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Folk Devils Fight Back
“The current set of moral panics being orchestrated by the Conservative government surfaced early in February 1993 with the death of two-year-old James Bulger. The flurry of debate which followed revolved around the breakdown of the family, the growth of crimes committed by children, and the powerlessness of . . .” read more
Second-Hand Dealers in Ideas: Think-Tanks and Thatcherite Hegemony
“[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the . . .” read more
'Win-Win' with Bruce Babbitt: The Clinton Administration Meets the Environment
“For the environmental movement in America the allure of the Democratic ticket in 1992 was not Bill Clinton. His record in Arkansas was poor. Tyson, the chicken mogul, had fouled the state’s rivers with an enthusiasm equalled only by his zeal for Clinton’s political well-being. Not fifteen miles . . .” read more
Representing Solidarity: Class, Gender and the Crisis in Social-Democratic Sweden
“The 1991 Swedish election produced the victory of a coalition of four bourgeois parties dedicated to bringing about a ‘system shift’. Their preparedness to break with the Swedish social-democratic model stands in marked contrast to the bourgeois governments of 1976–82. The change can be understood only in relation . . .” read more
China Today: 'Money Dissolves the Commune'
“Before I returned to China last year I was working on an essay entitled (borrowing and combining Raymond Williams and Juliet Mitchell) ‘Culture: The Longest Revolution’, explaining how difficult it would be to get rid of our dominant cultural heritage of patriarchy, and more specifically, what I called . . .” read more
The Economic Basis of Russia’s Politicial Crisis
“The struggle between the Russian executive and legislature seems unhinged from the world around and dancing to its own tune. Each side accuses the other of betraying democracy and plotting the restoration of totalitarian rule. The population looks on, bored by political brinkmanship as it tries to survive . . .” read more
The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe
“In the recent literature on gender relations in Eastern Europe, it is quite often said that democratization has ‘opened up a space’ within which women can now seek to identify their interests and organize. That is undoubtedly the case. At the same time, however, as offering a space . . .” read more
The Entrails of Thatcherism
“Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Conservative party for almost sixteen years and Prime Minister for eleven years. Under her leadership the Conservatives won three general elections and re-established themselves as the dominant party in the British state, while Labour declined to its interwar level of support. It . . .” read more
The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis
“International conflict over agricultural regulation continues after more than six years to threaten to destroy the whole Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), and with it an agreement that greatly extends corporate power relative to national (and public) power. Paradoxically, the deadlock . . .” read more
South Korea: Unification and the Democratic Challenge
“The victory of the ruling party candidate Kim Young-sam over Kim Dae-jung in the recent (December 1992) Presidential election marks a significant milestone in South Korean politics. Obviously it promises less of a change than an oppositional victory, but the mere fact that the winner is the first . . .” read more
Petra Kelly and Willy Brandt
“The deaths of Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly in a way mark the end of two successive generations of mass leaders, two eras of the West European Left, spanning more than fifty years. Willy Brandt, a man of very modest beginnings, identified from his earliest youth with the . . .” read more
Privatization and the Development of Capitalism in Russia
“The almost universal assumption, at all points of the political spectrum, is that Russia is in the throes of a painful transition to capitalism. Privatization is seen as the key to this transition, and resistance to privatization is accordingly seen by the Western Left as the essential basis . . .” read more
The Crisis of Algerian Nationalism and the Rise of Islamic Integralism
“By cancelling the elections planned for the end of 1991, banning the Front Islamique du Salut (fis), arresting its top leaders and detaining thousands of activists, the Algerian regime prevented an Islamist government from being elected, but did not succeed in forcing the theocratic djinn back into . . .” read more
The Crisis of Contemporary Culture
“St Catherine’s, the college to which I have just migrated, got its name by a mistake. The college began life in the nineteenth century as a society for matriculating students too poor to gain entry to the University, which is not least of the reasons why I am . . .” read more
Politics and Space/Time
“‘Space’ is very much on the agenda these days. On the one hand, from a wide variety of sources come proclamations of the significance of the spatial in these times: ‘It is space not time that hides consequences from us’ (Berger); ‘The difference that space makes’ (Sayer); ‘That . . .” read more
The Costs of Stability: The Advanced Capitalist Countries in the 1980s
“It is widely recognized that economic policy in the advanced capitalist countries shifted profoundly in the 1980s. Employment levels were abandoned to market processes, government deficits would be eliminated to squeeze inflation and release resources for private initiative, profitability had to be restored to improve the climate for . . .” read more
Reform and Revolution in South Africa: A Reply to John Saul
“F.W. de Klerk’s speech of 2 February 1990, in which he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and the other main anti-apartheid organizations, ushered in what has proved to be a complex, difficult and dangerous phase in South African history. Participants in and sympathizers with the . . .” read more
Democracy in Mexico: Will the First Be Last?
