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Posts from the ‘Contending for the Living’ Category

Aug 1

“Let others talk of glory, let others celebrate the heroes who are to deluge the world with blood…They know not what a cottage is. They know not how the poor live…”

Mike Marqusee’s latest column for Red Pepper celebrates William Frend, a radical who deserves to be better remembered.

Contending for the living
Red Pepper, August 2014

The 35-year-old Cambridge lecturer William Frend was putting the finishing touches on ‘Peace and Union’, his pamphlet on political reform, in early 1793 when the hostility between Britain and the revolutionary regime in France broke into outright war. At the last minute, he added two fiercely urgent appendices. Read more

Jun 1

A level playing field? Global sport in the neo-liberal age

Contending for the living
Red Pepper, June-July 2014

One of the hallmarks of the neo-liberal age has been the exponential expansion of commercial spectator sport – in its economic value, political role and cultural presence. All of which will be thrown into high relief during the coming World Cup. Read more

Jan 31

Past visions, future dreams

Contending for the Living
Red Pepper, February-March 2014

Last spring, I made the steep climb to the mountainside entrance to the Cuevas de Covalanas, one of several caves in the Cantabrian region of northern Spain decorated with pre-historic paintings. I had seen reproductions of this type of art in books, but nothing prepared me for the experience of the paintings themselves, on site and in person. Afterwards, I wondered how, not having seen these creations, I could ever have thought I knew anything about art history. I kicked myself for my presumption. Read more

Nov 30

How the left supported ethnic cleansing

Contending for the Living
Red Pepper, December 2013

The British left has made some terrible errors in its time but surely few more appalling than its 1948 support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own land. Today the left is attacked for “singling out” Israel for criticism but historically its record is the opposite, as demonstrated in Paul Kelemen’s invaluable new book, “The British Left and Zionism”. Although subtitled “History of a Divorce”, it is very much a history of the marriage that preceded the divorce, a chilling chronicle of the making of that terrible error. Read more

Sep 26

A party to dream of

Contending for the Living
Red Pepper

When the left alternative goes unvoiced, the real choices unposed, democracy is drained of content, writes Mike Marqusee. That’s why we need a new party of the left

I’m one of the thousands who signed up to the Left Unity appeal issued by Ken Loach in March. I did so because I believe the continued absence of an effective left alternative to Labour hampers our resistance to austerity, racism, war and environmental degradation.

Left Unity has no shortage of doubters. There are many who reject electoral politics altogether and others who remain committed to working in the Labour Party. And not a few who simply doubt the left’s capacity to measure up to the challenge.

For me, the starting point is the franchise, Read more

Aug 3

White supremacy alive and well in Britain

Red Pepper, August 2013

Only a year ago, the London Olympics were being hailed as “a defining moment” in the emergence of a proudly multi-cultural Britain. That claim was always inflated but it looks decidedly hollow, indeed dangerously self-indulgent, in light of recent developments: the electoral advance of UKIP, the enhanced menace of the EDL and most of all the barbaric attacks on Muslims and mosques in the aftermath of Lee Rigby’s murder.

The far right resurgence, here and across Europe, poses challenges of many kinds for the left. But whatever else we do, we have to recognise that the far right feeds off and re-enforces a more diffuse phenomenon: the racism, national chauvinism and xenophobia that are part and parcel of the mainstream.

The racism of the mainstream isn’t hard to find. Just look at the pages of the Mail or Express (far more efficient deliverers of racist propaganda than the far right) or at entertainments like Homeland or Argo (where in accordance with hoary stereotypes the Muslim enemies of the west are portrayed as unappeasable, brutally irrational, and at the same time calculating and duplicitous). Then look at how racism has been shown to infect nearly all our major social institutions – from football to police and prisons to Oxford and Cambridge.

Politicians of all three main parties dabble in it. Read more

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