Owen Dowling
@owenjdowling
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Historian | Archival Researcher at Tribune Magazine | Words in Tribune and Jacobin
Joined August 2015
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Masters dissertation complete!
'Colonial Capitalism, White Chauvinism, and the Black Proletariat: South Africa and Marxism, 1917-1940'
It's a study of the intellectual history of interwar South African Marxism, and its theoretical analyses of contemporary South African society.
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Attendance now confirmed at 500,000 🇵🇸
The over-300,000-strong Palestine solidarity demonstration in London descends upon Whitehall ✊🇵🇸
#FreePalestine
#CeasefireNOW
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The Syrians are a made-up nation.
The Lebanese are a made-up nation.
The Iraqis are a made-up nation.
The Jordanians are a made-up nation.
The Palestinians are a made-up nation.
In contrast, the Israelite nation has been evolving and preserving itself for thousands of years.
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Interviewing a Catholic priest based on Jerusalem, a BBC news presenter just asked whether Israel was or was not discriminating between "Palestinians" and "Christians" in its attacks on Gaza. A profoundly revealing comment.
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I finally resigned from the Labour Party in October 2023 after the leadership's endorsement of Israel's right to visit collective punishment upon the Palestinian people. Obviously I'll be canvassing for
@jeremycorbyn
: a voice for peace, justice & socialism
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Imagining Engels' reaction if you told him that, 180 years after writing his book on the Manchester working class, a Ukrainian statue of him in Manchester was threatened with removal because a counterrevolutionary Russian regime had invaded Ukraine in the name of anti-communism
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That there wasn't a revolution in Germany in 1923, or rather than it didn't succeed, was in consequence perhaps the most disastrous single turning-point in modern history
Grigori Zinoviev, Russian Chairman of the international communist organization Comintern, tells Chairman Heinrich Brandler of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD, Communist Party of Germany) that there will be a Communist revolution in Germany “sometime this autumn.”
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I remember Lammy chairing an evening with Bernie Sanders at the Brixton O2 the week of the 2017 election, reading Sanders a text he'd just received from "my friend Jeremy Corbyn".
He's a moral sewer on Palestine of course, but first & foremost an utterly unscrupulous opportunist.
BREAKING: Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy's speech is interrupted for a second and third time
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
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Rayner is a disgrace to the labour movement, a worldbeating self-interested cynic whose propensity to say & support absolutely anything so long as it advances her career has now brought her to running interference for a racist colonial state facing genocide charges.
The BDS movement was set up by Palestinians to protest against the Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
Here is Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, accusing Palestinians and people who support their fight for freedom of targeting the only Jewish state.
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Such a gorgeous Sunday afternoon canvassing for
@jeremycorbyn
in Islington North, in sunny Hillrise ward ☀️
So lovely to canvass with friends, meet new comrades, & see such enthusiasm from so many to return their socialist MP—in one person's words, "even if I have to crawl there"
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The Guardian (10 Oct 2018)
Ending sewage dumping will mean higher water bills, says report
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The over-300,000-strong Palestine solidarity demonstration in London descends upon Whitehall ✊🇵🇸
#FreePalestine
#CeasefireNOW
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Another important influence upon John Brown was the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Brown's soldiers were drilled & had their tactics devised by Hugh Forbes, a British mercenary who had commanded Venetian revolutionaries & fought alongside Garibaldi in defence of the Roman Republic.
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Taking a break between canvassing sessions to help re-elect
@jeremycorbyn
on a glorious Sunday afternoon in Islington North ☀️
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Genuinely is worth asking self-designated socialist Labour MPs who voted with the party whip "for unity" tonight what on earth they're in Parliament for
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Someone really should write a book about the Guardian from 2000-2020, looking at its coverage & editorial line around Iraq, War on Terror, 2008, Snowden, Peoples' Vote, Corbyn etc. It would be good to have a proper documented narrative of the paper's recent political trajectory.
