Channel 4’s Dirty Business shows why private companies cannot be trusted with vital services like water, says PAUL DONOVAN
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Government spending and debt: a new approach
Introducing a new paper from Rebuild Britain, FAWZI IBRAHIM argues that it is high time for the working class to drop the Labour Party as its vehicle for change, and take economic matters directly into its own hands
Washington’s unprecedented capture of the Venezuelan president was meant to demonstrate US power — but instead it has galvanised the Bolivarian movement and exposed the limits of the regime change agenda, argue ROGER D HARRIS and JOHN PERRY
With our ruling class struggling to secure a new vehicle for power and the disintegration of the traditional party system, a volatile new chapter is opening, sharpened by war, austerity and electoral distortion, argues NICK WRIGHT
TONY FOX reports from a commemoration of the legendary Battle of Jarama in which four Stockton-on-Tees volunteers fell
Does widespread and uncontrolled use of AI change our relationship with scientific meaning? Or with each other? ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The biggest strike in global history is a template for our future. The silence tells you all you need to know, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
IN his book, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin refers to imperialism as a “special stage,” “a very high stage of development,” “specific historical stage,” “the latest phase” and “the beginning of its transition to socialism.”
Imperialism, writes Lenin, is the stage of capitalism’s development in which “the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance.”
Rarely does he refer to it as the highest stage — but, given the title of the work, it has invariably been interpreted literally, that capitalism can evolve no further for it has reached its zenith.
Whether this is what Lenin intended is irrelevant, for this approach has permeated the communist movement and the left in general, yet it has little Marxist merit. It implies that once that stage is reached (which Lenin dates back to the early 20th century), time stands still, capitalism’s internal contradictions disappear and with them any further evolutionary development. But what happens to the socialist embryo that is born within capitalism? Does that cease to evolve as well?
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Hurricanes might have natural causes but the tragedy that follows is entirely human-made and a consequence of capitalist greed, asserts ROGER McKENZIE
As the ‘NRx movement’ plots to replace democracy with corporate-feudal dictatorship, Britain must pursue a radical alternative of local food security and genuine wealth redistribution to withstand the coming upheaval, writes ALAN SIMPSON
