Essays
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As the Floodwaters Rise: Survival on an Inundated Island
The effects of flooding are determined by regional and by class inequalities. As the state withdraws its from crucial functions, this imposes tasks for the left that are currently under-analysed.
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At the Base of a Pink-Green Tide
Could a growing wave of resistance across Latin America help to protect democracy and advance ecosocialist aims?
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Understanding Kisaan Andolan
An extended study of the historical and world-ecological context of the Farmers' Movement struggles.
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Red Apes
Histories of colonialism and extraction, told through their impacts on orangutans—and stories of red ape resistance.
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FALC and its Discontents
In a contemporary "expansionist" Marxism, luxury plays a central role, but it also remains underthought—particularly in its ecological implications. The "severe luxury" of William Morris has much to teach us.
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The Political Economy of the Ecocide Machine
The shortages of the pandemic revealed the physicality of a wide range of commodities. To ignore this physicality is to obfuscate capital's imperialist and ecocidal character.
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The Out of the Woods Mixtape
The Out of the Woods collective share some of their favourite music, with an accompanying essay exploring how these tracks relate to and shape our politics.
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Can environmental left populism work? The case of the West German Green Party
A left populism with a major green element has been advocated as a way to reconstitute the left and address ecological crisis. However, the experience of the German Greens points to the limits of this project.
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The Eco-Politics of the Sublime: Nature, Environmentalism, and Covid-Ecology
A conception of the sublime, liberated from its racist, sexist and domineering classic form, should form a part of any ecosocialist imaginary.
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The Tory 'Green Industrial Revolution'
The Government’s so-called Green Industrial Revolution is really a plan to subsidise the private sector in a period of low growth and dampened demand.
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Precedent Thinking in 2020s Britain
To think about the relationship between past and present in terms of 'precedent' can seem odd—but this structure of feeling has become central to how events are understood and represented in contemporary Britain.
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Stop Trying to Make Nuclear Power Happen
A number of eco-modernists are now arguing that the threat of climate crisis means that nuclear power is necessary. However, it remains wildly impractical, and at odds with any world we would like to build.
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Kitchen Cultures: Fermenting (with) the trouble
The cultural politics of fermentation, explored through recipes, theory, poetry, and stories.
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Agroecology and the Survival of Cuban Socialism
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was forced to embarked on an agroecological programme of food sovereignty. Now, it offers an example to the rest of the world.
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The Rio Cinema and the 1981-6 GLC
Much of the focus on the cultural politics of the GLC in the 1980s has been on flagship campaigns and events. The Rio Cinema tells a different story: the nurturing of a cultural ecology.
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Land and Life: Feudalism and Environmental Change in the Philippines
In the Philippines, the struggle against imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism is a precondition of any ecological sustainability.
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Writing, Aesthetics, Climate (A Bricolage)
How might we respond to Kate Soper's call for an avant-garde eco-socialist political imaginary? What is the time and space of the avant-garde?
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Red Vegans against Green Peasants
Calls to end animal agriculture and rewild much of the world are calls for the intensification of the exploitation of the rural by the urban, and the dispossession of peasants, small farmers, herders and nomads.
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Unskilled Work?
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.
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Introducing Raymond Williams
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.
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Socialists and Coalitionists
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.
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Another Nightingale: Coronavirus, Plague and the Colonial Violence of British Neglect
The disproportionate destruction of racialised communities through Covid-19 is the continuation of the colonial violence of which Florence Nightingale was a part.
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Riot Redactions, Colonial Reverberations
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.
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Bad New Times: Transfeminism and solidarity for the new decade
Socialist transfeminist proposals offer a challenge to the ever-increasing backlash against trans people.
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The Guilty Men Thesis and Labour’s Route to Power
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.
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The continuation of policing by other means? Extending abolitionist critiques to the mental health system
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.
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Stalemate in Chile: Reflections on the Ongoing Revolt
Chile wants a revolution but a mixture of the effects of the Coronavirus crisis and an inequality of force has, so far, blocked it.
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No Space for Us? Race and the Labour Leadership
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.
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‘Come 2 the park and play with us!’: Prince, acid communism, and sociality
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.
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The Coronavirus Crisis Response in the EU
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.
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The First New Socialist
The original New Socialist aimed “to renew democratic socialism” by engineering a broad political coalition. How successful was it?
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Left Economics from Below? Defending the Programme after Corbyn
Only a participatory socialist approach can make good on the potential of the Corbyn-McDonnell economic programme.
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Country, City, Quarantine
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.
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