Phil Hearse

Phil Hearse welcomes an impressive new biography of Ernest Mandel, but questions whether it does justice to the scale of the famous revolutionary’s achievements. - read article...

Peter Gowan, Professor at London Metropolitan University, a member of the New Left Review editorial board and a former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG), died on 12 June. He was probably the leading Marxist expert on international relations writing in English, and wrote and spoke with an astonishing grasp of the inter-relationship between economic, political and military power in the modern world. His ability to knit together theory with a vast range of factual knowledge held his audiences spellbound. - read article...

Britain’s New Labour, initiated in the 1990s to break decisively with the ‘old Labour’ of Keynesianism and the welfare state, is in its death agony. It is sure now that Gordon Brown’s party will lose the next election disastrously, possibly with its lowest share of the vote since the 1920s. A recent poll put Labour on 16%, alongside the UK Independence Party; others hover around 22%. - read article...

The crisis of working class representation is a familiar theme in the left internationally, the idea that because of the shift to the right of mass social democratic and Stalinist parties, or because of their collapse, the working class lacks a political force that can defend its interests in the national political domain. - read article...

So the Beijing games are upon us. There is no public event, other than perhaps FIFA’s Football World Cup, that is so universally approved of as the Olympic Games. An orgy of TV time and newspaper columns will whip up passions about what are, after all, minority sports. - read article...

This year is the 40th anniversary of the tumultuous revolutionary year, 1968. First in our series on the events of that year is this article which looks at the January 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam. - read article...

’Climate poverty’ kills 150,000 every year. - read article...

No one who supports left unity could be anything other than deeply disheartened by the turn of events inside Respect, which has created a crisis that threatens the future of the organisation. The current crisis is unnecessary and the product of the political line and methods of organisation of the Socialist Workers Party. - read article...

The leadership of the EZLN have suspended their ‘Other Campaign’ and called a new ‘red alert’ in response to massive state repression against the communities of San Salvador Atenco and Texcoco where hundreds have been arrested, dozens badly hurt, women raped and a 14-year old killed. - read article...

In a vicious act of class reprisal Ignacio del Valle Medina, Felipe Alvarez Hernández and Héctor Galindo Gochicua, leaders of the Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land in Atenco, were sentenced on Saturday 5 May to 67 years 6 months jail each for the events in Atenco in early May 2006. - read article...

Gabriel Kolko, historian of the Vietnam war and American imperialism, makes a complete rejection of socialism and Marxism in After Socialism. Phil Hearse finds his critique wanting. - read article...

McDonalds, arch-symbol of the transnational corporations, destroyer of health and forests, bitter enemy of the trade unions - this reviled company is having a spectacular growth in sales and profits. If you know why, you know all the essentials about the ’Anglo-Saxon’ form of neoliberalism. - read article...

Tony Blair has seen his domestic popularity plummet over Iraq and the National Health Service. Now a corruption scandal over the sale of honours threatens to bring him down in advance of his announced departure date, June or July of this year. - read article...

As the war become ever more unpopular in the US Iraq, George Bush is making a desperate gamble, trying to pacify Baghdad by sending more than 20,000 extra troops. This could lead to a bloodbath and result in a further political defeat for the failing ’war on terror’ - read article...

At dawn on November 4, 1956, Russian tanks, which had withdrawn from Budapest after the first round of fighting, returned. Six thousand guns opened fire on the city, raining phosphorous shells on combatants and non-combatants alike. - read article...

Mexico has witnessed bitter struggles over the summer culminating in the electoral fraud which robbed the centre-left PRD of the presidency. The material for further social explosions is everywhere. - read article...

The huge Latin American panorama of struggle has given rise to new debates about revolutionary strategy - debates which the Left has not been used to having for some time. How can this enormous generation of struggle, the rejection of neoliberalism and the rise of the Left be consolidated into permanent socialist gains, the power of the popular masses and the defeat of capitalism? - read article...

What stands behind the US drive to endless war? In promoting his recently published Quadrennial Defence Review, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of a “generation-long war”, projecting thirty years of unceasing combat against radical Islam. - read article...

The new political turn of the EZLN promises a new and proactive policy of building alliances and a new programme of the left, to fight for a new constitution. What are the limits and possibilities of this new Zapatista turn? - read article...

A new biography of Mao Tse-tung by ’Wild Swans’ author Jung Chang and Jon Halliday will force many on the left to re-assess some of their opinions about Mao and the CCP, before and after the struggle for power, according to our reviewer. - read article...

