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Allan Antliff
In 2015, artist, architect and anarchist Adrian Blackwell contributed a sculptural installation, Mirrored Circles for Ba Jin, to an exhibition of public art by four Canadian artists curated by Yan Wu (‘Subtle Gesture’ was an offsite contribution to that year’s ‘Shanghai Urban Space Art Season’).
Emma Mahony
This article explores the conflicted relationship between creative activism and the art world, through an analysis of the Barcelona-based activist collective Enmedio.
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, James Stafford
Conservative dishonesty over Brexit has put Labour in a dangerous position. By holding back from formulating a coherent and realistic Brexit policy, the party has left itself with many hostages to fortune.
Sahil Jai Dutta, Grace Blakeley, Anahí Wiedenbrug
Brings together three perspectives on the central arguments of Adam Tooze’s Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018), and how they differ from other dominant analyses of our current moment
Brian Shaev
Revisiting socialist debates on the Treaties of Rome (1957) opens a window onto early conceptions of the potential of a European common market and Labour's capitulation to the sovereigntist dogmas of late-imperial Britain.
Juvaria Jafri
Attempts to increase financial access for the poor have tended to create bifurcated banking systems, which systematically disadvantage those they are designed to include, and can exacerbate inequality.
Stewart Lansley, Duncan McCann
A citizen's wealth fund built up via progressive taxation on wealth and the one-off issue of a long-term government bond has huge progressive potential.
Samuel Foster
In the wake of Karl Marx’s bicentenary, and the recent centennial commemorations of both the Great War and Russian Revolutions, Issue 54 of Socialist History serves as a retrospective on Marxism’s impact, legacy and possible future. Samuel Foster introduces issue 54 of Socialist History.
Sarah Ann Sewell
This article examines German communists’ efforts to construct a revolutionary political culture during the Weimar Republic.
Madeleine Davis
John Kelly’s excellent study argues that while the British Trotskyist groups have been extremely unsuccessful in fulfilling their stated aims, principally building a mass revolutionary party, their main impact has come through involvement in wider social or political movements.
Jeremy Gilbert
Jeremy Gilbert introduces issue 95 of New Formations.
Sian Sullivan
In the last works of his life, especially The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-82) and The Courage of Truth (1983-84), Foucault turned again towards the possibility of seeking other rules of subjectification so as to play the games of power ‘with as little domination as possible’. His encouragement was to remember the philosophical strategy associated with Socrates, namely to attend to oneself through activating the soul’s contemplation of the actions of the self: thereby composing an ethical subject whose actions, through practices of freedom and truth-telling, are not enslaved by appetites; and whose ethos of care becomes extended through the conduct of relationships with others, including life (bios) itself. This paper extends Foucault’s expositions on ‘the care of the self ’ and ‘the courage of truth’ to affirm animist and affective activations of the soul silenced through the consolidated colonial universality of so-called western knowledge.
Fabienne Collignon
In this article, I explore the smile as regulatory mechanism installed in the face to organise a subject’s responses to neo-imperial/biopolitical capitalist governmentality.
Michelle Meagher, Heejoo Park, Robert Spencer, Rob Lapsley
Phil Cohen
1960s counterculture offered a fleeting glimpse of an alternative form of civil society, and the spirit of ’68 continues to inspire the quest for a more open, participatory and democratic society. Some see it as having prepared the way for neoliberal consumerism and individualism, others regard it as the great disseminator of popular and anti-authoritarian politics.
Richard Kuper, Brendan McGeever, Lynne Segal, Nira Yuval-Davis, Jamie Hakim, Ben Little
Arguments about antisemitism need to be understood in the context of the current political conjuncture - a time of increased racism in the wider society, but also a time when the issue has been weaponised in order to attack Corbynism. There is a need to acknowledge the existence of antisemitism in the left and Labour Party, even while calling for recognition that it also exists in other parties.
Ben Campkin, Laura Marshall
London’s LGBTQ+ s communities are rapidly losing their nightlife premises. There was a stark drop of 58 per cent between 2006 and 2017, partly because of property development and processes of gentrification.
Jennifer Lee Tsai
Two poems by jennifer Lee Tsai