“Against the trend of democratization that is establishing itself in Latin America, complete with the accompanying debacle of its various state-party regimes, Mexico alone continues to postpone the transition to a legitimate and representative polity. The party dictatorship described as ‘perfect’ by Mario Vargas Llosa, the former candidate . . .” read more
The Life and Times of Socialism
“As the light of socialist hopes and expectations fades, and the need for clear vision and historical perspective grows imperative, we might look to the owl of Minerva, trusting she will neither be dazzled by the fires of capitalist celebration (or crisis?) nor succumb to the absolute darkness . . .” read more
The Question of Electoral Reform
“Representative government in the United Kingdom has a very special character with respect to that elsewhere in Western Europe. In the first place, the British House of Commons at Westminster is the only parliament in Western Europe which neither now nor in the recent past has been elected . . .” read more
Ecology, Socialism and the Mastery of Nature: A Reply to Reiner Grundmann
“Reiner Grundmann’s ‘The Ecological Challenge to Marxism’ is very much to be welcomed as a well-argued and challenging contribution to a debate that is clearly quite central for the Left today. I think it is especially valuable for its defence of the metaphor of ‘domination’ or ‘mastery’ over . . .” read more
Russia on the Brink of New Battles
“When, in August 1991, the world heard the news of the failure of the attempted coup d’état, millions of people across the globe rejoiced at the victory of democracy in Russia. The inhabitants of the country, however, were in a rather less euphoric frame of mind. Although the . . .” read more
The Disintegration of a Labour Tradition: New Zealand Politics in the 1980s
“On 27 October 1990, New Zealand’s Labour government suffered one of the heaviest defeats in the country’s electoral history. Labour lost twenty-seven of its fifty-six seats, and its share of the vote was the lowest since 1931. It was a humiliating but not inappropriate end for a government . . .” read more
Can Democracy Survive in Russia?
“During a visit to Moscow in January at the invitation of the Russian Party of Labour to help counter threats to abolish Moscow Council, it was confirmed to me that, in the aftermath of August’s attempted coup and the break-up of the ussr, Russian politics is rapidly . . .” read more
The Crisis of Today’s Ideologies
“I have been asked to speak on ‘the crisis of ideology, culture and civilization’ today—an enormous subject, and one not easy to define. Yet very few people will doubt that there is today such a crisis, even if they cannot say precisely in what it consists. So let . . .” read more
A Socialist Interest in Law
“The momentous events that have taken place in the Communist world since 1989 have underlined, even though it may prove to have been too late, the necessity for socialists to take law seriously. I understand the slogan ‘taking law seriously’ to embrace the following ideas: one, contrary to . . .” read more
The Crisis in Cosmology
“Among the physical sciences, cosmology is distinctive: its domain is a unique and irreproducible system, the Universe; those who study it are inescapably immersed in the system; almost all of it is inaccessible to them; even on the accessible fragment there is almost no possibility of experiment. At . . .” read more
The Ruins of Westminster
“Britain, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is still officially known, resembles an ungainly, dilapidated, half-refurbished Victorian pile threatened by the simultaneous onslaught of subsidence, storm damage, woodworm and dry rot. This year brings an election that could be dangerously inconclusive and . . .” read more
Brazil: The Long March to the New Republic
“At the end of 1989, Brazilians voted in direct presidential elections for the first time since the military seized power in 1964. After an inconclusive first round, victory in the second went to Fernando Collor, an independent conservative, by a small margin over Luis Inacio da Silva, universally . . .” read more
The True Realm of Freedom: Marxist Philosophy after Communism
“This article is an attempt to consider the implications for Marxist philosophy of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It would be well to start by saying what Marxist philosophy is taken to be here. A convenient map of the field is provided . . .” read more
World Income Inequalities and the Future of Socialism
“The thesis of this article is that the great political upheavals of our days—from Eastern Europe and the ussr to the Middle East—originate in a radical transformation of the social structure of the world-economy combined with a persistent, indeed deepening, income inequality among the regions and political . . .” read more