The Bush administration is fighting a desperate rearguard action against worldwide protests. Amnesty International calls Guantanamo “the new Gulag”, whilst, inside Iraq, US and allied Iraqi forces carry out ever more indiscriminate attacks and detention sweeps. - read article...

A new book on the water struggle in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba casts new light on a key battle, and raises fundamental questions of strategy for popular struggles. - read article...

US plans to "kill" the Iraqi resistance are failing, and the plans for the January 30 election are in serious jeopardy. With less than one month to go before the projected Iraqi elections, no one knows whether they will take place all at once or over a protracted period or how many people will vote. The BBC World Service reports that in Baghdad, you wouldn’t even know that an election is taking place. Every day there are resistance attacks, which the US and its allies are powerless to prevent. The US stabilisation project is in danger of collapse. - read article...

Transcript of a speech in the debate on ‘Strategies for Social Transformation’, at the European Social Forum, October 16, 2004. - read article...

Despite all the media attention, the true scale of the Iraq conflict is concealed from the public in the West. What is happening is an utterly brutal all-out urban guerrilla war, with savage atrocities being committed by both sides. The scale of this is concealed with reports of “attacks” and “bombings”, apparently by disparate bands of desperadoes. Only occasionally, as with the turning-point battle of Falluja in April, does anything like the real scale of the fighting and the extent of American casualties get fully reported in the press and on TV. - read article...

Discussing the ideas in this book is useful, not because John Holloway has legions of devoted followers, but because many of the ideas he advances about fundamental social change are widespread in the global justice movement and anti-war movement internationally. - read article...

The US military response to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had much more behind it than imperial hubris - although there was plenty of that. Bush and the recycled Reaganite team around him launched a military-political offensive whose central aim was to forcefully extend the hegemony of US capitalism - read article...

AS we went to press the Israeli army was continuing its siege of Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin and many other Palestinian towns. - read article...

Now, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, since September 11 the US project has an overarching ideology, the ’war against terrorism’. It represents an ambitious new stage, an attempt to politically wipe out the opposition to the US corporations. - read article...

Subtitled "September 11, Causes and Consequences" Fred Halliday’s book says little about the "two hours which shook the world", but is in fact an assessment of the international political factors which gave rise to the attack, notably the questions of Islamic fundamentalism, globalisation and United States capitalism. - read article...

The war in Afghanistan has produced the most impassioned outburst of anti-war writing in the English-speaking countries since Vietnam. Unfortunately, while this finds an echo in the mainstream press in Britain, it is virtually excluded from the press in the United States, gripped as it is by an unparalleled reactionary mobilisation. - read article...

The dreadful slaughter in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania handed the Bush administration a political gift of monumental proportions; an opportunity to launch a political offensive against all its opponents at home and abroad. - read article...

Our articles on the floods in Pakistan have given details of how to send financial aid to the Labour Relief Fund. If it is more convenient for you, you can also send funds through the Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres account. - read article...

Pakistan is facing worst ever floods of its history. Torrential rains have unleashed flash floods in different parts of the country since last three weeks. Water levies broke leaving the people exposed to flood water. More than 12 million people have suffered due to these floods. More than 650,000 houses have collapsed, mainly in villages. Thousands of acres of crops have been destroyed due to flood water. Houses, live-stock such as cattle’s and goats, household goods, clothes, shoes and other items have been destroyed. Residents of villages are currently without drinkable water, food, shelter and in need of clothes. In particular, the situation is dire for children and women and they are in desperate need of food and clothing. Disease is spreading fast in the areas affected due to lack of drinkable water. In particular, flu, fever, diarrhea, cholera have been noted and are spreading. - read article...

An unexpected, unthinkable, yet - concerning current circumstances - quite expectable and natural thing has occurred yesterday night. Three public social activists that have always expressed a consistent antifascist attitude and shunned civil indifference have been detained. - read article...

We, the participants at the Istanbul ESF, affirming that we have a strong engagement aganist all war and occupation and that we are for a politial resolution of the Kurdish issue, have made the following resolution : - read article...

Under the impulse of the World Bank and international capitalist institutions, the Moroccan regime started a privatization process of the universities and attacks against the right to studiy. The announcement of the “Emergency plan” to the university at beginning of the academic year, i.e. of the brutal aggravation of these attacks, put a spark to the powder. The class-struggle trade unionists of fight, organised within the UNEM, are at the forefront of the mobilization against the “Emergency plan”. - read article...