Karl Marx famously wrote that "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie".
Has there ever been a government with as great a death wish as this one?
After a week dominated by Barack Obama’s consecration at the Democratic convention in Denver, his Republican rival has succeeded brilliantly in upstaging him.
Now that the dust is beginning to settle, what are the long term consequences of the war between Russia and Georgia?
British politicians love playing Winston Churchill. Tory leader David Cameron was at it last week when he flew to Georgia. According to the Guardian, Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili invited him after he compared the situation there to "the appeasement of Hitler".
I find the Olympics irritating at the best of times. Two weeks of corporate-sponsored flag-waving in honour of a bunch of muscle-bound dullards is not my cup of tea.
"So are we all Tories now?" asked the lead article in the Observer Review last Sunday.
Gordon Brown often seeks refuge from a disastrous domestic scene by banging on about the Doha round of international talks on trade liberalisation.
Any illusion that the end is in sight for the global economic crisis has now vanished. One cheerleader for world capitalism, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, recently admitted, "It has, in all likelihood, not even passed the end of its beginning."
"The worst is over in the financial crisis or will be very soon." This is what Alan Greenspan, former head of the US central bank, said back in May.
I was fifteen in November 1965, when the racist regime of Ian Smith illegally declared Zimbabwe – or the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, as it then was – independent of Britain. My family lived in the capital city, Salisbury, today called Harare.
How big a threat is fascism today? For many, even on the left, it belongs to the first half of the 20th century, the "age of the dictators". It has nothing to do with the era of neoliberalism, globalisation, and the internet.
