Author Public Reading Rooms
Feed Our Community – a necessary initiative
Maia Thomas, the founder of Exeter Black Lives Matter, writes about the Feed Our Community project that she has set up which delivers food to hundreds of people in need in her local area. Maia recently received the Ron Todd Foundation’s Equality award. Food is essential to everyone but inaccessible to many. Hunger is a matter of urgency but constantly ignored. Many people say they are ‘hungry’ as a throwaway comment daily, but have you really experienced true hunger? Behind closed doors some people face an empty fridge most days of the week with nothing but hopes and prayers till…
Commemorating István Mészáros
Tamás Krausz writes from Hungary to mark the 90th anniversary of his birth: István Mészáros certainly has an important and prominent place in the recent history of Marxism – mainly because in his work he never yielded to the temptation to submit to the siren voices of bourgeois philosophy. Unlike many others, he never sold his soul to the devil – as Lukács called the spirit of capitalism, a system that is always laden with fascism – right up until today. Just as István knew exactly that it was necessary to sail between the Stalinist scylla and the capitalist charybdis,…
Help The World – a new organisation in Oxford
Ayesha Abbasi writes about setting up her new organisation Help The World Oxford. Asalamu alaikum and hello!
China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse – book review
Andrew Burgin reviews Richard Smith’s new book ‘China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse’ Pluto 2020 It has become a truism that we live in the most dangerous phase of imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg’s assessment that the future we face is either that of ‘socialism or barbarism’ no longer fully expresses the depth of the interlocking crises facing humanity. As the Hungarian Marxist Istvan Meszaros wrote in 2003: ‘if I had to modify Rosa’s words it would be ‘barbarism if we are lucky. …the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of development.’ The world situation has deteriorated even…
The Left must oppose the US cold war on China – not sit on the fence
Fiona Edwards writes: The US ruling class is ramping up its belligerence towards China. This new cold war threatens not just China but all of humanity. It is vital that the Western left grasps the enormous stakes involved in ensuring the total defeat of US’s new cold war and discards any temptation to take a neutral position on this massive life-and-death issue. US imperialism is desperate to contain the rise of China, retard the country’s economic development and maintain the US’s domination of world affairs. The Covid-19 pandemic is greatly accelerating the relative economic decline of the US vis-a-vis China,…