How does the Chinese Communist Party navigate its way through the contradictions and tensions of managing a capitalist economy? This article traces the dynamics of recent developments within the Chinese economy and state, particularly the period of President Xi Jinping’s dominance. It explores the paradox of the juxtaposition of Communist Party rule with capitalist economic development. The resulting tensions are evident in the state’s successive changes of strategy, in its efforts to reconcile the antagonistic forces that have arisen during China’s extremely rapid industrialisation. An elite party is ruling without any functional or democratic means of negotiating between such antagonisms. China’s economy is currently shifting to a new phase, away from its emphasis on cheap labour from the rural areas and towards becoming a high‐tech economy. The current plan for growth rests upon a quest for greater self-reliance and vast investment in new technologies. Xi’s regime is attempting this while simultaneously seeking to strengthen its control over capital, labour and civil society. The article discusses recent shifts of policy resulting from Xi’s need to maintain the party’s authority following the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic: including the u-turn over Covid restrictions at the beginning of 2023, and the clampdown on companies such as Evergrande following the property crash.

Eurocommunism at first seemed to offer a strategy for renewal, but by the mid-1980s its momentum had dissipated. Recent renewed interest in Eurocommunism is part of a wider reflection on the crisis of communism in all its variants since the last part of the twentieth century. Its aim ‐ to forge a new strategy of democratic and peaceful conquest of political power, in keeping with the complexities of contemporary Western European societies ‐ at first seemed full of promise, but by the mid-1980s its momentum had dissipated. In spite of its aim of renewal, it was followed by the crisis and decline of the main communist parties with which it was associated, the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). The actions, decisions and strategies adopted by these parties can only be understood if they are framed within the historical and geographical context of the 1970s ‐ a period of general crisis in both the capitalist and communist worlds, which ultimately consolidated a historical break between two different eras. The article discusses some of the key characteristics of the project, and the hopes and disappointments it provoked, drawing widely on the published literature. It concludes with a brief engagement with some of the reflections and assessments that have been made on the subject. B roadly speaking, in the end Eurocommunism failed to find a way of combining a reformist strategy with a revolutionary identity. It abandoned core aspects of its former strategy without finding a convincing replacement.

This is an account of a discussion between Sita Balani, Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Gail Lewis and Adam Elliott-Cooper on Sita Balani's book, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race, offered as a means of sharing its insights and exchanges among a wider community of activists and organisers. The origin of the book was Sita's observation of two dynamics at play at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. The first was the fracturing of British Asian identity in the early years of the 'War on Terror', as Muslim became a racialised category in and of itself. The second was the rapid rise in 'gay rights': until 2003, Section 28 had criminalised the teaching of homosexuality as a 'pretended family relationship'; in 2004, civil partnerships had been introduced. Sita recognised that the moving around of these categories of sexuality and race was not merely coincidental. To help understand this she has introduced the concept of 'sexual modernity', which also has two parts: the promise of self-realisation through the pursuit of romantic love, the nuclear family and sexual adventure, and then - what 'stalks' this possibility - all of the sexual conduct and sexual practice that is disavowed and excluded from this. The book charts the state's racial taxonomies alongside its mobilisation of categories of sexuality and gender, in both the historical colonial context and the contemporary imperial centre. Panellists discussed some of the contradictions of these developments. These included the inclusion of police officers in the Gay Pride parade; moral panics about - and violence against - asylum seekers and drag queens; the 'problem' of the Black boy being attributed to not-enough-patriarchy, while for South Asian Muslim women it is a question of too-much-patriarchy; in an historical context, sexual violence being the norm in Jamaica but a source of paranoia in the colony of India. Through showing us the field of battle and its character, Sita gives us a tool with which to help build aligned constituencies of opposition and vision

The British university system is in a deep crisis, born of a two-pronged assault. The crisis is born firstly from decades of neoliberal marketisation and the rise of a remote and authoritarian executive elite presiding over a downwardly mobile and culturally deprivileged academic profession. We call this process neoliberal managerialism. It is born secondly from the ideological and political assault on universities, currently led by the Tories, reflecting the resurgence of anti-intellectualism since the millennium. The paper argues that although these currents embody ostensibly conflicting values, they combine and reinforce each other. We illustrate this argument by discussing lacunae in the decolonisation of British universities, notably the colonial ideologies and practices inscribed in neoliberal university governance and management. The final section reflects on how to resist and overcome the crises engulfing UK higher education. Framed by reflections on the positionalities of the authors, it argues that no consolations can be found in old-style academic professionalism, which historically was no less regressive than neoliberal managerialism and often complicit in its rollout. We conclude that academics could instead embrace the ineluctable dynamics of de-professionalisation and work towards an authentic and solidaristic public intellectuality.

