Giorgia Meloni speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference The greatest tragedy of the far-right’s victory in the Italian general election was its inevitability. Italian electoral law favours coalitions of parties. More than a third of Parliament is...
Red Pepper
Key words: Magical voluntarism
Image: Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Around a decade ago, Mark Fisher invoked the psychologist David Smail’s term ‘magical voluntarism’ to describe the trajectory of mental health discourse. This concept draws on the individualistic notion that we are all masters of our...
Preparing for the apocalypse the rational way
A help station run by the Common Ground Collective in the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans. The collective was founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to provide aid to provide aid to vulnerable communities in the absence of state assistance (Credit:...
Boris Johnson and loving our exes
Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary in Tokyo with an ASIMO robot (Credit: British Embassy Tokyo) When a senior politician is kicked out of office, something special can happen. If they play their cards right, they can become an Elder Statesperson through the magic of...
Time to shut down the education factory
The University and Colleges Union (UCU) has just achieved the first national mandate for an education union since the Trade Union Act 2016. In aggregated ballots on pay and conditions and separately on pensions, yes votes topped over 80% on turnouts of 57.8 per cent...
At a crossroads, Brazil looks left and right
Presidential candidates Lula (left, photo by Lula Marques) and Bolsonaro (right, photo by Isac Nóbrega) In the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, held at the start of this month, leftist candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva fell just short of the 50 per...
Black British history is much more than Windrush
At a Black Lives Matter protest in Surrey (photo by Martin Pettitt). This October marked the 35th year of Black History Month being observed in the UK. The brainchild of Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, a Ghanaian journalist and pan-Africanist, the month has become a time when we...
The apocalypse in popular culture
A shot from the 1984 film Threads (Credit: BBC Nine Network) In the mobile phone game Plague, Inc, players choose to be bacteria, fungi or bio-weapons and play as viral outbreaks. To ‘win’, they must evolve and proliferate. The game had enjoyed moderate popularity...
Latin America’s new ‘Pink Tide’
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaking to supporters following his victory in the 2022 Brazilian general election (Credit: Ricardo Stuckert) References to a Latin American left should come accompanied with an asterisk, as left-wing governments and movements...
Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women by Kristen Ghodsee – Review
From left to right: Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lyudmila Pavlichenko If the names Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Elena Lagadinova are unfamiliar to you, Kristen Ghodsee’s new book will provide an...
10 years after ‘the squares’
‘Democracia Real YA’ demonstration in Madrid on May 15, 2011. Photo by Olmo Calvo (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0) Giorgos Venizelos: More than 10 years have passed since the so-called movements of the squares were first observed. Their proliferation in...
#EndSARS: Two years since the massacre
EndSARS protestors in 2020. Photo credit: TobiJamesCandids On 4 October 2020, footage surfaced on social media showing officers of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) dragging two unarmed men from a hotel in Ughelli Delta state and shooting one dead outside. That...