Blog

Report for the NO campaign in the Dutch Referendum on the EU-Ukrainian Association Agreement, 6 April 2016

Partly drawn from my forthcoming book The Downing of Flight MH17—A Political Economy of the New Cold War

The argument of this paper is that after the crisis of 2008 which has turned into an enduring stagnation amidst proliferating violence, capitalist property relations are increasingly being upheld by authoritarian means. The mode of production and social organisation, including the supremacy of the West in international affairs, has lost […]

After the repression following the bourgeois revolts of 1848 in Europe Marx and Engels adjusted their original ideas of working-class revolution with the theory of permanent revolution. It held that since the bourgeoisie no longer could be counted on to side with the workers against the ruling classes, socialists should […]

In this paper I argue that the current crisis in Ukraine (a well as, in hindsight, that in Yugoslavia in the 1990s), reveal that the English-speaking West no longer can rely on a competitive advantage in production to meet the challenge of new ‘Rapallos’—a rapprochement along the lines of the […]

Wolfgang Streeck’s Gekaufte Zeit/ Buying Time contains a compelling analysis that points to the origins of the current crisis in the wave of strikes of 1968-69. It caused the capitalist class to try and wrest free from the post-war social (-democratic) contract forced on it by labour. However, not only […]

The current global configuration and more particularly, relations between the liberal West and Russia after the defeat of the Soviet Union (as well as China in the not too distant future) are widely perceived as a new Cold War. The comparison is t with earlier Cold War(s) must however be […]

What follows was written as a background document for the referendum on the blanket surveillance law in the Netherlands in March 2018 and part of a book project, ‘The End of Political Compromise in Capitalism’. I argue that surveillance is part of the ‘War on Terror’ complex, which in turn […]

The Russian Revolution in this paper is analysed in the context of a conjuncture dominated by counter-revolution. Beginning with the repression of the 1850s, a process of permanent counterrevolution has become the over-determining trend of social-political history. The Russian Revolution was subject to several distinct aspects of this process. First, […]

This comment was submitted to International Affairs in late September 2018 and returned within 48 hours with a note that the journal does not publish rejoinders. That the article I comment on can be published at all is testimony to the sorry state of the field of International Relations, which […]

This is Part I of a project jointly undertaken with Hector Reban and Max van der Werff after the author’s return from attending a conference MH17—The Quest for Justice, in Kuala Lumpur in August 2019. Many thanks to Mr. John Philpot, international criminal lawyer, for valuable comments. 1. Introduction. The […]

This paper discusses the urgent need to define a socialism of the 21st century based on the achievements of the Information Revolution. Compared to the labour socialism based on the Industrial Revolution and culminating the Soviet experience, a digital socialism would broaden the revolutionary subject of a transformation to what […]

In reply to a Twitter message summing up a series of crimes ascribed to ‘Saudis’, beginning with their alleged responsibility for bringing down the Twin Towers, I posted, ‘Not Saudis, Israelis brought down the Twin Towers with help from Zionists in US Govt’. This was picked up by self-professed Jewish […]