The year 2023 is arguably not the best time to recommend a book about illness. More than three years after Covid-19 infections first made the headlines, many people are experiencing what the WHO has described as 'pandemic fatigue' - the feeling of having had enough of all the talk about illness. 1 Yet, at the same time, there may be no better moment to read Alice Hattrick's Ill Feelings , in which the author describes their daily struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and what it means to be clinically exhausted in a society that expects you to 'function' at all times - not least because the book speaks to and of people who have no choice but to deal with illness every day of their life, and for whom going back to 'normal' pre-Covid life is not an option.

The Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard defamation trial constitutes what Sarah Banet- Weiser (2018) calls a 'feminist flashpoint': it has become a media event that facilitates and shapes discourses around gender-based violence in the public sphere. The cultural significance of the social media commentaries on the trial is threefold. First, the sheer volume of media traffic turns sexual violence into a media spectacle. Second, commentary featured discussion of domestic violence and situated it within the legacies of #MeToo. Thirdly, the stark divide between Depp and Heard supporters reveals shifts in cultural understandings of sexual violence since #MeToo but also a backlash against the movement. Cultural understandings of gender-based violence and feminism, popularised by #MeToo, are acknowledged, but the same digital tools that enable online feminist activism are mobilised in the backlash. The authors explore the re-activation of the myth of the 'ideal victim' Heard's resistance to dominant representations of the passive victim; and the 'memeification' of Heard (Valenti 2022) as a form of gendered surveillance and policing. The trial exemplifies a new iteration of postfeminism, one that acknowledges the cultural and political significance of #MeToo yet upholds the same rape myths that were previously criticised.

This article critically engages with the political strategies of the new social and political movements that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-8. It takes issue with discussions of contemporary alter-political practice and theory that overlook the crucial point that the creation of new social institutions and relations in the here and now - a central part of this politics - must itself be political: it argues for the need to tackle the whole question of the collective subject and agent of change. This leads into a discussion of the theory of hegemony put forward by Gramsci, and, later, Laclau and Mouffe, and, drawing on this, a new strategy is proposed, for the construction of powerful collective subjects. Taking its cue from recent social movements such as 15M (the Indignados) and new municipalism in Spain and Italy, it looks at new ways of configuring the strategy of hegemony, by making its concepts of leadership, unity and representation more participatory, bottom-up, accessible to ordinary people, plural and flexible. A historical transition to egalitarian democracies, solidary economies and environmental sustainability is dependent on a wider counter-hegemonic project and contest. This needs to be carried out in all social relations and fields. It must energise critical masses on the ground, and conjoin institutional interventions with new social invention and multiple assaults on the status quo. The object of a contemporary alter-political organisation should be to animate, bolster and help articulate the multi-faceted texture of current oppositional and constructive activities, re-instituting the social in all its far-reaching diversity and complexity.

Immigration controls do not prevent human movement, nor do they protect citizens. In fact, borders produce many of the social harms they claim to prevent, including loss of life, inhuman and degrading treatment and multiplying inequalities. Nor do borders in any way address the conditions that shape migration processes in the first place - global disparity, the dispossession of lands and livelihoods, climate breakdown: instead, they render people all the more vulnerable to various forms of exploitation and abuse. What we call border abolition is concerned with expanding the freedom both to move and to stay. This article examines the question of immigration controls and work, and discusses how border abolition connects to the struggles of workers for better conditions and wages. It also argues that border abolition is inherently internationalist: it involves a challenge to all the relations that underpin the permanence of borders - vast global inequalities, ongoing processes of dispossession and extraction, and the mirage of 'development'. Anti-capitalists should remember that there can be no socialism in one country, and no progressive labour movement that puts 'natives' first. Because walled workers cannot unite, anti-capitalism is necessarily internationalist, which means committed to border abolition.

There are limits in articulating political struggles around the NHS and the imagined geographies of the nation: struggles based on nostalgia for the post-war welfare state risk co-opting the NHS for an exclusionary, nationalist politics. In tracing the times and spaces of the health service the article asks: when was the NHS? and where is the NHS? The idea of universal healthcare - and changing ideas of nation, state and welfare - are articulated in particular political conjunctures. The whereabouts of the NHS is more than a question of devolution and territorial politics in an increasingly disunited Kingdom; there are also questions of borders, and of workers who are trained and drawn into the NHS from overseas: it is impossible to imagine the NHS without grappling with the ways in which colonialism is integral to the formation of the post-war national welfare state. As both a residual of the national welfare state, and as an emergent site of political and cultural work, the NHS is continuously reworked within dominant politics; while it also offers an emotionally powerful political resource to galvanise popular public support that resists such tendencies. We therefore insist on the need to get to grips with the complex and partial embedding of private interests and market logics within the organisation of healthcare - often framed, rather crudely, in terms of the 'Americanisation' of the NHS. But we also warn of the analytical limits, and political dangers, of framing political struggles around national spatial imaginaries when seeking to 'protect' the NHS in these times of crisis.