Book Review: In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo (PM Press, May 2010) & The Enigma of Capital And the Crises of Capitalism, David Harvey (Profile Books, April 2010)
I’ve always found the economic side of Marxism to be a bit of a chore, [...]

Book Review: Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia before and after Suharto, Verso, 2008
There was a time when everyone seemed to be talking about Indonesia. Well, they were talking about it on Joe Duffy and Pat Kenny at least, and that’s as near as makes no difference in this country. As East Timor voted to extricate [...]

Socialist Register 2010 - Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism (Merlin Press) Ed: Leo Panitch & Colin Leys.
There’s been some excellent work published on the many faults of the Irish health service by campaigning journalists like Sara Burke and Maev-Ann Wren. For those who want to put the debates about Irish healthcare in an international context, [...]

When the world financial system looked as if it might collapse in the autumn of 2008, many people assumed that there would have to be drastic changes in the wake of the crisis. Nothing would ever be the same again: the neoliberal philosophy which had spawned the financial meltdown was now irreparably damaged, and a [...]

The following is an extract from the ISN pamphlet A Force for Progress? Five Myths About the European Union. which was launched earlier on this week by Harry Browne at Connolly Books.
The European Union has divided opinion on the Left. Some people see it as a bulwark against the power of multi-national corporations that [...]

The Left has often been accused of not understanding economics properly. So it’s been no small pleasure over the last year to see the guardians of neo-liberal orthodoxy thrashing around helplessly in a bid to explain the financial meltdown, while radical critics like David Harvey and Robert Brenner have provided by far the best guide [...]

Book Review: Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power

A country in crisis
Everything seems to be “on the brink” or “standing at the crossroads” in world politics these days. But Pakistan surely has done enough to earn every cliché in the book: as the country passes its sixtieth anniversary, it [...]

In the second pamphlet on Italy from the archives of the Irish Socialist Network, which I’m republishing here to coincide with the two recent Perry Anderson essays on the Italian centre right and its ‘invertebrate left‘, the story goes back to the rise of the left in Italy towards the end of the Second World [...]

In two superb essays published in the London Review of Books recently, Perry Anderson describes the politics of Italy’s Second Republic in the context of the consolidation of power by Silvio Berlusconi and the recent history of the Italian Left, respectively. These are worth reading by anyone interested in politics and contempory European history in [...]

A system in crisis
There were two remarkable things about the Lisbon Treaty referendum that have been almost completely ignored by the men and women whose job it is to chew over Irish politics on a daily basis. First of all, the result showed that Irish citizens have no confidence in the people they vote for. [...]