“What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage, even fisticuffs.” Near the end of his novel The Magic Mountain, …
Trump’s Red Scare will backfire
And so we enter the beginning of the end. After months of insecurity, Democrats have united behind Kamala Harris as their nominee, while Republicans seem to have adjusted their messaging in response to their new opponent. The election finale is …
Why the Left hates MAGA Communism
I wanted to love MAGA Communism. When the movement emerged on X in 2022, it ruffled all the right feathers. It sought to meet working-class people where they were, channelling their frustrations while simultaneously dismantling the Left-wing establishment.
Predictably, the …
Lenin’s lesson for Western liberals
Before launching his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin placed the blame for the war on a surprising figure: Vladimir Lenin. Allegedly, the founding father of the Soviet Union gave away the western territories of Russia as part of the establishment …
Degrowth communism is capitalism’s monster
A spectre is haunting the West — the spectre of degrowth communism. Or so Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought, would have you believe. Saito is the author of Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the …
How Bolshevism built modern Britain
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist historians, many of whom generally — and with good reason — attach odium to Great Man History. For he was that rare thing: an individual instigator of historical change. A hundred years …
Green capitalism is a con
If religion was the opium of the masses in the days of Karl Marx, then today’s drug is the cult of green capitalism. The West has been fooled into thinking that a combination of futuristic green technologies and green growth …
How to escape North Korea
When Kim Seungeun first visited North Korea, he saw a barren land devastated by famine, its trees stripped by people desperate to heat their homes. He can still picture the corpses floating down the Tumen River on its border with …
Marx’s vision of inequality
It is often assumed that Marx was an egalitarian thinker. This is done, I believe, not through reading Marx (few people do it) but by applying a simple extrapolation. According to this common, and somewhat naive, view of the world, …
Liberalism’s sin was born in the Cold War
If the contemporary political scene is strewn with wreckage, it is clearer than ever that “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” did much of the damage. More than any other, these two ideologies have afflicted both the centre-right and centre-left, fostering the sense …
Has Xi Jinping bankrupted China?
It is hard to tell when a crisis in a dictatorial regime, such as the sudden breakdown of China’s economic model, is not about this or that, but about the regime itself. My own experience in this regard is very …
Communism has deserted the banlieues
It is grimly appropriate that the riots across France started when the police shot a young man in Nanterre. Nowhere epitomises France’s last few decades of social and political change better than this suburb of western Paris. The English word …
Neoliberalism killed the liberal dream
The 150th anniversary of J.S Mill’s death seems a prime opportunity to reflect on the tangled mess that liberalism has bequeathed to the 21st century. Fairweather liberals can’t decide whether to torch their dusty copies of On Liberty or dust …
Will King Charles save East Germany?
The Germans might not be setting their capital on fire, but when King Charles touches down in Berlin this morning, he will do so knowing that he is visiting a country no less divided than its western neighbour. While France …
Capitalist radicals will shatter the world
“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are …