James Baldwin was born one hundred years ago in Harlem, New York, 2 August 1924.

The majority of theatre broadly falls under the umbrella of dramatic theatre. It will have a linear plotline, actors who wholly inhabit well-developed characters, structured, thought-out themes, etc. Bertolt Brecht, the German Marxist playwright, would call it escapism.

The recent visit of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan has sharply increased the prospect of war in the region.

Capitalism is a system that has an innate tendency to get into a cul-de-sac of crisis, and the only way it knows for coming out of crisis is by further exploitation of the working class.

The dog-whistle calls of “Freedom for Cuba” that reverberated round the world on 11 July, emanating from a mix of forces in Cuba, which were carefully manipulated and crafted by the CIA and U.S. anti-Cuban forces abroad, shed a great deal of light not only on U.S. foreign policy hypocrisy but on left-wing hypocrisy and impotence, both here in Ireland and elsewhere.

On the right, identity politics is leveraged to deliberately divide and fracture workers, pitting them against each other, most frequently on the basis of race, gender, religion, or nationality.

It is from the latter source (also entitled “David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles”) that much of this present volume has been drawn, or adapted into book form, covering a range of topics, from surplus value, the history of neoliberal capitalism, alienation and climate change to political responses to the covid-19 pandemic.

Friedrich Engels, whose 200th birthday falls on 28 November, had a very personal connection with Ireland. Soon after being sent to help run the family textile factory in Manchester in 1842 he met twenty-year-old Mary Burns, daughter of an Irish dyer.