Book Review: Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the state: experiments in popular democracy. London / New York / Calcutta: Seagull (2nd edition - 2009).
A new book by Hilary Wainwright is usually a significant event: Beyond the Fragments (with Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal, 1979), Arguments for a New Left (1994) and the first edition of Reclaim the [...]

On Europe’s northwestern fringes there are two small countries, each with populations of 4-5 million, and an economic background of small farming and fishing, with large-scale emigration in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, independence in the early twentieth century from a larger and more powerful neighbour [...]

Like its predecessor, 19th century robber-baron capitalism, disorganised capitalism knocks the stool out from under the formal representation of social movements in parliaments. Perhaps it would be better to state this in reverse: organised capitalism created the relatively brief conditions within which social movements (in particular the workers’ movement) could find a relatively stable presence [...]

The following preface and introduction are taken from a report, The Norwegian Oil Experience: A toolbox for managing resources?, which is being published in English here for the first time.
Translator’s Preface
The discovery of oil and gas, like other mineral resources, is often a curse rather than a blessing. For many societies around the world it [...]

I’ve written about this issue here before, but some things deserve a second comment.
At the moment we have the combination (in Ireland as in several other northern countries) of an economic austerity package, an unpopular government tied to neoliberal economic policies more broadly, an ineffectual mainstream left pledged to the same basic [...]

This article is an edited version of a presentation I gave at the “Equality in a time of crisis” conference organised by the Egalitarian World Initiative and the UCD School of Social Justice (May 6 - 7).
View as a PDF (select Save As to download)
Introduction: youthful mistakes
I was asked to talk for this paper about [...]