After Captain Tom
The cultural memory of the Second World War has long been used to serve the interests of British conservatism. But now that the long post-war compact is over, has its meaning evaporated completely?
4336 Articles by:
Raven Hart
Raven Hart is co-founder of the Bristol Cooperative Alliance, an organisation that aims to promote a decentralised economy that empowers local communities and facilitates democratic self-determination.
Revolutionary Nostalgia
The Right has co-opted historical common sense to sinister ends. In response, the Left must fight fire with fire by embracing its own radical traditions of collective story-making.
Reclaiming the People’s War
Though it has recently become a byword for reactionary nostalgia, the Second World War was in certain crucial ways an extension of the ‘Red Decade’ of the 1930s. A modern anti-fascist Left must reclaim this inheritance — and avoid its shortcomings.
To Still Speak of Freedom
Seventy years ago, the Congress of the People was broken up by apartheid police while discussing the Freedom Charter, a vision for a just society. The document remains a guide for building a free South Africa today, writes Mervyn Bennun, one of the meeting’s participants.
Airbrushing the Ghettoes
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the legacy of the Holocaust has been used to denigrate left anti-fascism and promote the interests of ethno-nationalist establishments. But we should remember who really killed the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ of the Second World War.
Partisans of the World
For many people who risked their lives to defeat Nazism, aiding the post-war movements against a dying but vicious colonialism was the next step in the fight to realise their anti-fascist ideals.
Acid Japonisme
Visionary Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki anticipated our present malaise decades ago, in writing that combines melancholy for the failure of sixties radicalism with scepticism about a world of ubiquitous screens.
Party Poetics
The new poetry collection by London writer Caleb Femi is a modern epic based on the institution of the ‘shoobs’ (or house party) and its under-explored experimental potential.
Black Britain Beyond the Capital
British publishing has been slow to document black British stories outside of the capital. A new book, taking a road trip around the UK during the Thatcher years, sets the record straight.
Erik Satie for the People
The elusive French composer is the subject of a freewheeling new Ian Penman book and an intense, eighteen-hour performance directed by Marina Abramovic. How seriously should we take their versions of the Satie myth?
Fiddling While Rome Burns
A new book about Trump’s 2024 election victory is a profoundly unsettling account of the Democratic Party machinery’s refusal to respect their own voters or offer any answers to America’s problems beyond maintaining the status quo.
Tony Benn’s Ongoing Relevance
A new anthology of Tony Benn’s writings and speeches highlights the radical democratic instincts and internationalist vision that have helped define British socialism this century.
Baggins of Downing Street
In delivering his toxic ‘Island of Strangers’ speech on immigration earlier this week, Keir Starmer aligned with a bizarre conservative tendency inspired in equal measure by Enoch Powell and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Landlords Never Really Die
Since its publication last year, Nick Bano’s book ‘Against Landlords’ has generated much debate about the housing crisis — and laid the ground for a new trend in left publishing.
Britain Must Stop Arms to Israel Now
As a High Court case seeking to block sale of British munitions used by Israel in Gaza begins, one of the campaigners involved — former UN Assistant Secretary-General Andrew Gilmour — argues that Britain’s role in the process must end immediately.
Israeli Settlers are Erasing the West Bank
Louis Theroux’s recent documentary about settler violence in the West Bank drew attention to the plight of the region — but in the Hebron Hills, where Palestinians and Jewish activists face settler devastation, the reality is even more shocking.
The Forgotten Feminism of Amber Films
The subversive and sensitive output of the North East feminist film collective sought to document glamour and grace in working-class life. So why is their work absent from conventional histories?
VE Day at 80: Antifascism is Ours
As we mark the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism in Europe, the radical antifascist legacy of the Second World War is in danger of being forgotten. For the sake of survival, we can’t let that happen.
A Murky Clarity
Politicians’ pronouncements that last month’s Supreme Court judgement ‘clarifies’ sex and gender feeds into a wider right-wing narrative that the Left is in denial about the truth of human nature — and that hostility to minorities is the only way to deal with reality.
Not Just Where, But How We Live
In the year of the Renters’ Rights Bill, how should the tenants movement respond to changing ideas around how the current housing crisis is exacerbated by patriarchal and capitalist notions?