The lessons from France

France’s presidential election ended pretty much exactly how everyone predicted it would: the first round ended with the liberal Macron and the fascist Le Pen advancing to the run-off vote, which just ended with Macron emerging as the clear winner, albeit by a smaller margin of 58.5% to Le Pen’s 41.5%. While it is disappointing…

The degeneration of the “anti-imperialist” left and its consequences

Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, many of us in the left, myself included, were highly sceptical of the prospect that Russia might invade Ukraine to begin with. We had our reasons, but we turned out to be wrong. In the days and weeks since, we in the left have had to reconcile our…

Welcome back to the eighties, the real eighties that is

If you’ve ever hated the 21st century so much that you wished that everything would go back to the 1980s, congratulations you’re getting exactly what you wanted. Late capitalist society is regressing back to the 1980s, and I don’t simply mean in terms of aesthetics and legislated nostalgia. Beneath the neon facade, we are seeing…