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It is strangely, darkly funny how every Labour-left apocalyptic fantasy about what would happen if the right regained control of the Party has come true and then some
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Being on the left means you'll be relentlessly demonised, then eventually proven to have been completely right after you've been defeated
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Sky News' header image for an article on "Hate preachers" is a photo of a peaceful
@PSCupdates
protest outside a Barclays branch featuring a few Palestinian flags, an Irish flag, & a rainbow flag with the word 'PEACE' on it being waved by a cyclist wearing a cat backpack 🇵🇸🇮🇪🏳️🌈🐱
Hate preachers are to be banned from entering the UK
Read more ⬇️
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Lisa Nandy as foreign secretary is a prospect, however unlikely, that should alarm progressives and opponents of imperial belligerence everywhere
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With a few honourable exceptions, Labour MPs are some of the most incurious, authoritarian, self-interested, cowardly, vacuous people you will ever come across
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According to Mike Davis, capitalist shock therapy in the former Communist countries of Europe and Asia saw the number of people living in UN-defined extreme poverty rise "from 14 million to 168 million: an almost instantaneous mass pauperisation without precedent in history."
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Second-hand bookshops are the indispensable backbone of the socialist movement: all of these were £1-£3
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Utterly disgraceful and shameful - a stain on all that is good in Labour Party history, & the apotheosis of all of its worst racist and colonialist episodes.
We’re in Israel for a solidarity mission.
Today, we met Israeli president
@Isaac_Herzog
to express our support for Israel and her people in the aftermath of October 7th.
We stand with you 🇮🇱🇬🇧
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Sadly, it probably was a mistake for me to get so emotionally invested in the success of the Corbyn project as a teenager. I can't pretend that the post-2019 thermidor, return of TINA, & annihilation of hope as a factor of British politics hasn't been deeply personally upsetting.
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Journalists doing the "who cares about Parliamentary procedure" tweets are obscuring the real content of what happened: a corrupt/blackmailed Speaker breaching convention *in the service of stopping a motion condemning Israeli collective punishment from coming before the House*
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Dissertation complete!
'British Left Responses to the Coup in Chile, 1973-85'
It's a study of the different discussions, debates, and expressions of internationalist solidarity that emerged on the British left in response to the overthrow of Allende's government in Chile
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Britain wasn't even a completed bourgeois democracy until 1928 - the section of the country who could refer to 'our elected representatives' in the eighteenth century was about 3% of the population.
This country does have a long tradition of elite panics about 'the mob', however.
"For the first time since the 17th century... it seems that our elected representatives are acting out of fear rather than out of conviction... this is how a democracy dies"
#trevorphillips
, who has a record of making Islamophobic comments.
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A Harrow schoolboy going on a two-month sanctions-busting jolly to a South African goldmine in 1982 - 12 years before the end of white minority rule in 1994, 8 years before even the notion of a negotiated solution arose - was not about seeing apartheid's "collapse first-hand."
Simon Sebag Montefiore: ‘I worked down a South African goldmine at 17’
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I've written for
@Jacobin
on how and why British trade unionists expressed solidarity with the Chilean working class following General Pinochet's military coup against Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government 48 years ago today.
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@SamuraiApology
+ pointing out the artificial and colonial nature of the borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, as if that treaty wasn't the twin sister of the Balfour Declaration.
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"You know, Ralph Miliband predicted all this."
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@Taj_Ali1
Corbyn organised physical-force community resistance to the National Front in Wood Green in 1977, animated by the same anti-fascist politics that inspired his anti-Apartheid and Chile solidarity activism.
Streeting's not fit to kiss his boots.
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"there were assorted revolutionary flags including one from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament."
A revealing comment from the Guardian press release for Starmer here; this is an emphatically right-wing leadership, defining itself against UK history's most iconic peace movement
New - three years ago, Starmer’s new team walked into Loto, finding “revolutionary flags, shredded documents and a sleeping bag.”
Now they believe they are three quarters of the way through their time - and are betting on a May 2024 election.
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I went to Islington North to report on the mass canvassing effort underway for
@jeremycorbyn
, hearing from legendary socialist filmmaker
@KenLoachSixteen
& speaking to Corbyn, campaign director
@schneiderhome
, & former Lab MP
@LauraSmithCrewe
for
@jacobin
.
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Researching the history of the Comintern and getting to know its personalities means you end up putting names and faces to some of lesser-known victims of the Great Purge. The murder of thousands of old bolsheviks truly was an unspeakable crime against the cause of socialism.
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"I am not a traitor of my people. Those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all you evildoers, to the last man."
