Theory and Strategy.
All of the articles we have published under the tag Theory and Strategy, beginning with the most recent.
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Mutual Aid, Incorporated.
For capital, the Covid-19 crisis represents an opportunity. How can the left resist and respond in ways that are affirmative of life?
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Strategy and Tactics
Calls which suggest "moral judgements" should be replaced by "strategy" misunderstand what it means to organise a movement from below.
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What Next for the Labour Left?
Labour's left is disorientated and fractured after traumatising defeats. But any retreat into low-stakes sectarianism would consign it to irrelevance for years to come.
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Coronavirus and Prisons: the need for Radical Alternatives
The health of prisoners was already in crisis before the Coronavirus outbreak, what should a radical response be to this life or death issue?
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The Socialist Republic
Whatever the result of the Democratic Primaries, the Socialist Republicanism of Eugene V. Debs offers a way forward in conceptualising socialism as a politics of freedom.
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Defend The Community Organising Unit: Activists into Organisers
Powerlessness is the root of so many of the problems faced by ordinary people. Community organising can challenge this.
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If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars
Calls to give up distinctively socialist policies for short-term tactical gain are mistaken. The left can learn as much from 2017 as 1983.
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Why Sadiq Khan's call for associate EU citizenship is wrong.
Khan's proposal is an empty gesture that relies on British exceptionalism. This is why the Remain movement failed.
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Revolutionary (Un)Productivity: a review of Jenny Odell's 'How to Do Nothing'
What would it take to reject capitalist temporality? In Jenny Odell's popular book, Nicole Froio finds a new way to think about productivity, connection, and relationship.
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Defining Oppression
The Jewish Labour Movement leadership hustings demonstrated the limits of current attitudes towards antisemitism. The left must develop its own analysis of this oppression.
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What's to Debate?
The support of most Labour leadership candidates for trans rights is welcome. But arguments over 'sex' and 'gender' miss the sheer complexity and bureaucracy of current laws on gender recognition.
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A Plea to Wavering Comrades: Beware the Labour Right
Keir Starmer looks set to win & Rebecca Long-Bailey’s campaign has stuttered, but the left must not pass up a historic opportunity to transform the party, & resist the inevitable attempts to do so from the right.
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False Promises
Keir Starmer's leadership bid gestures towards generosity whilst manipulating our emotions & appealing to our unconscious biases. We should refuse this dishonesty.
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Reconsidering climate change intervention: a review of Holly Jean Buck’s ‘After Geoengineering’
Blending essay and fiction, Holly Jean Buck argues that ecosocialists must engage with new technologies
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The Tory Party in the 2020s - How will they govern?
The Conservative government may wish to centralise power in Westminster – but there are trends in British society that no tech whizz can fix.
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Dialectics / Dialogue: a review of Ashley Bohrer's Marxism and Intersectionality
Ashley Bohrer's latest book brings Marxism and intersectionality into dialogue, offering a groundbreaking reading of the two traditions, but a limited view of collective struggle.
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Light in the Darkness
Our hope, our love, and our togetherness are powerfully transformative. We must never forget this.
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Class War Corbynism, No Fucks Given
After the election the real struggle begins, it's time to fight fire with fire. Time for Class War Corbynism.
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Fracking bans, Election Giveaways and the Fight for the Future
How should the Tory moratorium on fracking be understood in the context of their efforts to reshape society and the state to render them even more subject to the logic of the market.
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Everything is horribly, brutally possible: On Political Disavowal
The reactionary disavower wants to stake a claim to a mode of rationality which is as equally grounded in feeling and fantasy as the furthest-out-there utopian and moralistic socialists.
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The Fight of Our Lives
Why thousands who had never taken part in political activism before are campaigning for Labour.
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Trans Rights and the Labour Manifesto
Labour's manifesto offers a great deal but when it comes to trans rights there is a worrying ambiguity around the Equality Act and trans healthcare is completely ignored.
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Resisting Green Colonialism: Lithium, Bolivia, and the Green New Deal
There are potential contradictions between decarbonisation in the Global North and the needs of communities in the Global South. How should we handle them?
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The Bolsheviks did not 'smash' the old state
Debates between partisans of “reform” or “revolution” presume that the Bolsheviks really “smashed” the Tsarist state. What if this isn’t true?
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Remembering and Rebuilding Socialist Culture: A talk given at The World Transformed
How collectivism, mutual aid and political education formed a fundamental part of working-class community and culture.
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To Each According to their Needs! On Labour's Universal Basic Services report.
John McDonnell's UBS report offers a potential framework for a revolution in the ways we conceive of and meet our needs.
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Building a Socialist Media System
In advance of the TWT policy lab, what might a socialist media look like and how would it relate to other commitments to a democratised everyday life.
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Refusing To Be Bought: a critical response to the Tories' education proposals
Leaked documents reveal the Tories' plans to offer teachers a massive pay rise and more power—but at what cost?
