Monthly Archives: July 2013

On the Issue of Political Extradition & the United States: Saints & Sinners

If justice is transitive, it applies to all alike, and we should critically engage the grave double standard the United States applies to extradition requests it issues, while requests submitted to it for criminals, terrorists and stooges of corrupt regimes … Continue reading

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Tendency of the rate of profit to exasperate

A few years back Deloitte issued a report that had a long term analysis of the rate of return on various measure, investment capital, equity and assets. In all three cases there was a fairly clear downward trend. Deloitte come … Continue reading

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Provisional thoughts on Egypt

Between January and October 1850, Karl Marx wrote a series of four articles on the revolutionary situation in France for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which were collected and published with the dreadfully uninspiring title Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850. Decades later, … Continue reading

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Review – Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography – Georgi M. Derluguian

The title of this book by itself could already warrant a read, yet there is much more to find in this book, its interesting title aside. The work mainly deals with the question of the Soviet Union and particularly its … Continue reading

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European Left Summer University

The European Left Summer University was held between July 3rd and 6th. Organised by Bloco de Esquerda of Portugal, the University was a three-day series of lectures and seminars on the key issues facing the European Left, the party of … Continue reading

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The ties that bind: historical memory and present struggle

After having received 12 years of schooling in Ireland, I think it’s not too outlandish to say that history is a means to the formation of national identity, one which inculcates in the population a more or less patriotic conception … Continue reading

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Against the Grand Narrative: on postmodernism

Without recapitulating the entire history of postmodern thought, which beginning we can, for our purposes, anchor at the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is safe to summarise its development as stemming from a justified distrust of the liberal project, … Continue reading

Posted in Cultural analysis, Culture, Philosophy | 1 Comment

The roads to power: capitalist democracy and socialist strategy

This article comes from an abortive book project that I was working on about five years ago. The questions that it raises about political strategy for the radical left now appear far more pressing than they did when I wrote … Continue reading

Posted in History, Proletarian politics | 1 Comment