Yugoslav partisan Lepa Radić, hanged in February 1943, with the correct attitude on those who fought in Nazi ranks
Oh cool, but what if you fought against the USSR as [checks notes] a member of the SS? No? Still OK? Great, thanks for clarifying.
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This Is England is a great film, & definitely potential grounds for interesting left discussion, but this framing of it as somehow a depiction of 'socialist patriotism' is bizarre. The film ends w/ the little boy, traumatised by the film's events, throwing his 🏴 flag in the sea
Join us Sunday on St George's Day for a film screening of "This Is England" and a discussion around Socialist Patriotism! 🏴⛳
See you there!
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I interviewed Marxist historian Robin Blackburn, author of 'The Making of New World Slavery' & 'The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery', about his long-awaited concluding volume, 'The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery for Abolition, 1776-1888', for
@jacobin
.
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The British accent from the mouth of this spokesman for genocide is fitting. In the sweep of history, & in the technical specifics of how this latest violence is meted out upon Gazans, the massive crimes of the Israeli state project against Palestinians are Britain's crimes also.
Israel accuses South Africa of being “complicit with Hamas’ campaign of Genocide against our people”- saying “We assure South Africa's leaders, history will judge you”.
Govt spox added that Israel will appear at ICJ where SA has filed a case accusing Israel of genocidal acts.
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The Protocols was, of course, not a Soviet tract, but one of paranoid religious Tsarist mysticism. It served as a key text for the western-backed anticommunist White Russians after the Revolution, & for Nazi concepts of 'Judeo-Bolshevism'. It was banned by the new Soviet state.
Decades of Soviet and Nazi antisemitic propaganda repackaged to fit today’s narrative.
Holocaust education banned across much of the Arab world where the Soviet forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, claiming to detail how Jews plot to subvert the world using everything
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Very excited to finally get to grips with the Grundrisse, now that
@profdavidharvey
's new reading companion from
@VersoBooks
has arrived.
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"Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revolution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. [...] In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams."
Hobsbawm on Bonaparte
Striking that Napoleon Bonaparte - the classic referent of the "Great Man of History", the "world-spirit on horseback", the archetypal "ambitious bourgeois individual", the personal harbinger of world bourgeois transformation - died one year before the invention of the photograph
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@jamesdgreig
That excuse was also - almost to a tee - that which was given by artists who played Sun City/otherwise breached the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa
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"I would like to dedicate this first space flight to the people of communism, a society which our Soviet people are already entering, and which, I am confident, all men on earth will enter."
Yuri Gagarin, 1961
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An amazing evening at
@MarxLibrary
listening to legendary South African revolutionary Ronnie Kasrils on his new book 'International Brigade Against Apartheid'. The event was also attended by many of the ANC's London Recruits. It was a real privilege to be so close to that history
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"After a speedy trial, [King Charles I] was executed on January 30th, 1649, as a 'public enemy to the good people of this nation.' Monarchy was declared to be 'unnecessary, burdensome, & dangerous to the liberty, safety & public interest of the people,' & was abolished."
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@AaronBastani
This is hideous. The people speaking in this video are anti-Palestinian racists, plain and simple.
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The only force in British politics which has consistently defended social liberalism, democratic freedoms & oversight, & pluralism in media, politics & civil society, has been the "hard left" that the liberal commentariat gleefully pretended intended to send them to the gulag
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Commentators humouring the notion of a NATO implementation of a no-fly-zone over Ukraine is so criminally, terrifyingly irresponsible that I can't believe I'm actually hearing it.
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I was starstruck meeting pathbreaking socialist-feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, author of 'Hidden from History', 'Women, Resistance & Revolution' & other important works/memoirs, cofounder of
@HistoryWO
& the 1970 Oxford Women's Liberation Conference, & Black Dwarf coeditor
Wonderful to attend the 'Beyond the Fragments: 45 Years On' conference (
@beyondthefrags
) at the PHM yesterday, with the socialist-feminist classic's co-authors
@hilarypepper
, Sheila Rowbotham, &
@lynne_segal
speaking—organised by my brilliant friends
@racheljcollett
&
@AlfieSteer
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@timjacobwise
Yes, which is why WEB Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, AP Randolph, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, Stokely Carmichael, Ella Baker, Claudia Jones, Cornel West, Adolph Reed, Cedric Robinson etc never ever described themselves as socialists.