The European Left Between Crisis and Refoundation
“Today we cannot understand anything of Europe, the European Left or any other problem in the world unless we start out, in a spirit of truth, from the epochal shift of the last few years that has resulted in the political, ideological and economic collapse of the Communist . . .” read more
Incomplete Revolution: National Movements and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire
“Early in September, less than a month after the abortive coup in Moscow, Soviet ethnographers gathered in Bishkek (formerly Frunze), the capital of the newly independent Kyrgiz republic, for their annual national conference. Confronted by the radically transformed political situation in what was repeatedly referred to as ‘the . . .” read more
The Regulation Approach: Theory and History
“In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the . . .” read more
The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure
“It is well known that Japan has in the past decade developed into an economic superpower—the world’s greatest asset country, with the biggest per-capita gnp, the biggest aid budgets, home to all ten of the world’s biggest banks and many of its biggest corporations, the base for . . .” read more
The Ecological Challenge to Marxism
“Contemporary Marxism has responded in a number of ways to the challenge posed by ecology. Broadly speaking, three currents of thought can be distinguished. The first I shall call the ‘Marxist dissident’ response. Its proponents have abandoned central elements of Marx’s theory, claiming that the new questions posed . . .” read more
The Vacuum in Hungarian Politics: Classes and Parties
“In February 1989 the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt or mszmp) formally accepted the principles of multi-party democracy. Within thirteen months of this decision, free elections were held and a complex political system emerged in which six parties came to represent distinct political fields in . . .” read more
Khomeini: Fundamentalist or Populist
“‘How did Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini become an Imam? Much like the Holy Prophet Abraham. He carried out God’s Will, smashed idols, was willing to sacrifice his own son, rose up against tyrants, and led the mostazafin [oppressed] against their mostakberin [oppressors].’” read more
Es Gibt Keinen Staat in Europa: Racism and Politics in Europe Today
“I would like to start by explaining how I came to modify the agreed theme and, to some extent, focus of this contribution. There were some general reasons for doing so, which occurred to me as I was reading the Congress programme, but recent political events provided a . . .” read more
Realpolitik in the Gulf
“On the morning before Yom Kippur late this past September, I found myself standing at the western end of the White House, watching as the colour guard paraded the flag of the United States (and the republic for which it stands) along with that of the Emirate of . . .” read more
Economies Out of Control
“At the end of the 1980s a word was pronounced in London and New York which had virtually dropped out of economic vocabulary at the start of the decade—stagflation. The Reagan and Thatcher booms are over and their successors have been left to grapple with a legacy of . . .” read more
Why is the United States at War with Iraq?
“Why is the United States at war with Iraq? It is a lot easier to say what are not the reasons for us intervention in the Gulf than to provide a fully satisfactory account of its presence there. According to the Bush administration, the usa is . . .” read more
From Stalinism to Post-Communist Pluralism: The Case of Poland
“The classical theories of totalitarianism, as elaborated in the 1950s, described totalitarian systems as imposing total ideological conformity, effectively controlling minds and consciences, eliminating all forms of opposition, and thus being virtually immune to internal change. It is no wonder that the gradual dismantling of Stalinism, which began . . .” read more
Fin de Siecle: Socialism after the Crash
“As we enter the last decade of the twentieth century, the ruin of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Communism has been sufficiently comprehensive to eliminate it as an alternative to capitalism and to compromise the very idea of socialism. The debacle of Stalinism has embraced reform-communism, and has brought no benefit to . . .” read more
Liberal Militarism and the British State
“The British contribution to the Gulf war, the Cold War rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher, and the fresh memory of the Falklands war remind us of the military propensities of the British state. Yet Britain has not had conscription since the fifties, its generals keep out of political life, . . .” read more