On November 2, 2017, Chris Mansour interviewed Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked! and a panelist on a conversation that took place the night before entitled Is the Left Eating Itself?, part of an international discussion linked to Spiked!’s Unsafe Space Tour, which aimed to tackle issues such as campus culture, free speech, and Title IX. A recording of the conversation can be found at . What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.
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THE EVENTS OF OCTOBER 2017 and the subsequent election held on December 21st have done little to resolve the issue of Catalan independence, which has now escalated into a regional and national crisis marked by political gridlock and polarization among the Catalan people. This polarization has taken a particular toll on the Catalan left as well as on the region’s labor movement, allowing the bourgeoisie to remain in power and further its own agenda by exploiting the issue while the Left remains fractionalized and at odds about the way forward.
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EVENTS IN CATALONIA in the last two months represent the biggest challenge ever faced by the Spanish regime since its establishment in 1978. The explosion of the masses on to the scene has acquired at points insurrectionary features. Where does this movement come from? What is its character and how can it move forward in the face of Spanish state repression?
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The account of history is the theory of the present: How did we get here; and what tasks remain from the past — that however appear to be “new” today? As Adorno put it, “the new is the old in distress.” This is true of capitalism and its crisis now.
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On October 14, 2017, Efraim Carlebach interviewed Ian Birchall at Birchall’s home in Edmonton, north London. In 1962, Birchall joined the International Socialists, a tendency led by Tony Cliff and the organizational forerunner of the extant Socialist Workers Party (UK), founded in 1977. Though he is no longer a member of the Socialist Workers Party, Birchall has remained a leading figure of the International Socialist tendency for over half a century. He is the author of numerous publications including the 2011 biography, Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His Time[i]. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.
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