Over recent years, it seems ‘radical’ has become a dirty word. In the wake of the anniversary of 1968, and with books and films galore about the romance and failures of revolutionary life and thought, it seems we’re comfortable with radicalism as an object of nostalgia, but less willing to understand its contemporary legacy – and its trivialisation.

Culture Wars is exploring radicalism – past, present and future – in an attempt to understand a lived tradition as well as how certain ideas filter through the culture. Having focused on past ‘Radical Thinkers’ and the legacy of 1968, touring from Iran to Haiti, investigating the role of ideology and demise of the traditional Left, we turn towards two contemporary variants: ‘political Islam’ and the environmentalist movement. These reviews and essays constitute a critical investigation of what shapes contemporary attitudes towards the future.

The End of Left and Right?

The end of Left and Right, if it has occurred, needs to be taken seriously. It amounts to no less than the collapse of a way of looking at, and doing, ‘politics’.

The Gates of Eden are rusting!

Don Eales recalls the political power of popular song, and asks where the voices of challenge and dissent are today.

Snow in Istanbul

Once people internalise the ideology of passivity and infectiveness, they cease to be able to understand themselves as properly political subjects.

Organised defeat? - here comes everybody

Shirky and other digital evangelists argue the rise of social media is actually a severe challenge to the elite’s hegemony and authority.

Mummy dearest

Hildegart’s tragedy may well come to occupy a niche of bizarre but instructive prominence in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

Participation nation

As a humble citizen participating in one of these schemes, you cannot have faith that every individual will respect your views, since those who make the final decisions are not accountable to you.

Communist kitsch without conviction

Is a work of art that forges its content out of the everyday, and shows its epic potential, not infinitely preferable to fantasy tales from Middle Earth?

Psychoanalyse the psychoanalysts?

Director Astra Taylor has done a fine job with an impossible brief. Zizek is a hard man to film, and it is even harder to convey his ideas. The movie manages both; its form belies its sophistication.

For the love of God

Aside from the moral posture led by Government, the general attitude towards ‘radical views’ today looks like the self-indulgent smile given to a small puppy naughtily walking all over the new family sofa.

Zizek, partially digested

Zizek is wondering how we can capture the progressive potential that was recognised in the working class when the working class no longer has a political existence.

The excess of the left in Iran

His history reveals that the left failed precisely because of an excess of ideas and fractious allegiances to every brand of revolutionary Marxism going: Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism and Castroism.

Thermal mass housing

A welcome breath of fresh air in a climate that collocates any discussion about alternative approaches to the environment with pointless schemes such as ‘offsetting’ your carbon footprint.

What does the ruling class do when it rules?

It is key that Therborn’s historicisation of the class character of the state remains valid, even if we are forced to consider how the situation now looks thirty years on.

On Ideology

For all his talk of developing Marxism, Althusser is intent on rebuilding a new, overly deterministic system, where ideology, and in particular the educational state apparatus take on primary roles.

The Emergence of Social Space

Ross constructs a highly persuasive argument that the 1871 commune, with Rimbaud’s poetry at the centre, should be observed from a spatial critique, with some startlingly comprehensible results.