MARTIN JENKINS believes Michel Foucault’s analysis of power can inform an ethical understanding of socialism. The French thinker Michel Foucault died 20 years ago in 1984. Lecturing at the foremost European universities, Foucault was briefly a member of the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF). Along with other thinkers, he has been labelled as a post-modernist.(1)...
Cook’s report
The ILP’s ‘Conversation of the left’ was held in Leeds on 8 May 2004. Martin Cook reports. This meeting was a deliberately low key ‘conversation’ with no big name speakers and a set of themes on the future of the left and our attitude to the Labour Party. The organisers seemed a bit disappointed...
Making the mutual state
The New Economics Foundation is influencing the government’s agenda with its ideas for democratising the public sector. MATTHEW BROWN spoke to NEF’s executive director, Ed Mayo. Last year an “independent think tank”, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), published a small pocket book called The Mutual State: How local communities can run public services, which...
Africa: Imperialism goes naked
SARAH BRACKING and GRAHAM HARRISON argue that imperialism is a far more useful concept than globalisation for understanding Africa’s relations with the global economy. ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’...
The left, the war and the obligations of the oppressed
In the wake of September 11th, and opposition to the war on terrorism, WILL BROWN calls for the left to re-examine its knee-jerk responses to international conflict. Writing in the left-wing American magazine, Dissent, Michael Walzer has issued a stark indictment of the left’s response to the events of September 11th and the war...
Behind the Stars and Stripes
America is still gripped by patriotism in the wake of the attacks last September on New York and Washington. But behind the bunting, there are fiery arguments on the US left and right about the uses and abuses of American power. GARY KENT reports. Debate on the US left is bitter after 9/11. On...