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Prominent Centrists and the Fiction of the White Working Class
The self-image of the celebrity centrist relies on the stereotype of an uneducated, bigoted, 'White Working Class'. It's time for them to take responsibility for their own beliefs.
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The Defiance of Durham
The achievements of mining communities and unions are celebrated in spite of the conditions in which they arose, not because of them, and this heritage also fuels today's struggles.
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Editorial: Chris Williamson
The decision not to readmit Williamson offers a sliver of hope that the left of the Party, and its apparatus, may yet be able to tackle antisemitism.
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There's More to Life than This! An argument for joy, against economism.
Technocratic policy fixes and sci-fi fantasies won’t save us—ecological collapse calls us to rethink our attitudes to extraction, exploitation, and interconnection.
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Freedom and Movement: Radical Music vs. the Hostile Environment.
Radical music, like radical politics, can energise and mobilise us towards collective liberation—but physical and conceptual borders are threatening this potential.
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"A Robert Byron of the Left"? An Interview with Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley discusses "The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space" and Tribune magazine.
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End the Oppression of Pedagogy! Why Southampton Transformed matters.
For political education to work, it must connect theory to what is local, material, and concrete. Southampton Transformed is one of a number of regional events aiming to do this.
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The Struggle that Lies Ahead
Ralph Miliband and the new left's analysis of the failures of the 1945 Attlee Government, allows us to predict the obstacles that would face a socialist government and offers ideas how these might be overcome.
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Communist Feelings
Works by Doris Lessing and Vivian Gornick on the fall-out around 1956 uncover the passion that's missing from conventional political histories. What can we learn from them?
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Against the New Vitalism.
Recent attempts to rehabilitate vitalism, despite claims to be radically ecological, are an example of how fascism re-appropriates the past in an attempt to colonise the future.
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From Revolting Housewives to Big Problems: Women, Class and Politics
To claim that working-class women don't do politics is to overlook past and present experience of how, and what happens when, they do.
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Questions for Centrists
To get further than vapid statements about ‘change’ and ‘politics being broken’, centrists must ask themselves some fundamental questions about beliefs and strategy.
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We Are Not Your Flock: Reading Angela Smith with Rancière.
What does the Independent Group’s claimed “duty to lead” tell us about their attitude towards the world-making capacities of the working class?
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Objects of History: A Design for Life and the Production of A New World
The longing for a vanished world can't be assuaged by pretending the dark history of working-class defeat encoded in 'A Design For Life' never happened. It can only answered by the production of a new world.
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For the Many, Not the Married
Despite the many gains made by feminist and LGBTQ activists, society - including the mainstream left - remains more invested in the couple and the nuclear family than in broader ideas of community.
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Implicit Crisis
Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity, one of the stronger contributions to the ‘identity debate’, is a convincing defence of coalitions and class struggle but an all too subtle argument against political pessimism
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‘Labour Does You’: Might thinking through pregnancy as work help us radicalise the politics of care?
How might re-conceptualising pregnancy as work—that is, alienated labour—help us radicalise the politics of care in trans-inclusive ways?
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Socialism and Ecology
Only a particular sort of socialism can make the necessary junction between ecology and the satisfaction of needs.
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Learning Nothing from Thatcherism
In 'For a Left Populism', Chantal Mouffe talks of radicalising democracy and partisan interventions. But what she actually offers is not especially bold.
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Culture for the Many, Not the Few
Alongside economic and political struggle, socialism will involve overcoming elitist gatekeeping to apply shared ownership and democratic control to everyday cultural activities.
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A Very British Coup Megagame at The World Transformed
The Very British Coup megagame provides much food for thought on how Labour should approach its present internal and external battles, and the bigger ones still to come.
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Drifting rightward: the left and the Labour Party
Three lessons from history about labour movements drifting to the right, and how we can guard against it.
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Labour and the Planning System: Lessons from Fracking
A genuinely democratic system that is open to popular knowledge is an essential part of defining our lived social spaces
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Rhetoric, Responsibility, & the Problem of the Political: Some thoughts after reading Andrew O’Hagan on Grenfell Tower
Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘The Tower’ is neither radical or neutral, but a symptom of a middle-class journalism that upholds and supports the given political order through its dishonest claims of objectivity
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The Free Internet is an Illusion
Capitalism has pocketed much of the foundational infrastructure of the internet. Here's how we can start uprooting it.
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On The Guardian's Transphobic Centrism
The Guardian's sly, transphobic editorial rightly caused outrage but should also help clarify strategies for future trans politics
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Open Selection and Socialist Democracy
The democratisation of candidate selection opens up questions and possibilities that are much wider than factional advance
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The Constitutional Turn: Liberty and the Cooperative State
An ambitious policy agenda for change is taking shape on the left in both Britain and the United States. But so far the structure of the state has not featured prominently in proposals for reform.
