Barack Obama’s administration is starting to put itself about internationally. Having stayed away from the World Economic Forum in Davos, the US sent a high-powered delegation headed by Vice-President Joe Biden to the Munich security conference the weekend before last.
Sometimes the really important social conflicts between exploiter and exploited find expression by distorted means, via conflicts among the exploiters themselves.
The conventional view is that Barack Obama’s presidency is going to struggle with the contradiction between the huge expectations invested in him and the glum realities of office. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.
So what is Israel trying to achieve with its assault on Gaza? And what role is being played by the US and its outgoing and incoming presidents?
How should socialists react to the immense furore over the police arrest of Tory frontbencher Damian Green and search of his parliamentary office and home?
The parallels between the present crisis and the 1930s are growing. Summing up the steep falls in financial markets, last Saturday’s Financial Times said, "All this is consistent with the fear that the world is heading for a true depression, that will at least bear comparison with that of the 1930s."
You would have had to be very naive to believe that the G20 meeting in Washington last weekend would really mark, as Gordon Brown put it, "the birth pangs of this new global order" demanded by the world economic crisis.
The surest thing to emerge from Labour’s surprise victory last week in the Glenrothes by-election is that Alex Salmond doesn’t walk on water any more. The leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and first minister of Scotland has dominated politics north of the border for the past few years.
Neoliberalism is for mugs. This has turned out to be one of the main lessons of the present economic crisis.
There have been a flood of pieces in the international press recently about how the financial crash has meant Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes – reduced to intellectual pariahs in the heyday of neoliberalism – are back in fashion.
The crash of 2008 is forcing governments to make previously unimaginable inroads into the private sector. Pumping capital into the banks by partly nationalising them – the key measure announced by the New Labour government in Britain last week – looks set to spread to the US and Europe.
Initially many establishment figures in continental Europe thought they could ride the global financial crisis out. This was, they said, a problem generated by "Anglo-Saxon" free market capitalism that had nothing to do with the well-regulated economies of the euro-zone.
