Josh White / 21 Nov 2022
Magazine for the Poor
Selling The Big Issue
You’ve seen them wearing red jackets, carrying a red magazine. (...)
Socialism
John Foster / 10 Jun 2022
Status Quo Apologist
Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Francis Fukuyama
Francis Fukuyama has a fraught relationship with history. In the late 1980s, he thought it was over.(...)
Josh White / 25 Apr 2022
Ex-Social Democrats
Today’s New Statesman
Getting off the tube at Blackfriars, you could walk through the backstreets of Fleet Street without seeing the office of the oldest progressive magazine in Britain. It’s easily done.(...)
John Foster / 12 Nov 2021
Inequality is Still Wrong
Time for Socialism, by Thomas Piketty
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Penned towards the end of the Vietnam War by Hunter S. Thompson, in his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the statement sounds truer than ever.(...)
Joel Schalit / 11 Oct 2021
Civil Rights, Not Ethnicity
Germany’s Racism Crisis
It was a transparent failure. Irmgard Furchner, a 96-year-old ex-secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp, had disappeared the day her trial was to begin, having been accused of complicity in the deaths of over 10,000 Jews.(...)
John Foster / 17 Sep 2021
Out of the Red
The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, by Chris Miller
The end of communism was meant to be a return to the “civilised” world of individualism and consumerism. It didn’t quite happen that way.(...)
Redux / 16 Jul 2021
History at a Standstill
Germany and the Roma
One of The Battleground's strongest areas of coverage is Germany. Not just any German topic, but that of the country's continuing problems with racism.(...)
John Foster / 30 Oct 2020
No Alternative to Capitalism
Foretelling the End of Capitalism, by Francesco Boldizzoni
Whoever said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Slavoj Žižek and Frederic Jameson are both blamed,) it’s a quote that has legs because it’s true.(...)
Joel Schalit / 03 Jun 2020
Dinner is Ruined
Döner After Lockdown
When the government finally announced restaurants could serve takeout, it was like a rainbow appeared over Berlin. As long as we picked up dinner by six, we were safe.(...)
John Foster / 11 May 2020
Poor and Poorer
Coronavirus and the EU
The term “crisis” is applied all too freely in politics and journalism. It has become a common designation for the Coronavirus outbreak as well. (...)