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Democratising British journalism: a response to Jeremy Corbyn’s Alternative MacTaggart Lecture
Jeremy Corbyn's media reform speech was a good start, but flawed - it severely underestimated the scale of the media crisis.
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Eco-Socialism or Eco-Barbarism
What good is theory in the face of catastrophic climate change? In "The Progress of the Storm" Andreas Malm articulates a strong case for a red-green, anti-fascist, anti-colonialist politics
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Lesbians Going Their Own Way? A Critical View of the London Pride Hi-Jacking
The Get the L Out disruption of Pride reflects capital's tendencies to fragment and incorporate struggles.
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Politicisation and its Potentialities: A Review of Ian Parker's Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left
On the words that are the very keys to unlocking politicisation and its potentialities; a blueprint for thinking, critically and reflectively and a signpost pointing towards practice.
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Freedom Yet to Come
The Labor Republicans offer ways to help us talk about how work makes us unfree
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Labour’s Problem with Police (or, Why Going All-In for Cops is a Cop-Out)
Labour's positioning on the police represents a failure of leadership and a failure to challenge oppression with harmful consequences
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"The sorts of areas that a party has to win": Britain's spatial contradictions and the 2018 local elections
In the wake of the local election results, how should strategies for local government sit in Britain's geography?
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Stephen Lawrence and the Hostile Environment
This hostile environment is no mystery. British capitalism developed in symbiosis with empire: a formal structure of violent domination and exploitation of people of colour the world over.
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Antisemitism and Our Duties as Anti-Imperialists
Antisemitism exists within the left, including among supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. There must be no place for it, it must be condemned without equivocation.
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'You are more oppressive than our oppressors': Transphobia and transmisogyny in the British left
It is now more important than ever for the labour and trade union movement alongside the British left, more generally, to take a hard stance against transphobia and transmisogyny.
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Escaping the Black Dog's Shadow
Several weeks ago, Johann Hari told us that everything we knew about depression was wrong.
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An Anatomy of the Soy Boy
New Developments in the Abuse and Expression of Effeminacy in Anonymous Online Spaces
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Fully Automated Lush-ery Communism?
As Alice Bonasio tweeted live from the Lush Creative Showcase on 4 September 2017: ‘Jeremy Corbyn says he’s got no bath to use the bath bomb he’s made [in.] “Number 10 has a bath” replies Mark Constantine.’
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Speech and Fascists on Campus
On U.S. campuses it is increasingly clear that fascist strategy is to hypocritically use notions of free speech to support a racist, reactionary agenda.
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There Always Was an Alternative
In an exclusive and edited extract from his new book "The Corbyn Effect", Mark Perryman traces the origins and potential of Corbynism.
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Interview with Mark Perryman on "The Corbyn Effect"
Tom Gann spoke to Mark Perryman about the legacy of Stuart Hall, Labour modernity, possibilities for radical organisation, cultural politics and more.
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Normietivity: A Review of Angela Nagle's Kill all Normies
Inevitably, Angela Nagle’s new polemical non-fiction book, Kill All Normies, sent me on a trip down memory lane.
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Corbynism's Ming Vase Period? Contextualising and Opposing the Line on Immigration
It is necessary to criticise Jeremy Corbyn’s recent comments on immigration, which are not only a problem in themselves but indicative of a general direction of the project which needs to be resisted.
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White Marxism: A Critique of Jacobin Magazine
This critique comes from a place of solidarity.
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Reclaiming Common Sense
Arguably, we are at a critical sociohistorical juncture.
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Labour Party Conference: Call for Contributions
This September, thousands of Labour Party members - including constituency and trade union delegates from across Britain - will descend upon Brighton for this year’s Labour conference.
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The Puzzle We Face
This piece follows on from the author's election special essay, "The Hegemon Crack'd".
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Poor Gramsci
In 1987, the late Stuart Hall published an essay titled ‘Gramsci and Us’ in Marxism Today, then (still officially at least) the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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Understanding and Building on the Manifesto
The General Election result not only settles the question of the Labour leadership but also of the broad contours of the programme, at least in terms of social and economic policy, for the next election.
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Class Interests and Campaigning in 2017
Some insightful comparisons have been drawn in recent weeks between the Labour Party’s platform at the recent general election and their platform in 1983.
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No Time For Game Theory
"Credibility" is a sort of shadow-play in which sincerity is always understood to be instrumental, a token, something more or less successfully faked.
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Fantasy Politics
What happens when the most firmly held of common senses meet the hard reality of political transformation?
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Corbyn's Emerging Class Coalition
After the June 2017 General Election, can we see a new class coalition emerging?
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The Hegemon Crack'd
After the election result I couldn’t help being reminded of the classic TV show Columbo. It played out a little like that.
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The Stuplime Object of Ideology
It’s worth exploring precisely why there is, and will continue to be, a lingering anxiety about the trustworthiness of centrist détente.
