The Mask Is Off: Bukele’s Prison State

Tom Stevenson, 11 September 2025

Calling himself the ‘coolest dictator in the world’, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized the monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s...

Read more about The Mask Is Off: Bukele’s Prison State

Biff-Bang: Tariffs before Trump

Ferdinand Mount, 14 August 2025

It is the least convincing cliché of the age that ‘globalisation has passed its sell-by date.’ On the contrary, tariff mania seems like a frantic attempt to resurrect the past, not unlike those nostalgic...

Read more about Biff-Bang: Tariffs before Trump

In Evin Prison

Amir Ahmadi Arian, 14 August 2025

More than an hour after the bombing of Evin Prison, the guards finally came out of their offices. From behind a locked door they began shouting at the prisoners in the women's ward. ‘See?’ they yelled....

Read more about In Evin Prison

Berlin Diary

Adam Shatz, 14 August 2025

Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief...

Read more about Berlin Diary

With the proscription of Palestine Action early in July, the question of what support for a terrorist group means has become urgent. Very few people in Britain supported al-Qaida; many more support the...

Read more about Short Cuts: What is the meaning of support?

For a long time, it had seemed that Assad might outlast everything. Then, almost overnight, it was over. And with his fall came the possibility, however fragile, of accountability. Yet high-ranking officials...

Read more about ‘We were tricked’: Assad and the Alawites

Graeber seems to have had most fun as an outsider, a movement anthropologist wending his way among anticapitalist militants, arguing and taking field notes. He would arrive with his notepad, ready to...

Read more about Baseline Communism: David Graeber’s Innovations

I believe there is a moral case for disarming the machinery of war that is killing innocent civilians in Gaza with the complicity of the British government. I believe that damaging and destroying weapons...

Read more about Short Cuts: Who’s afraid of Palestine Action?

Short Cuts: Gaza under Siege

Tareq Baconi, 10 July 2025

Humanitarian aid has long served as cover for Israeli crimes. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying force is charged with caring for the population under its control. Yet rather than compel Israel...

Read more about Short Cuts: Gaza under Siege

Austerity is a choice. The protection of the family at the expense of other ways of living is a choice. The transfer of public wealth to private wealth is a choice – it’s a choice to make housing a...

Read more about ‘I appreciate depreciation’: Dynastic Capitalism

Short Cuts: Ready for War?

Tom Stevenson, 26 June 2025

The standard assessment of the British armed forces is that they have become ‘hollowed out’. The army has too few tanks and too little artillery to form the armoured divisions its own plans demand....

Read more about Short Cuts: Ready for War?

TV Meets Fruit Machine: Faragist TikTok

William Davies, 26 June 2025

In my own For You journey into Faragism, I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of some form or other: retiring to live off passive income or emigrating to a less broken...

Read more about TV Meets Fruit Machine: Faragist TikTok

Diary: Gulf Contracts

Peter Talbot, 26 June 2025

In aerospace, engineering, technology, construction, health and defence, the rush is on to grab as many fat contracts as possible. Companies from these sectors, and others, are jumping into bed with regimes...

Read more about Diary: Gulf Contracts

Diary: Rape Crisis Centres

Lili Owen Rowlands, 5 June 2025

There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an experience that has been buried for decades. Part of the work is giving practical information,...

Read more about Diary: Rape Crisis Centres

The United States was born in war and has waged a war of some sort in every year of its existence. Silicon Valley knows that war is good for business. And many of its most powerful people want us to stop...

Read more about Collective Property, Private Control: Defence Tech

Universities’ reliance on international students is only the most recent attempt to solve a broader problem, one that continues to dog British policymaking when it comes to major social and cultural...

Read more about Short Cuts: University Finances

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Are​ we, as Richard Seymour suggests, ‘in the early days of a new fascism’? In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour argues that in trying to understand the new far right, we have been looking in the wrong...

Read more about Is this fascism?

Behind this anti-establishment mood, which has rankled in British politics for many years now, lies the nastier promise of Faragism. It is not only that his voters are angry or disenfranchised, though...

Read more about Short Cuts: Labour at the Cliff Edge