José Saramago 1922 - 2010
One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) - [...]

Book Review: Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2010)
Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a). The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in [...]

Last week’s podcast from Doug Henwood’s Behind the News (embedded below) is definitely worth listening to. The entire show is dedicated to a discussion of the financial crisis with the political economists Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch who are the co-authors of a new book In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial [...]

In the midst of one of history’s most severe crises of capitalism, there is no more apt time than the present to briefly survey the basics of Marxist economics. It would be beyond the scope of this short article to trace the development of the theory from the works of Marx up until the present [...]

Since the 1990s, anthropologists working in Ireland have increasingly concerned themselves with ideas of class and class relations. Previously, the central themes were rural life, community, kinship and social structure. In 1932 Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball undertook a two-year study of small communities in Co. Clare. The resultant publications, An Irish Countryman [...]

Ideologies are not issued self-developed and completed into the aether of the idea rather they are generated by the development of specific historic processes in the real world. Ideas are not primary but secondary reflections back into reality through the mediation of the mind. Material reality is primary in the evolution of thought just as [...]

One of the most encouraging signs in these days of a fractious, fractured Left is the success of a small number of websites devoted to fraternal discussion among socialists. These include Dave’s Part, Socialist Unity, and Liam MacUaid’s web page as well as at least one fan site.
This could surely be a momentous moment for [...]

This is the second progamme in the four-part series, Looking Left, which is being made for DCTV (The first in the series, on The Irish People is here). The topic on this occasion is The Ripening of Time, the political journal of the Ripening of Time Collective, thirteen issues of which were published between 1976 [...]