Last year, India’s powerful farmer movement thwarted Narendra Modi’s plans to win an electoral supermajority. A communist leader of their movement explains how they’re turning the tide on the reactionary BJP.
Grace Blakeley
The Saving Standards Scramble
In the coming years, climate breakdown will ravage the global food systems on which we depend, ushering in a new era of political instability.
Ella Glover
Cooking on the Breadline
The British food industry leaves thousands of those who feed us too poor to feed themselves — this is why many food workers are pressing back against low pay and exploitation.
Chris McLaughlin
The Afterparty
Ejected and dejected, Britain’s fragmented left is exploring the possibility of a new political party. The odds are against a socialist alternative to Labour — but Keir Starmer’s leadership may be shifting them.
Features
Owen Hatherley
Socialism at the Milk Bar
The authoritarian socialist regimes of the twentieth century tried to rescue people from ‘kitchen slavery’ through communal eateries. In Poland, they survive and thrive.
Hugh Corcoran
Imagining the Progressive Restaurant
In a country where so many people live increasingly lonely, bland, and digitised lives, food institutions can — and should — be bodies that place communal enjoyment before the whims of consumerism.
Katya Schwenk
Fries and a Shakedown
After decades of consolidation, just four firms now control at least 97% of a frozen potato market worth over $68 billion — and a new spate of legal cases are accusing them of price-fixing.
History
Diarmaid Kelliher
Feeding the Flames
More than simply keeping picket lines going, providing food to workers in dispute is a form of collectivism that has shaped the trade union movement.
Francesca Newton
The Revolt of the Housewives
In 1795, English women facing starvation organised to seize food supplies and distribute them for an honest price — making the case for a system that placed community need above individual profit.
Marcus Barnett
A Gut Radical
From popularising peoples’ history to crusading for ordinary people’s access to good food and wine, Raymond Postgate’s socialism was about the full enrichment of life for all.
Mark Seddon
The Left’s Cafeteria
For decades, The Gay Hussar was the Labour Left’s integral Soho spot for organising, gossip, and goulash, remembers Mark Seddon.
Culture
Juliet Jacques
Museum Without Objects
The ‘universal museum’ is a product of Enlightenment thinking, with museums such as the Louvre cast in an increasingly ludicrous position as guardians of global heritage. But is there another way?
Huw Lemmey
Communism’s Forgotten Radicals
A new book traces a group of forgotten militants whose disparate lives collided in 1920s Moscow, culminating in a queer love story against the backdrop of the nascent communist state.
Alex Niven
In With the In Crowd
The Left tends to celebrate the crowd only in limited and conditional ways. A new book by Dan Hancox aims to reclaim the mass gathering for the 2020s.
Hannah Proctor
To the Lifehouse
A new book rediscovers lessons from Black Panther survival programmes, solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece and the Occupy Sandy disaster relief efforts — and asks whether impending climate catastrophe means we should stop waiting and start doing.
