In the 18th century the US produced a Declaration of Independence. Today we need to declare our interdependence, says BARRY WINTER, and this should be a guiding feature of the world we live in.

BARRY WINTER reviews Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, and finds the late academic’s fascinating account “both right and wrong” in its lament for social democracy.

Born in London in 1948, Tony Judt taught at several British and American Universities. At New York University in 1995, he established an institute for the study of European history. He authored over a dozen books and wrote for various publications, such as The New York Review of Books. He won various awards for his writings, including the Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

PAUL SALTONSTALL reports from a recent seminar on how to reform capitalism from the inside

The talk was given by Michael Green, one of the authors of The Road from Ruin: A new capitalism for the Big Society, and the host was the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). This was one of their quarterly [...]

Radical sociologist DAVID HARVEY provides a clear and concise analysis of the recent financial crisis and asks if it’s time to look beyond capitalism to a new social order.
“Any sensible person now would join an anti-capitalist organisation,” he says. “We have a duty to change our mode of thinking.”
Click here for Harvey’s RSA lecture in [...]

WILL BROWN examines two welcome contributions to debates on democratic renewal and progressive social change
The need to extend democratic practices within society, beyond the confines of the parliamentary system, has been widely recognised on the political left for some time. However, in a context of rising political apathy and a perceived ‘crisis’ of democracy, the [...]

BARRY WINTER went to the Critical Politics conference in November, and found a Left still confused about how to respond to new times.
Organised by the Signs of the Times collective, the intellectual heirs of Marxism Today, this conference was really back to front. It concluded where it might, more usefully, have begun, with an analysis [...]

BARRY WINTER reviews Anti-Capitalism: The social economy alternative, by Chris Hill, and considers the role of the social economy in creating change, as well as sustaining socialism.
This is an intriguing book. Written and, indeed, published by a former, long-standing member of Militant and, at the time of writing, a member of one of its offspring, [...]

MARTIN JENKINS re-examines the work of Thomas Hobbes to counter the popular prejudice that humans are naturally competitive and aggressive isolationists.
Will human nature act as an impediment to socialistic political change? Are we naturally greedy or selfish in seeking to gratify our desires and needs? Thinking people on the ‘left’ maintain that human beings are [...]

If our urban world has been imagined and made then it can be re-imagined and re-made, says DAVID HARVEY.
The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park wrote, is:
Man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is [...]