With the death of Pope Francis, the world loses not only a church leader but also a moral compass
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Italy after Berlusconi
NICK WRIGHT surveys the damage done by the brazenly nefarious kingpin who fatally undermined Italy's post-war consensus and rehabilitated the far right
The 2022 coalition of (from left) Matteo Salvini, Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, brought the direct descendant of Mussolini’s original Fascist Party to power for the first time since WWII
LYNNE WALSH previews the Bristol Radical History Conference this weekend
Keir Starmer’s £120 million to Sudan cannot cover the government’s complicity in the RSF genocide or atone for the long shadow of British colonialism and imperialism, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
Join the traditional march from Clerkenwell Green, which will bring together countless international workers’ organisations in a statement against the far right
Ecuador’s election wasn’t free — and its people will pay the price under President Noboa
Mountains of research show that hardcore material harms children, yet there are still no simple measures in place
We face austerity, privatisation, and toxic influence. But we are growing, and cannot be beaten
THE old joke, that Italian film directors, irrespective of their politics, are members of the Communist Party, oddly enough never applied to Nanni Moretti whose films are irresistibly amusing, rich, complex in their construction and self-referential in a way that opens his unfailingly Marxist critique of Italian society and Italian capitalism to endless analysis.
Even when seemingly simple entertainment, Morretti’s films always cast a sharply critical eye over the complexities and contradictions of Italian life and politics. An early critic of the corrupting influence of the privately owned mass media, he is committed to a didactic and pedagogical purpose, to change people’s minds.
The opening scenes of his We Have A Pope (2011) take us around a cardinal’s conclave in the Vatican as each priest silently utters a prayer to their God: “Not me lord, not me.”
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The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
The left must confront both far-right bigotry and the undeniable problems the exploitation of migrant workers by the ruling class creates — but there are few lessons from the global left on how to strike this balance, laments NICK WRIGHT
Xenophobic hysteria over the statistically insignificant number of small-boat crossings deliberately conceals how capitalism manipulates population flows for profit — if we can explain that, we’ll beat the right, argues NICK WRIGHT
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
