International

Super typhoon Haiyan, which smashed into the Philippines at the weekend, was the strongest storm ever recorded, with winds speeds of up to 220 miles an hour. It has created an apocalyptic situation in which no one knows how many are dead. The current figure is 10,000 and rising fast. There are close to a […] Read more »

  The Making of Global Capitalism – The Political Economy of American Empire By Leo Panitch and Sam Ginden (Verso Books 2012) Reviewed by Dave Kellaway ‘In today’s world the multinationals operate outside nation states, there is a new global capitalist order in which no nation state is dominant’ ‘ Europe was constructed against US […] Read more »

Andrea Martini reports from Rome: Tens of thousands of workers, young people, migrants and activists from the environmental movements peacefully filled up Rome’s streets in two extraordinary days of mobilisation on the 18th and 19th of October. Autumn 2013 has been yet another autumn of crisis, of factory closures, of cuts and privatisation, of widespread […] Read more »

Merry Cross reports on a powerful meeting she attended: Yesterday I managed to track down and attend a really interesting meeting in Reading organised by the World Development Movement . It was about the terrible effects of the activities of the Cerrejon coal mining giant in Colombia but as importantly, about the British banks financing […] Read more »

A livestreamed Waltham Forest Left Unity meeting with speakers Nadia Idle (War on Want), Ashok Kumar (Asia Coordinator for Adidas Workers Unite! Union) and Kathy Lowe (Waltham Forest LU) With thanks to Occupy London and the Occupy News Network Read more »

They say that, in politics too, every cloud has a silver lining, and fortunately it can be reported that in the case of the German general elections the silver lining has a distinctly reddish shade, writes Thomas Kachel from Die Linke, Germany’s Left Party. But firstly, a look at the deep black cloud hanging over […] Read more »

Dave Kellaway from  Hackney Left Unity writes about recent developments in Italian politics.  Former prime minister Berlusconi has been twice convicted of fraud by the highest court in the land. He has called his plight the result of a coup d’etat by a left-dominated judiciary and has organised the collective pre-resignation of all his MPs […] Read more »

Murray Smith comments on the recent German elections and what they mean for Die Linke. Once the immediate euphoria – for those that way inclined – had dissipated, it very quickly became apparent that the victory of Angela Merkel and the CDU in the German elections, obtained very largely at the expense of the CDU’s […] Read more »

Sissy Velissariou reports on the devastating attacks being inflicted on higher education in Greece. For at least the past four years the public and democratic university has been systematically undermined by the neoliberal governments through its institutional liquidation, that has destroyed the collective and democratically elected academic bodies, predominantly by its economic strangulation. At the […] Read more »

When the left alternative goes unvoiced, the real choices unposed, democracy is drained of content, writes Mike Marqusee. That’s why we need a new party of the left. Read more »