The trouble with ethnicity

The concept of exploitation is central to the Marxist understanding of history and contemporary society. But not all social conflicts can be immediately reduced to the struggle between exploiters and exploited, and to explain these conflicts we require other concepts. The most important is that of oppression. This refers to systematic discrimination by one social group against another on the grounds of characteristics either inherited (skin colour, gender) or socially acquired (religious belief, sexual orientation). The experience of oppression cuts across class lines, although that experience is more or less severe depending on where its victims are placed within the class structure. Some forms, like the oppression of women, have persisted throughout the existence of class society, while others, like racism, are specific to capitalism alone. Sometimes the reasons, or pretexts, for the oppression of a group may change over time. During the feudal era, for example, Jewish people were persecuted for their religious beliefs, but as capitalism developed persecution increasingly took place on the grounds of their supposed race. Whatever the reason or pretext, however, ruling classes throughout history have instigated or endorsed the oppression of different groups in order to maintain or create divisions amongst those over whom they rule. Recently, groups have increasingly been subjected to oppression on the grounds of their ethnicity. The most extreme form of such oppression has become known as 'ethnic cleansing'

Realism, modernism, and the spectre of Trotsky, part 1: Lukács

No abstract available

Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840. By Peter M. Jones (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016) 268 pp. $100.00

No abstract available

Realism, modernism, and the spectre of Trotsky, part 2: Greenberg

No abstract available

Neoliberal Scotland: Class and Society in a Stateless Nation - Introduction

Readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories will be familiar with the dialogue in "Silver Blaze" concerning the curious incident of the dog in the night time. The famous exchange between Inspector Gregory and the great detective, on which the plot of the story turns, concerns an episode in which a dog might have been expected to bark, but did not. Similarly, academics based in Scotland, particularly the minority who also act as public intellectuals, might have been expected to analyse the effects of neoliberalism in that country. Such expectations have, however, been disappointed-and not because the advance of neoliberalism was halted at the Tweed. Given the exceptional extent to which Scotland is integrated into the capitalist world economy, such a miraculous deliverance was never very likely, whatever the wishes of local politicians and state managers-and these groups have, of course, been far from resistant to the new dispensation. The UK, along with the USA, was one of the first sites for the neoliberal experiment in socio-economic engineering. Indeed, one of the flagship policies of the second phase of British neoliberalism, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), was launched in Scotland from 1995 with the construction and commercial operation of the Skye Road Bridge. As part of the British state, Scotland has experienced, and continues to experience, the effect of these policies to the same extent as the rest of the UK, with only minor variations since the establishment of devolved government in 1999. Indeed, in many respects, the application of neoliberalism actually became even more extensive under the Labour and Liberal Democrat governments than it had under their Conservative predecessors, and this has yet to be addressed, other than at the margins, by their minority Scottish National Party (SNP) successor. Yet only with the onset of a new period of capitalist crisis in 2007-08 did commentators outside of the radical left apparently notice that Scotland has been subject to the same neoliberal regime as the rest of the world, and even now it is journalists rather than academics who show the greatest awareness of this fact

Centuries of transition

This review of Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages situates the book within the context of his earlier writings on the transition to feudalism, and contrasts his explanation for and dating of the process with those of the two main opposing positions set out in Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Guy Bois's The Transformation of the Year One Thousand (1989). Although Framing modifies some of Wickham's earlier positions, it largely sidesteps explicit theoretical discussion for a compellingly detailed empirical study which extends to almost the entire territorial extent of the former Roman Empire. The review focuses on three main themes raised by Wickham's important work: the existence or otherwise of a `peasant'-mode of production and its relationship to the `Asiatic' mode; the nature of state-formation and the question of when a state can be said to have come into existence; and the rôle of different types of class-struggle - slave-rebellions, tax-revolts and peasant-uprisings - in establishing the feudal system

In perspective: Tom Nairn

The 1960s saw an upsurge of separatist nationalisms at the core of the capitalist system, with the movements in Catalonia, Eskudai, Occitania, Quebec, Scotland, Wallonia and Wales all making their first serious impact during that decade. Nationalist demands went on to play a role-—although by no means the most important role--in the social upheavals which shook the capitalist system between 1968 and 1976. And although none of them succeeded in establishing new states, several--Catalonia, Quebec and, more recently, Scotland--gained a significant degree of formal autonomy within the state framework of the dominant nation. These events inspired a number of important studies of nationalism, the majority of which appeared in two clusters. The first appeared between 1977 and 1982 and the second between 1989 and 1992, following a further and, in terms of establishing new states, more successful revival of nationalist aspiration in Eastern Europe. Whatever criticisms might be levelled at these works the best have nevertheless helped to advance our understanding of the phenomenon in important, if partial, ways. Only a minority of these studies approached the question from an avowedly Marxist perspective. One of them was by the Scottish writer Tom Nairn, who is regarded by many as the foremost modern theoretician of the subject

Realism, modernism, and the spectre of Trotsky, part 2: Greenberg

No abstract available

Nations and neoliberalism

This paper examines nations and neoliberalism

Uneven and combined development: modernity, modernism, revolution

Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development was born out of his experience of the Russian Revolution. To mark the centenary of the revolution, we are publishing a series of five pieces by Neil Davidson that explore the theory’s wider contribution to how we understand capitalist modernity. These articles show how ideas that began life in the revolution continue to inspire new ways of grasping the world, and that we are very much engaging in a living 21st century world when reflecting on the previous century. The series published here are extracts of his forthcoming book Violating all the Laws of History that will be published in the Haymarket Historical Materialism series in 2018