Book Review
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Journalism doesn’t need saving by those who made it toxic. Wright names the rot—Murdoch, the lobby, the Oxbridge cartel—and shows how the presses keeps running.
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Journalism doesn’t need saving by those who made it toxic. Wright names the rot—Murdoch, the lobby, the Oxbridge cartel—and shows how the presses keeps running.
Trump didn’t just return to NATO; he returned as “Daddy”—a role not earned through diplomacy, but conjured through spectacle. Baudrillard warned that when image overtakes reality, politics becomes performance. The bombs may have hit Iran, but the real strike was rhetorical. What mattered wasn’t destruction, it was the appearance of obliteration, the meme of authority, the myth of restored order. In the empire of simulation, the sovereign returns not with treaties, but with merch.
Labour won power by promising stability, but what it offers now is paralysis. It has no strategy to counter Farage, no defence against a Tory right fightback, and no imagination to confront the ecological and economic shocks coming fast over the horizon. While Reform sets the agenda and the left reorganises, Starmer retreats into technocratic caution. The government is not leading Britain—it’s managing decline, and doing it badly. Unless Labour finds the courage to confront the forces tearing the country apart, it risks becoming the caretaker of its own collapse.
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is a searing indictment of Western complicity in Israeli aggression, exposing the ideological, economic, and political forces that have enabled the destruction of Palestine.
The work isn’t fake because it’s imaginary—it’s fake because it pretends to matter. We clock in, log on, file the forms, and call it a life.
Matt Goodwin’s claim that “London is over” isn’t analysis, it’s a panic attack in column form. Behind the talk of pints and train delays lies the same tired script the Mail rehashes every few weeks, just in time for its readers to rage over their cornflakes. Crime becomes a cipher for immigration, anecdote stands in for data, and the city’s diversity is framed as an existential threat. But what really offends Goodwin isn’t decline—it’s that London no longer looks or sounds like him.
Alexander Dugin’s latest polemic is not political analysis but fascist sermon—an apocalyptic blueprint in which nuclear war is both inevitable and desirable. Cloaked in the language of sovereignty and tradition, it is a call to arms for a new ideology of holy Russian power. What begins with Fordow ends with the end of humanity. And for that reason alone, it demands scrutiny—not celebration. You listening, tech bros?
The next state to cross the nuclear threshold won’t be doing anything new. It’ll be following the path Israel already took—building the bomb in secret, shielded by silence and strategic utility. The real precedent was set decades ago in the Negev. That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of the so-called international order: one bomb is a threat to civilisation, the other a pillar of it. This isn’t about non-proliferation. It’s about who gets to own the apocalypse.
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.