The legacy of two decades of war can’t be measured just by the number of abandoned airbases and military installations, or by the tens of thousands of Afghans killed. In these years of suicide bombings...

Read more about Is this a new Taliban? Afghanistan after the Exit

On the Disassembly Line: Dirty Work

Katrina Forrester, 7 July 2022

The internet was supposed to be different. The new technologies central to contemporary capitalism offer the possibility of improving our working lives, even if they do so partly by eliminating our jobs....

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Diary: The Plutocrat Tour

Iain Sinclair, 7 July 2022

Silence is the defining quality of wealth. Private security operatives whisper into their fists while patrolling a zone of distrust. Silence repels unexplained outsiders who dare to trespass on the shaved...

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The corruption allegations against Lula may have been hazy, but those against his party were well-founded and damning. This fact is often lost in a soup of accusations and counter-accusations, and the...

Read more about Billionaires in the Dock: Operation Car Wash

Lea Ypi recovers the sensory world of communist Albania: its privations, its ecstasies, but also its banalities. Young people in Albania fretted over what to wear to school just like children elsewhere....

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Cheap palm oil is part of an interlocking late capitalist system. When we say there is a demand for RBD palm oil, we mean there is a demand for instant noodles and foamy shampoo in plastic bottles and...

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Not War Alone: The Price of Wheat

Tom Stevenson, 12 May 2022

National grain supplies are an emotive subject: they are a test of the basic competence of the administrative state. An empty central granary once meant imminent political collapse. Russia’s invasion...

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Democrats were so overjoyed at defeating Trump that for a time they failed to notice that the election returns called into question the demographic determinism which in recent years has led many Democrats...

Read more about Hope in the Desert: Democratic Party Blues

While orthodox Marxists had long argued that the purpose of racism was to divide workers, Black and white workers in South Africa already had different relations to capital. Apartheid racism was essential...

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Short Cuts: Destroying the Asylum System

Frances Webber, 7 April 2022

Refugees are rarely able to get visas: you aren’t classified as a refugee under the 1951 Geneva Convention until you are outside your country and unable or unwilling to return. And once outside it, you...

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Bring out the lemonade: What the Welsh got right

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 7 April 2022

Who’s to say that one version of Welsh nationalism is more ‘true’ than any other? The claim that ‘Wales is a nation’ isn’t a descriptive statement: it is – or aspires to be – an illocutionary...

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Things fall from the sky

Tom Stevenson, 7 April 2022

Russian forces near Kyiv have made little progress in the past week, but are dug in at their positions. In Mariupol and Kharkiv Russian forces chose encirclement and bombardment over the occupation of...

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Paper Cuts

Malin Hay, 24 March 2022

In February, the price of coated papers was up 78 per cent from last year. The manufacturers may have wanted higher prices, but dramatic hikes are bad for the industry’s stability as well as for buyers....

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Before the War

Tariq Ali, 24 March 2022

No one​ knows how this will end. Putin’s reckless adventurism has backfired: an attempt to mimic the US on a GDP of $1.5 trillion, smaller even than Italy and minuscule compared to China...

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A UK Bill of Rights?

Tom Hickman, 24 March 2022

There is nothing wrong in principle with a new bill of domestic rights. It has been the policy of each of the three main political parties at various times over the past two decades and can be done consistently...

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The EU claims it runs a ‘fully autonomous sanctions regime’ in the service of ‘safeguarding EU values’. But for the most part its sanctions, and those of the UK, are applied in conjunction with...

Read more about First Recourse for Rebels: Financial Weaponry

LRB contributors

LRB Contributors, 24 March 2022

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine by Sofia Andrukhovych, Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley,...

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Diary: In Portadown

Susan McKay, 10 March 2022

‘I’ve been to a right lot of rallies over the years,’ she said. She thought things had got worse. ‘Bit by bit they have taken it all off the Protestant people. We have nothing left. They say we...

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