As our new issue, ‘Facing the Future Again,’ is released, incoming Tribune editor Alex Niven argues that the time for disillusioned nitpicking is over — the Left must now stand in populist, militant, unified opposition to the surging far-right.
The rise of a new far-right Catalan nationalist party is a sinister development in European politics, showing how voters wearied by inequality and frustrated by failed devolution projects are seeking solace in blood-and-soil populism.
Recent clampdowns on protest under Starmer and Sunak extend a long-running war on the Left waged by the British state. Meanwhile, far-right forms of extremism are scandalously deemed low-risk ‘cultural nationalism’.
Keir Starmer’s media cheerleaders said he would replicate the quiet radicalism of Clement Attlee once in power. But one year into an inactive, often inaudible Labour administration, comparisons with the 1945 government seem absurd.
In the landscape of contemporary European politics, our rulers seem increasingly intent on walking us towards catastrophe — an ‘eyes wide shut’ approach that badly misremembers the cautionary tales of the twentieth century.
The cultural memory of the Second World War has long been used to serve the interests of British conservatism. But now that the long post-war compact is over, has its meaning evaporated completely?
The Right has co-opted historical common sense to sinister ends. In response, the Left must fight fire with fire by embracing its own radical traditions of collective story-making.
Though it has recently become a byword for reactionary nostalgia, the Second World War was in certain crucial ways an extension of the ‘Red Decade’ of the 1930s. A modern anti-fascist Left must reclaim this inheritance — and avoid its shortcomings.
Seventy years ago, the Congress of the People was broken up by apartheid police while discussing the Freedom Charter, a vision for a just society. The document remains a guide for building a free South Africa today, writes Mervyn Bennun, one of the meeting’s participants.
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the legacy of the Holocaust has been used to denigrate left anti-fascism and promote the interests of ethno-nationalist establishments. But we should remember who really killed the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ of the Second World War.
For many people who risked their lives to defeat Nazism, aiding the post-war movements against a dying but vicious colonialism was the next step in the fight to realise their anti-fascist ideals.
Visionary Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki anticipated our present malaise decades ago, in writing that combines melancholy for the failure of sixties radicalism with scepticism about a world of ubiquitous screens.