Issue 25
Drawing the Poison
Politics
The Free State’s Fascists
Although fascism has traditionally held little sway over the Irish people, it is a century-old movement — and one experiencing a well-funded renaissance.
The Economics of Despair
Of the ten most deprived areas of Britain, seven saw far-right pogroms this summer. Any attempt to counter the rise of fascism must start with reckoning with and stamping out the system which spawned it.
The New Enemy at the Top Table
Last decade, the philosopher G. M. Tamás saw the new European far right as ‘post-fascist’: a movement that fights for no real change, raises national passions, humiliates the vulnerable, and is utterly comfortable with globalisation’s grim realities.
As I Please
As Reform UK soars in the polls and Muslim communities come under attack, Starmer’s Labour remains alarmingly complacent about undermining what gives the far right an advantage.
The Sad Oracle
His chronicles of liberal discontent have made Michel Houellebecq one of the most renowned writers of the century as well as a far-right prophet. Yet liberalism’s fiercest critic still hasn’t found his alternative future.
The Kids Are Not Alright
From monarchism to eco-fascism, internet subcultures have given rise to a new generation of ‘e-deologies’. But what — if anything — do these online movements hold for the future of the Right?
Features
The Death of Die Linke
Once a leading light of the European left, a series of crushing splits have seen Die Linke’s support base crash out and turn to the far right. Its demise is a warning for socialist parties everywhere.
Musk Versus Brazil
After X refused to remove profiles inciting political violence, Lula’s government banned the platform, forcing its billionaire owner into a humiliating retreat — and providing a rare victory against Big Tech’s apparently inescapable power.
Keeping the Wolves at Bay
After right-wing nationalists in Bolivia seized power in 2019, a mass movement restored the country’s socialist government — proof that it isn’t elites that protect democracy, but organised workers.
History
Remembering the Black People’s Day of Action
Following the killing of thirteen black youths in a suspected far-right arson attack, Britain’s black population formed an unprecedented movement to confront the institutional racism of the police and the media.
Tribune and the Civil Rights Struggle
In Martin Luther King’s era, Tribune provided an important platform to the civil rights movement in both Britain and the US, cementing the publication’s beliefs that racial justice was inseparable from the struggle for socialism.
Culture
Goodlord’s Rent Horror
In a novel that takes the form of a long email to an estate agent, poet Ella Frears explores the housing crisis through the abstract and automated technology of an increasingly widespread online lettings platform.
Nurturing Acts
Is motherhood political? In a new book, Helen Charman examines how politics in Britain and the north of Ireland have been defined by motherhood as a state of radical possibility.
Insurrectionary Cell
The short-lived but lore-heavy career of early 1980s northern synth-pop duo Soft Cell is catalogued and reappraised in a compelling new oral history, from working-class 1970s Leeds to the excesses of downtown New York City in the 1980s.
The Funny Money of Weimar Germany
Notgeld was the money issued locally in Germany during the First World War and the tumultuous interwar period. What do these strange and experimental artefacts reveal about art and money?