Dec 1, 2012
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, December-January 2012-2013 As we approach the tenth anniversary of the global anti-war protest of February 15th, 2003, people are bound to ask what it actually achieved. Certainly it failed to stop the war, a failure for which Iraqis paid and are paying an exorbitant price. So was it a… Read more
Sep 25, 2012
[This is a companion piece to my upcoming column in Red Pepper, which chronicles the hopes and frustrations of the revolutionary year of 1792.] In the voluminous writings he composed during his eleven years imprisonment under the fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci repeatedly cites the aphorism, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (which he… Read more
Aug 1, 2012
Contending for the Living Red Pepper, August-September 2012 The word comes down to us from ancient Greece, where polis was used to describe the city-states that emerged in the sixth century BC. This polis was more than a community or concentration of individuals. It was a self-conscious unit of self-administration (independent of empires) and from… Read more
Feb 1, 2012
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, Feb-March 2012 2011 has been hailed in the media as a year of “protest” in the abstract, but it’s been more challenging and concrete than that. In defiance of received political wisdom, mass action in the streets returned with undeniable impact. Contests over space and the public domain became… Read more
Jun 1, 2011
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, June-July 2011 In 1818, Shelley visited his friend Byron in Venice, where his Lordship was camped out in a decaying palazzo, ruminating on the city’s faded glories. Their conversations – on human freedom and the prospects for social change – formed the basis for Shelley’s poem Julian and Maddalo,… Read more
Aug 1, 2010
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, August-September 2010 In Act IV Scene i of King Lear, the blinded, humbled, suicidal Earl of Gloucester hands his purse to the naked madman, ‘Poor Tom’ (actually Gloucester’s ill-used son, Edgar) and as he does so observes, “So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough.” Shakespeare’s… Read more
Dec 1, 2009
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, December-January Rolling back the new ‘common sense’ of spending cuts may seem like a difficult job, but it’s not impossible, says Mike Marqusee It’s now clear that cuts in public spending, and resistance to them, will be the stand-out issue in domestic British politics during the coming years. The… Read more
Sep 1, 2008
If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew by Mike Marqusee reviewed by Daniel Machover, Socialist Lawyer, September 2008 “a highly readable and engaging mix of biography, autobiography and political analysis…” This book tracks the life of the author’s grandfather, Edward V Morand (known in the book as EVM), a journalist, founder… Read more
Aug 1, 2008
[This essay was published in 2008 in A Time To Speak Out, the Independent Jewish Voices initiative published by Verso.] “Fear the Lord, my son, and the king, and with dissidents do not mingle.” (Proverbs 24, 21) The recent emergence of Jewish dissent on Israel has been met with fierce hostility by established Jewish organisations… Read more
