The feminist writer Audre Lorde famously observed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She was wrong, though. Sometimes appropriating the master’s tools can come in very handy. Already accustomed to the sound of falling masonry, onlookers …
The Left has forgotten its philosophy
A mere glance at the headlines underscores what most working people under 40 intuit. Unfathomable wealth inequality, flat or barely improving wages, falling life expectancy, and a massive housing shortage are overturning the hard-won gains of the 20th century. And …
Michel Houellebecq is literature’s Lucifer
According to folklore, somewhere in the Southern Carpathians there’s a university called Scholomance that’s run by the devil. Students are taught how to conjure spells, command the weather and ride dragons. What, though, might be on the devil’s curriculum? What …
English nationalism is built on a lie
Someone once called nationalism the most contradictory of all political ideas. If it can lead straight to the gas chambers, it can also free you from oppressive imperial powers. For every Franco or Modi there is a George Washington or …
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 …
Thomas Piketty’s failed revolution
Think back to the political situation a decade ago, and one may have in mind a calmer, less dysfunctional time. Britain’s economy was growing, just about, and real wages were beginning to rise for the first time since the summer …
The peasants won’t go quietly
Farmers hurl eggs at the European Parliament. They dump manure wherever they go. In Spain, they burn tyres. In Occitania, office buildings. Their tractors have cursed the capital of Germany with terrible traffic. As in the Holy Roman Empire circa …
E.P. Thompson, Marxist rebel
Edward Palmer Thompson was an unlikely Little Englander. He was born 100 years ago into the sort of polymathic, globe-trotting family that this country no longer seems to produce. His parents met in Jerusalem in 1918, where his mother taught …
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 …
The Marxist who recognised evil
Norman Geras, who died 10 years ago today, was an unusual figure on the Western Left: he was a Marxist who steadfastly and unequivocally opposed militant Islamism and jihadi terrorism. As a free-thinking political theorist, he was as strident in …
In France, money is dirtier than sex
Almost anywhere in the world, you would have confidently expected people to celebrate their country overtaking Japan, the UK and Germany, to clock more millionaires than everywhere else except the United States and China.
Not in France, though. Accusations flew, …
McDonald’s made me a Marxist
There is a saying at McDonald’s: “‘tits on tills’ — boys in the kitchen, girls on the counter.” The idea, as a 22-year-old former worker described in a recent BBC report, is “to put attractive people at the front”. Human …
Why we can’t tell the truth
The idea of truth has fallen out of favour in recent years. For one thing, it’s less politically important than it used to be. In the era of the Cold War, what beliefs you held to be true counted for …
The Marxism of Horrible Histories
Of all historians, living and dead, one has changed the way we think about history more than any other. Yet he remains curiously absent from feuilletons and podcasts. Terry Deary has never been one for self-promotion. So although anniversaries are …
The Unabomber never grew up
The Unabomber and I share several connections. Both of us hold PhDs, are of Eastern European descent, and attempted to escape the dismal modern world by fleeing to remote locations in western Montana — he after leaving academia, me just …