Editorial

Blair tries his best to avoid being remembered as Bush’s ‘poodle’, but his low popularity ratings reveal that Iraq will be his legacy. The war that was launched on lies about WMD but was really about oil and the containment of China will be what he is remembered for.

 

Britain

Alan Thornett looks at Blair’s Britain after ten years of a new Labour government.

 

Venezuela

Some provisional lessons from Venezuela

The tension at the heart of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, there for several years, has come to the forefront in recent months, since Hugo Chavez’ re-election as president in December 2006. Here Stuart Piper discusses the tension between the revolution’s anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist achievements – which are undeniable – and its socialist promise – which remains just that, a promise.

 

Venezuela

Venezuelan socialist feminist Jessie Blanco asks searching questions about Chávez’s ‘Socialism of the 21st century’.

 

Climate Change

Roy Wilkes argues that we need dialectical theory to understand the processes of global warming underway.

 

Climate Change

Belgian environmentalist, Daniel Tanuro, argues that the dependence on the market proposed by the Stern Report as a solution to climate change can only lead to a cul-de-sac. To escape without a blood bath or an ecological disaster, there is only one way: to break with the logic of the market.

 

Climate Change

NUT member and conference delegate Roy Wilkes looks at the way climate change is dividing the left.

 

Ireland

The Civil Rights Movement

In the last issue of Socialist Outlook, James Healy looked at the struggle for Irish independence and its relation to the fight for socialism in the 1910s and 20s. Here he discusses the struggle in the late 1960s and early 70s, focusing on the different strategies employed by political groupings in the North.

 

History

There have been many articles in the left press and the media on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Here David Packer analyses the forces that led to its abolition and subsequently the slave mode of production itself in the New World.

 

Review

By Michael A. Lebowitz, 2nd Edition, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Canadian Marxist, Michael Lebowitz’s book, first published in 1992 seeks to rectify what he sees as the ‘one-sidedness’ of Marx’s analysis of capital.

 

Letters

James Haywood expresses a few concerns that came to mind whilst reading the previous Outlook’s articles on ‘Ecosocialism’.