Come on now.
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It was an unforgettable experience interviewing ANC-SACP anti-apartheid leader Ronnie Kasrils for
@tribunemagazine
— on his recent book 'International Brigade Against Apartheid', & thirty years spent organising the transnational anti-apartheid underground.
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"Tales of Mau Mau savagery spread wildly among the white settlers in the colony & at home in Britain. Mau Mau was portrayed as a barbaric, anti-European, & anti-Christian sect that had reverted to tactics of primitive terror to interrupt the British civilizing mission in Kenya."
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Solidarity with the people of Gaza against this terrifying, criminal assault
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Jeremy talking about the Caribbean anti-colonial movement, the Pan-African Congresses, Ghanaian independence, Claudia Jones, Shapurji Saklatvala, the Morant Bay Uprising and the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica, CLR James, & the teaching of anti-colonial and anti-racist history
Today's Parliamentary debate on
#BlackHistoryMonth
took place at a time when the
#BlackLivesMatter
movement has become so strong all over the world, including here.
This movement will not disappear - it empowers and unites people globally.
My speech 👉
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"In the 1990s... Janet Yellen spoke of unemployment as a ‘worker-discipline device’. This disciplining device is foundational to the operation of capitalist economies. If workers are not sufficiently scared of unemployment, they will be more likely to organize ..."
@graceblakeley
Real estate CEO Tim Gurner sparked outrage this week after calling for a rise in unemployment to put workers in their place. We should be grateful for his comments — they reveal what the ruling class really thinks, writes
@graceblakeley
.
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Uplifting rally in Liverpool today in support of refugees & repudiation of the foul fascist riot in Kirkby, with a great series of speakers. Brilliant to see and speak to
@jeremycorbyn
, who remains unbowed in upholding a politics of anti-racist, anti-colonial internationalism.
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Excited to see the new issue of
@tribunemagazine
has arrived.
My piece, 'Tribune and the Struggle for India's Freedom', explores the magazine's historical relationship to the Indian independence movement, and its support for Indian freedom in terms of anti-colonial anti-fascism
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Framing Nazi Germany, & "the 1930s" generally, as inhabiting a space outside of History, utterly beyond the reach of comparability with anything today (except, ofc, the anti-racist left!), serves only to obfuscate the social foundations of, & so enable far-right nativist politics
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Historian E.P. Thompson understood the importance of popular movements of the past for the political struggles in his own time, conducting their spirit into his lifelong battle with the 'Beast' of the nuclear arms race.
Me for
@tribunemagazine
.
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🚨HELP REQUESTED🚨
I'm currently planning a new research project on the British left and the Chile solidarity movement in the 70s-80s (having done my undergraduate dissertation on the subject), & am looking to speak to people who were involved with Chile solidarity at the time.
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There is, in fact, no contradiction more irreconcilable than this one
"There is no contradiction between Labour being the party of workers and, at the same time, the party of business."
@JohnLehal
on Keir Starmer's CBI speech and Labour's future relationship with business:
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It is, in fact, very hard to focus on uni work when the world around you is a maelstrom of death and compound crises
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@TheEconomist
Yes I'm sure the topic is awkward for you
The Economist’s above-the-fray insistence everyone move on in Chile is noteworthy because of The Economist’s direct role in the coup of Allende [excerpts from ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin]
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Hundreds of Algerian demonstrators against French settler colonialism were massacred by Paris police, under the command of a wartime Nazi collaborator, at the Pont Saint-Michel in 1961.
Amidst another settler colonial bloodbath, the commemorative march has been banned.
🇩🇿🇵🇸
The March on Tuesday to commemorate the Algerians killed by the Paris police during a protest on October 17th 1961 on the orders of notorious war criminal and Holocaust facilitator Maurice Papon has been banned by his current successor in the role of Prefect of Police in Paris.
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'The Political Economy of Super-Exploitation in Congolese Mineral Mining' explores the neo-colonial super-exploitation of Congolese extractive labour within global capitalist production, and its intimate relationship with electronics capital.
Have a read!
Owen a historian at
@RobCollAlumni
won the first prize of £1500 for his submission entitled, ‘The Political Economy of Super-Exploitation in Congolese Mineral Mining’.
