How did you become involved in music and politics? Growing up in Chicago and then Detroit and Oakland, my family were all interested in radical organising, so I was a political organiser from the age of about 14 and 15. At that time my musical inspiration was Prince, when everyone else in my school was...
by Judge Red, Dave Renton In every city in Britain, this Christmas will see more people sleeping rough than at any time since the 1980s. Officially, street homelessness is increasing by just under 10 percent. That figure is almost certainly an underestimate.
Lord Heseltine's recent report on economic growth is no help for working class people - but it shows how the state props up the private sector, writes Jack Farmer
Miriyam Aouragh reports from Nablus in the West Bank, where Israel's assault on Gaza provoked a new upsurge of protest and has further isolated the Palestinian Authority
There is intense planning under capitalism, but it is done to maximise profit Planning under socialism would be driven from the bottom up based on mass participation and democracy For many people the words socialist and planning in the same sentence will conjure up images of Stalinist horror: brutal five year plans, inefficiency and waste....
The weekend running up to 20 October was a calamitous one for the Tories. It began when their chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, was forced to resign in the wake of the “plebgate” scandal, and things went downhill from there. Mitchell was accused of swearing at a police officer outside Downing Street, telling him to remember...
Spreading the pain The economic crisis is having a more pronounced and more protracted impact on living standards than either the recession of the early 1980s or that of early 1990s. The Office for National Statistics estimated that average living standards have fallen by 13.2 percent since the start of 2008 as measured by net...
During the culmination of the American presidential debates the world bore witness to a bizarre, but revealing, foreign policy battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Who would befriend Israel more? Who would better defeat “the terrorists”? Who would impose the most crippling sanctions on Iran? Writing in the Guardian the following day, Gary Younge...
At Labour's annual conference Ed Miliband claimed his party could unite Britain as "one nation". Mark L Thomas looks at the reality of Labour's arguments for a responsible capitalism
Spain has seen increasing calls for independence for Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, alongside strikes and protests. Joel Sans Molas argues that economic turmoil and austerity are creating the biggest political crisis in the country since the overthrow of Franco's regime 35 years ago
The controversy about Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses in 1989 revealed the hypocrisy of the ruling class and stoked Islamophobia. But, argues Gareth Jenkins, Rushdie's new memoir reveals someone who has travelled a long way from his former identification with the oppressed
