Tom Gann, The Editors

What are 'bad new times'? What do they mean for New Socialist?

The Editors

Keeping our comrades up to date with New Socialist.

Adam Blanden

Johnsonism’s response to coronavirus aims to reconfigure state-capital relations, both in guaranteeing private sector activity, and in extending the commodification of social reproduction.

Tom Gann

No election can be won without significant support from within the popular classes. Johnsonism represents the hegemony of the most reactionary fractions of capital because of their capacity to command this support.

Rhian E. Jones

Boris Johnson enthusiastically embraces a style of politics of a pre-democratic age, and repurposes it for an increasingly post-democratic one.

Sabrina Huck

Johnsonism has created its own national populist electoral coalition. It now aims to maintain this through the “levelling up” agenda.

Tom Gann, Rhian E. Jones, Adam Blanden, Sabrina Huck

What can we learn from Johnson’s spell as Mayor of London? What are the ruling class strategies of the Johnson project? How does it stand in an international context?

Mary Robertson

Only a participatory socialist approach can make good on the potential of the Corbyn-McDonnell economic programme.

Mediocre Dave

Making claims for better pay or greater respect through skill is dangerous. Celebrating people’s aptitude for work that exploits them is a misplaced form of solidarity.

Daniel Frost

The original New Socialist aimed “to renew democratic socialism” by engineering a broad political coalition. How successful was it?

Tom Gann

In the 1980s Raymond Williams was the thinker of the relation between the conjunctural and the organic. This grounded his position on electoral and political strategy.

Raymond Williams

The advocates of coalition politics, whether big (anti-Tory) or small (labourist), have abandoned the struggle to transform belief and opinion. Opposing both coalitions is necessary for socialist renewal.

Charlie Ebert

Chile wants a revolution but a mixture of the effects of the Coronavirus crisis and an inequality of force has, so far, blocked it.

Alex Benham

The disproportionate destruction of racialised communities through Covid-19 is the continuation of the colonial violence of which Florence Nightingale was a part.

James Trafford

Uprisings reveal policing including that of the British state as not only domination, exclusion and hierarchical ordering but grounded in an originary war and the unpoliceability of colonial subjects.

Sylv M

Socialist transfeminist proposals offer a challenge to the ever-increasing backlash against trans people.

Zaynah

The Labour leadership contest and Starmer’s early leadership represent a return to normality for Labour – a normality in which the votes of Black and Brown people are taken for granted.

Paul Ewart

Labour victory in 2025 will require a break with the common sense of the post-1979 era. We need a new Guilty Men thesis to enable that rupture.

Steffan Blayney

If we are to think about alternatives to policing and prisons, we must also think critically about the mental health system’s own relationships to structures of institutional racism, violence, and the state.

josie sparrow

What do horseshoe crabs, COVID-19, Stonehenge, ticks, and Kirstie Allsopp have in common? They all have a part to play in the story of how capital produces nature.

Toby Manning

In expressing joy in the social, creating lived utopias beyond the family, and destabilising normality, Prince is a key example and practitioner of acid communism.

Adam Blanden

The Coronavirus crisis has seen a return to the familiar EU deadlocks. This can best be understood through how the EU represents and organises (and disorganises) class fractions.

Kate Flood

In her first organising column, Kate Flood takes us through the bread and butter of working class unity: building the union!

M Tetrapod

The capitalist state is attempting to use the Covid-19 crisis in schools to push narrow, traditionalist pedagogy and enrich their friends. Educators must articulate radical new futures.

The Editors

We asked for responses on radical organising in response to Coronavirus. Next, we're asking for responses on London-centricity.

Jude Wanga

Jude Wanga discusses class, growing up in Hertfordshire, Petrarch, breaking America, Britney and more with the lead singer of the Subways.

Tom Knightwell

Searching for homo-authenticus, discussing immigration, Orwell, and gentrification.

Jack Frayne-Reid

The Coronavirus outbreak may have sidelined Dylan as a touring musician, but it has also seen the release of his first new work as a songwriter since 2012, “Murder Most Foul”.

Christiana Spens

Iconoclasm has played a crucial role British history (and in the struggle against the British and its history). Colston is only the latest instance.

Jude Wanga

Pressure from Black footballers as workers forced a significant symbolic shift in the acknowledgment of racism. However, there remains much to do in a wider context that is becoming ever more embittered.

Sanaa Qureshi

The macro failings of the state, the shortcomings of institutional society and the bigotries of the populace crystallise in the way footballers have been treated during the pandemic.

Tom Gann, josie sparrow

Tom and josie consider the relationship between Zheng Chaolin’s life, his politics, and his poetry.

Zheng Chaolin

A poem by Zheng Chaolin, with extended notes by translator and compiler Gregor Benton.

Zheng Chaolin

Zheng Chaolin's poem of 1984, taken from the Verso collection 'Poets of the Chinese Revolution', with notes by Gregor Benton.

Tom Gann, Wendy Liu

Wendy Liu discusses her political journey from ardent Silicon Valley Kool Aid drinker to scathing critic of the entire industry (and capitalism), as documented in her new book 'Abolish Silicon Valley'.

Frankie Miren

'Burn it Down' documents the fundamental optimism of feminist movements; the belief that things can change.

Nikhil Venkatesh

Socialists should be worried about surveillance capitalism not because it is an unprecedented economic form, but because it exploits and alienates in ways similar to 19th century industrial capitalism.

Nicole Froio and Constanza Marambio

How can we think about political relations between women? Can intimacy be a radical act? A recent book aims to examine these questions.

josie sparrow

A review of Lola Olufemi’s 'Feminism, Interrupted' and Alison Phipps’s 'Me, Not You'.

Cyn Awori Othieno & Annette Davis

An archive of French Afrofeminist thought and organising, a tradition which dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Daniel Baker, Daniel Finn

Throughout the conflict, the IRA’s military capacity and significant, but not decisive, support in working class Catholic communities gave it a power of negative veto but little chance of outright victory.