Congratulations Owen! 🏆🎉
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Oppenheimer was so good that I wasn't even (that) annoyed by the "Umm actually I read all three volumes of Marx's Capital in the original German and didn't agree with their central thesis that 'property is theft'" line
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My piece in the latest
@tribunemagazine
print issue, 'When Tribune Backed The Boycott', reconstructs the history of the magazine's anti-apartheid commitment (1948-1994), & pioneering support of the campaign to boycott South African goods.
Subscribe today!
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I had the unforgettable experience of interviewing Toshiko Tanaka & Ogawa Tadayoshi, Japanese peace activists & survivors 79 years ago of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, for
@tribunemagazine
about their experiences & message for a world on fire
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Stewart Lee once described David Cameron and Ed Miliband as "about as different as two rats fighting over a courgette that has fallen into a urinal. The main difference being that the David Cameron rat is wearing chinos, in an attempt to win over the youth voter."
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@joecguinan
Getting to be the one obsequiously fawning over the phone to the White House from Downing Street and receiving a message in reply so generic it may as well be automated is the ultimate dream of every Labour Right cadre - perhaps second only to co-signing one of Washington's wars
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Henry Kissinger's longevity is perhaps the greatest argument against the existence of a moral universe
Fascinating to talk geo-politics with the great strategic mind ex US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.
The 🇬🇧🇺🇸 alliance and our friends and allies are as important now as ever 🌍
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Keir Starmer, lying to credulous remainer liberals and knowing they'll never, ever admit to having been played
So sad and so unnecessary. The campaign to change his mind starts today!
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Tfw you're a socialist, a young person hoping to work in academic history, and a Liverpool fan, and you live in Britain in 2023.
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@AaronBastani
Imagine how deeply someone would have to despise Jacinda Arden to compare them to Ian Austin
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For the 50th anniversary of the Chile coup, I interviewed
@jeremycorbyn
for
@tribunemagazine
- on the vibrant cultural inheritance of Popular Unity, Chile Solidarity activism, international & local antifascism, & the relevance of Allende's experience today
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"Your imperialist spending is very good, but where is your imperialist strategy??"
NEW: Keir Starmer welcomes increased spending on defence but criticises the Prime Minister's proposal as a "spending announcement without a strategy":
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"[C]olonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred ... a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in ..." - Aime Cesaire
Everyone switch on to Al Jazeera right now. This is one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen.
IOF is attacking mourners carrying Shireen’s body from the hospital right now. They’re using stun grenades and tear gas and charging at them with horses and batons.
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"... a party whose leaders have always sought to escape from the implications of its class character by pursuing what they deemed to be 'national' policies: these policies have regularly turned to the detriment of the working classes and to the advantage of Conservatism."
📢 Keir Starmer: The Labour party is not a nationalist party. But it is a national party.
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@AaronBastani
Staggering that people can't see that, in retrospect, Kinnock was completely wrong about everything, and that his strategy laid out the red carpet for the inescapable institutionalisation of neoliberalism
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"What yesterday’s events signified is that the Starmer leadership’s contempt for democracy within Labour, which the media and political class ignored or cheered when directed at socialists, has spread to contempt for parliamentary democracy."
@karl_fh
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@nkulw
JC was hugely involved in the UK Chile Solidarity Campaign from the start in 1973, and even before that spent formative time in Chile on the cusp of Allende's election, becoming very influenced by Unidad Popular:
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@BarnabyRaine
Incredible that the article gives the verbatim context in which you make that statement, then just moves on as if that doesn't totally undermine the title/article premise's entire defamatory insinuation.
Really squalid, petty stuff. Solidarity comrade ✊
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Vote Corbyn — for peace, equality, & justice from Finsbury Park to Palestine!
Very important that all progressives who are able come & canvass in Islington North in the final days before polling day.
Let's keep our socialist, anti-racist, & internationalist voice in Parliament!
It’s the final Super Sunday of the election.
We don’t have party machinery. We don’t have big donors. We have something more powerful: people.
It's time for one last effort to prove that when we come together, we can win.
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I've reviewed Christopher Clark's monumental new history of the European revolutions of 1848-49, 'Revolutionary Spring', for
@jacobin
.
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Merry Christmas friends and comrades, far and wide!
I'm dreaming of a free Palestine 🇵🇸
@emercurial_
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