.
They tell us the crisis is caused by desperate people in dinghies, not decades of housing policy that turned homes into investment vehicles. But the truth is, Britain is not short of houses, its just full of landlords, speculators, and empty properties waiting to make someone rich.
While far right mobs are framed as “concerned locals”, anti-fascists are treated as the threat. The police escort becomes the scandal, not the fact that far-right demonstrators are being allowed to dominate England’s streets with near impunity. When the media sides with the mob, resistance is rebranded as provocation.
I knew the late Neil Faulkner, and I have always meant to review his last book; he was a storyteller, a fighter, and one of the great Marxist historians, someone who could hold a room and remind you that history is not past but struggle.
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni’s Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis, recently published by Verso, is more than a critique, it’s an intellectual war machine. They chart how the CCC has reshaped the global economy, from Amazon’s AI-driven logistics empire to the speculative bubbles propping up Tesla and Google. They expose how Big Tech’s far-right accelerationists, from Andreessen to Thiel, are using crisis to rewire the state itself. The choice, they argue, is stark: biocommunism or extinction.
Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra’s article “A Global War Regime” examines the interplay between militarisation and capitalist structures, yet, from a Marxist perspective, it overlooks crucial aspects like class struggle, the state’s role, and the ideological mechanisms underpinning militarisation.
Simon Pearson argues that Marxists must revive class-based language and analysis of capitalism’s exploitation to connect today’s diverse struggles against inequality and build mass working class power.
“All I Want for Christmas is You (to Buy Stuff) or Your Exploited Joy,” provides a Marxist and Situationist critique of how the capitalist class has commodified Christmas into a spectacle of consumption that fuels exploitation, alienation, and hollow aspirations.
Karl Marx’s controversial 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” has sparked heated debate over whether it reflects antisemitism or offers insights into capitalism’s exploitative nature. This essay examines Marx’s inflammatory rhetoric and problematic stereotypes while also considering the enduring relevance of his critique of commodification and alienation.
Conspiracy theories exploding during COVID-19 have captured swathes of the British working class. This proliferation indicates the failure of Marxists to foster class consciousness while exposing how reactionary tropes obscure the real economic forces exploiting systemic crises.
With the climate crisis intensifying, net zero emissions by 2050 has emerged as a key policy goal to limit global warming, but its feasibility and fairness are contested across the political spectrum. This post argues for ambitious climate action to reach net zero, situating the debate within broader capitalist critiques and speculative futures.
In this post, I look at Althusser’s theory of history, why it’s still important and how it can help us understand the complicated social structures of today. By looking at modern examples like the rise of tech giants, the debate over climate change, and the rise of populism, we can see how Althusser’s ideas still give us important insights into how economic, political, and ideological forces work together to shape our world.
This article discusses Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. Its continued relevance in understanding the role of workers in shaping their conditions of labour and the emergence of new knowledge production facilitated by social media and the internet.