Editorial

The new year brings threats of recession leading to austerity and unemployment for ordinary people. Combined with hikes in energy prices, rises in the cost of food and petrol, the poor and vulnerable will be the first to pay for the so-called ‘bumpy ride’ predicted for the world economy in 2008.

 

Britain

With the first bank run in Britain for over a century and the threat of a sharp slowdown in the housing market questions of the economy are at the forefront of media and political discussion. Yet these surface phenomena mask a deeper set of problems that arise both from the international context and from the development of British capitalism over recent years. Here Andy Kilmister analyses these problems and initiates a broader discussion about economic prospects in the coming period.

 

Britain

David Packer looks at the recent events in Respect and at the role of revolutionaries

 

Climate Change

In the last issue of Socialist Outlook, Phil Ward outlined how, after a 10-year lull, establishment figures are again raising the issue of (enforced) population control as a means of tackling the environmental crisis. Now the focus is on climate change, with a pinch of anti-immigrant racism just to spice up the mix.

 

Climate Change

The notion of the ‘photosynthetic ceiling’ is all the rage in environmental circles. It is the idea that humanity will consume an increasingly large and disproportionate amount of the photosynthetic capacity of the Earth, to the point where in the short term it would use it all up. Although based on the results of research published in established scientific journals, the ‘photosynthetic ceiling’ is actually, argues Daniel Tanuro, a whimsical and mystifying idea.

 

International

Peter Jacobs, a member the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), analyses developments in Zimbabwe.

 

International

The collapse of republicanism and the rise of reaction

What happened in Ireland? How is it that the vicious arch–bigot Paisley is suddenly transformed into a smiley elder uncle figure. John McAnulty’s article was produced from notes from a speaking tour in England by Socialist Democracy in July 2007.

 

History

Dan Jakopovich investigates the FBI’s counterintelligence activities against the US SWP.

 

Review

By Moshe Lewin, Verso 2005 416 pages, £25

The standard view of the Soviet Union promulgated by the corporate media and capitalist intellectual elites traces a direct and continuous ideological line from the Bolshevism of the 1917 Revolution, through the totalitarianism of the Stalinist period between the mid-1920s and 1953, and on to the post-Stalinist period from 1953 to the final collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.

 

Review

By Eric Hobsbawn, Little, Brown 2007 £17.99

Eric Hobsbawn’s new book, compiled from a series of lectures, is a welcome analysis of the three elements in the title but also of related subjects such as nationalism, migration, as well as football and crime.

 

Review

By John Berger, Verso 2007 Hardback £12.99

John Berger’s latest book consists of sixteen short essays, written between 2001 and 2006, concerning ‘surviving the nights and imagining a new day’ in the era of unimpeded capitalism and the ‘war on terror’. For Berger, in particular, this means finding meaning in a world in which Marxism is temporarily on the retreat.

 

Letters

In Roy Wilkes’ reply to Andy Kilmister’s letter (SO 13), there is a sentence which raises doubts as to Wilkes’ interpretation either of dialectics or of nature.