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James Stafford, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Labour, and the left, are in a mess, and there are no easy answers. Recognising this is a precondition for the renewal we need.
Danny Dorling
In his new book, A Better Politics, Danny Dorling asks what policies emerge when we take happiness as the priority for politics and economics.
Yagmur Savran
This piece aims to demonstrate that now is not the time for the international Left to be disputing the Rojava revolution and whether it fits their theoretical framework, but to instead show communitarian solidarity with the Rojavans in what is arguably a fight for freedom and popular democracy against the forces of fascism.
Francis Dupuis-Deri
Informed by anarchism, this article raises the possibility of viewing the state per se as a system of domination, oppression, appropriation and exclusion, one that is interwoven with other systems and influences them as much as they influence the state.
Euromemorandum 2016 critically reviews economic policy in the EU in 2015. It argues that the current slight easing of fiscal pressure should be replaced by co-ordinated fiscal expansion. It also discusses the EU democratic deficit with special reference to Greece, as well as migration, youth unemployment and TTIP.
Sara Ahmed
To understand how sexism works, to ask why sexism remains stubbornly persistent in shaping worlds, determining possibilities, deciding futures, despite decades of feminist activism, is to work out and to work through the very mechanics of power. [...]
Sarah Franklin
This article, based on a lecture of the same title prepared for the Sexism Workshop at Goldsmiths College in 2014, builds on personal experience to address the persistence of sexism in the academy. The individual experiences on which it is based are both personal and generic, and the aim of revisiting them here is diagnostic: to examine sexism as a means of reproduction.
Zara Dinnen, John Ó Maoilearca, Sam McBean
Reviews by Zara Dinnen, Geoff Eley, John Ó Maoilearca and Sam McBean
This rich history tells the life story of Ada Salter, who, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, had pioneering roles in local politics as well as in feminist and ethical socialist movements. Graham Taylor here shifts the focus, usually on Ada's husband Alfred, to Ada's remarkable work, and her significant impact on Bermondsey and on national politics.
Noisiness in political debate can be a virtue and a vice. Jeremy Corbyn’s incredible victory in the Labour leadership contest is testament to this: from one point of view he has shown the sheer mobilising power of a clear, polemical ideological vision, even when articulated in an unassuming, modest style. [...]
The movement for workers’ control in the 1970s was among the most promising of the many roads not taken in the forgotten history of the left.
Thomas Ferretti
Anyone serious about fostering freedom, equality and social justice should support co-operatives.
Doreen Massey
Soundings has been arguing for a long time that Labour should ‘take a leap’, that it should challenge the dominant terms of debate: that, rather than accepting the established political terrain, it should be marking out distinctive territory of its own. [...]
Jo Littler, Mandy Merck, Hilary Wainwright, Nira Yuval-Davis, Deborah Grayson
A roundtable discussion on socialism and feminism with Mandy Merck, Hilary Wainwright, Nira Yuval-Davis and Deborah Grayson, chaired by Jo Littler.
Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey
First published in Michel Butel’s popular review L’Autre journal, of which he was an editorial board member, Gilles Deleuze’s essay on control societies, re-published in Pourparlers in 1990 and later translated as the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (hereafter just the ‘Postscript’) has proved to be one of his most widely cited pieces of work.
Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey
One of the UK’s leading radical economists discusses the history of post-Fordism as both a concept and a set of economic practices, with specific reference to his role as an innovative municipal policy-maker at the GLC in the 1980s and subsequently.
William Davies
Review Essay - Undoing the Demos: Neo-Liberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown, ZONE BOOKS, 2015
Allan Antliff
Kim Croswell’s, Portrait of Herbert Read (‘To Hell With Freee’), marks the first issue of Anarchist Studies devoted to a pivotal figure in the history of modern art (and much more), with a special focus on Read’s polemical pamphlet, To Hell with Culture (1941).
Danielle Child
In 1941 Herbert Read – a British art critic, poet, novelist and political thinker – wrote an essay, to be published as a pamphlet in ‘The Democratic Order’ series, entitled ‘To Hell with Culture’. The essay sought to criticise the capitalist co-optation of culture, whilst simultaneously calling for a functional art within a democratic society.
In this book Maggie Andrews explores the WI’s relationship with feminism from the formation of the organisation in 1915 up to the eve of British feminism’s renaissance in the late 1960s.