Conter speaks to National Education Union (NEU) rep and Northumberland branch officer Alex Snowdon about the fight against an early return to schools.

UBI has arrived as a fashionable policy response to the crisis triggered by the pandemic. But is it a technocratic fix rather than class politics?

After VE day, when the war was over, a different kind of battle had to be fought. It involved not bullets and battalions but solidarity and strikes. Cailean Ghallagher draws comparisons with the present pandemic crisis, and the need to organise against hypocritical politicians and bosses who praise on one hand and take with the other.

Liberal voices in the media are preaching that a new social settlement will emerge from the pandemic crisis. Lorcan Mullen argues that the moment is in fact a dangerous one, with threats to the working class multiplying on many fronts.

In our latest piece examining the life and political contributions of Neil Davidson, a pioneering Scottish Marxist theorist who passed away earlier this month, George Kerevan examines some of the intellectual debates he entered into with rival and friendly thinkers.

In our first article remembering the life and contribution of socialist activists and theorist Neil Davidson, Raymond Morell looks at the movements and debates in which he was a key protagonist.

Expressions of mass public solidarity have been a major feature of the pandemic era. Though these are complex moods, subject to manipulation by neoliberal forces, socialists should take courage from them.

Mass unemployment is back, and with it, Ben Wray argues, socialists must press the demand for a new kind of full employment.

In the follow-up to his article on the need for alternative economic recovery groups, Sean Baille proposes what these forums would look like and drafts a provisional programme of economic recovery.

Economist Michael Roberts dismisses claims that the economic recovery will be rapid following lockdown. The damage will be deep and structural.

Ruling elites are already debating among themselves what the new economic reality should be. Working class people should establish their own recovery plan, and organise for its implementation.

Economist James Meadway warns that cuts will be only one form of capitalist response to the economic chaos triggered by the pandemic and lockdown. The system will change in complex and contradictory ways, and socialists will require a sophisticated response.

The interests of the elite are in full view, argues David Jamieson. And the Scottish Government is determined to declare its allegiances proudly.

In the second part of a series of short essays, Lewis Akers addresses the failures of the ‘institutional left‘ to address the latest crisis of capitalism.

Coronavirus has upended the world of work and further exposed the failing UK welfare system. Allan Young argues the time for a Universal Basic Income has arrived, and it should form an important element of the left’s response.

Economist Alfredo Saad-Filho argues that neoliberalism has left humanity dangerously exposed to a predictable, and predicted, threat

As the first part of a short series examining the current crisis of capitalism, Lewis Akers argues the end of a specific phase of capitalism is not the same thing as an existential challenge to the system itself.

Danny McGregor examines developments in the run-up to the Covid-19 pandemic, and argues that, regardless of recent jumps in support for governments, the new reality will place more pressure on existing fractures.

The Covid-19 pandemic has suspended economic and social life. Ben Wray says British authorities are not thinking expansively enough about the consequences. We need a planned economy now to meet essential needs.

The structure of the economy after decades of economic liberalisation and a decade of austerity is not fit to deal with the social fallout of a global pandemic. David Jamieson looks at the possibility of popular responses.

A hundred years on from Rosa Luxemburg’s murder Stella Rooney argues that her ‘Reform or Revolution’, one of the first Marxist critiques of reformist currents within the socialist movement, is as relevant today as ever. A version of this article first appeared in the volume 1 of Conter.

In our latest letter from abroad, voice.wales journalist SC Cook tells us that the anger concentrating in parts of Wales is being underestimated by those who think Brexit is its highest expression. With a general election on, will Corbyn’s message of transformation resonate in the Valleys?

A motion at the Labour conference has placed the defence of free movement back on the agenda. Sai Englert argues that entirely correct criticism of EU ‘free movement‘ should not lead the left towards an anti-immigration orientation.

On an historic day for the global climate movement, David Swanson argues socialists must involve themselves in the movement by appealing to its most radical impulses and repudiating retrograde interventions from the elite.