From This Issue

Marxists have no trouble speaking about what they love. But they do need to learn how to listen: to themselves, and, more importantly, to the reply of their beloved.

Thatcher attentively reproduced many a theme from the pioneering monetarist and racist Enoch Powell, racialising the experience of inner-city industrial decline as a problem of disobedient foreign cultures. The Iron Lady would be proud of how these stories continue to be taken up by her heirs.

What has degraded a lineage of once consummate state managers and political operators into, to borrow Dominic Cummings’ description of the Johnson cabinet, a parade of ‘fuck pigs and morons’?

The radical flank of the climate movement continues to court arrest with disruptive and spectacular actions, adhering to the logic that Suffragettes and civil rights activists were unpopular in their time. As Marcus remarks, ‘no one needs to like Just Stop Oil’.

Rationing repeatedly rears its head, either as immediate response to shortages of oil, gas or food caused by wartime disruptions and corporate opportunism, or, in a longer-term horizon, as an emergency fallback if carbon taxes, carbon trading and other market mechanisms fail to halt global warming.

In early November 2024, something historic happened in Spain. The story starts with the violence of climate change. We all saw the scenes of sudden apocalyptic inundation in Valencia: the streets turned into roaring rivers, the people floating away, the piles of...

In the streets for Palestine, today’s hated Semites are found. They are the children and grandchildren of Asia and Africa and Ireland and the Caribbean. In the multiracial city, they meet and forge new traditions. These diasporas terrify because they threaten to destabilise existing identities; this has long been the fear animated by the rootless cosmopolitan Jew, shuffling from place to place and making revolutions there, turning all that is solid into air.

The automation of death has been a goal of the US military since 2004. The aim has been to progress from ‘man-in-the-loop’ technology, where a human decides what the technology does, to ‘man-on-the-loop’ system where a human can intervene but does not regularly make decisions, to full automation.

Why, and how, are any of us capable of self-reflective thought? Of experiencing emotion, ratiocination, preference, cold, whim, melancholy, joy? Anything at all?

Art does not stand outside the mode of production that is capitalism. And if, in the broader anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle, a version of contemporary art is chiselled away, this will be part of the tectonic shifts that will shatter its postmodern particularisms, historicism, institutional ‘criticality’, and its style of styles that it prides itself on presenting as universal, against the pale of history.

Israel has pursued a policy that limits any form of indigenous economic and institutional development that could contribute to structural reform and capital accumulation, particularly in the industrial domain.

The real and tangible feeling that Israel is defeatable comes with an endless stream of possible regret for choices made under the stress of an existing and seemingly all powerful order.

The morning sun is already high and hot as we enter the grounds of San Giovanni Park, the former asylum in Italy’s north-eastern city Trieste, through Europe’s largest rose garden – 3000 varieties in mid to full bloom, hot-pinks and blood-reds, lemons, peaches and...