Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain’s greatest historians, died on 1 October aged 95, leaving behind him a considerable and varied body of writing. He was a lifelong communist but one whose views were trenchant, critical and never formulaic. His life in many ways mirrored the great events of the 20th century about which he wrote so well: the rise of imperialism, fascism and communism was as much part of his life ...

Economist Richard D. Wolff is known as a critic of capitalism, but lately he's been arguing for an alternative: cooperatives. August 11, 2012  | The economic crisis of the past five years has caused a lot of people around the world to question the very foundations of our system -- is capitalism really the best way to do things? One of the biggest problems, though, is that there seems to be no other way to r ...

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of.  If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history. The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropri ...

When times are good, and the world-economy is expanding in terms of new surplus-value produced, the class struggle is muted. It never goes away, but as long as there is a low level of unemployment and the real incomes of the lower strata are going up, even if only in small amounts, social compromise is the order of the day. ...

The Occupy movement built a global sense of community and put unprecedented inequality on the agenda. In an exclusive extract, the eminent US thinker asks where it goes now. This is the transcript of a discussion that took place earlier this year between Noam Chomsky and Occupy supporters Mikal Kamil and Ian Escuela for InterOccupy, an organisation that provides links between supporters of the Occupy moveme ...

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained ...

Actions such as those by the Occupy movements and UK Uncut provide transparency in an inherently unjust system. Oxford, UK - No one wants to sound naïve and over-excited. We much prefer to come across as worldly-wise and realistic. So it's always tempting to dismiss direct action. After all, we tell ourselves, politicians and their friends always end up doing what they want, no matter how loudly we protest. ...

Some of the most inspiring social struggles of 2011 have placed democracy at the top of the agenda. Although they emerge from very different conditions, these movements – from the insurrections of the Arab Spring to the union battles in Wisconsin, from the student protests in Chile to those in the US and Europe, from the UK riots to the occupations of the Spanish indignados and the Greeks in Syntagma Square ...

Social-democracy had its apogee in the period 1945 to the late 1960s. At that time, it represented an ideology and a movement that stood for the use of state resources to ensure some redistribution to the majority of the population in various concrete ways: expansion of educational and health facilities; guarantees of lifelong income levels by programs to support the needs of the non-”wage-employed” groups, ...

Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked ...