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In 1990, A. Sivanandan published an essay subtitled 'The hokum of New Times', which took aim at Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques' theorisation of Thatcherism and the neoliberal revolution. Central to this criticism was Sivanandan's decade-long tracing of the 'new circuits of imperialism' that had been engendered by a new global division of labour and hierarchies of production, technological change and the domestic fall-out of such processes in forms of British state racism and racialised forms of exploitation. Although Hall's work has diffused into the field of international political economy, Sivanandan's take has largely been neglected. This article, developed from a presentation at the 'New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference', King's College, London, October 2022, will briefly return to the Hall and Sivanandan debate to help foreground Sivanandan's international political economy and also highlight how it took racism and imperialism to be integral to the neoliberal order in Britain and beyond. It will show how Sivanandan's anti-racist and anti-imperial international political economy can help us to frame and understand the current crisis of neoliberalism from the vantage points of 'over here, and over there', and how thinking with and through international political economy must be at the heart of contemporary anti-racism's address of the current crisis of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan 'We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead' in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a re-thinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, the Black Panther Party (BPP) seemingly went through an ideological transformation. Between 1968 and 1970 the Party had forged strong national and international solidarity and support through a politics of revolutionary armed self-defence and a commitment to anti-imperialism. Yet, in late 1970 as the sands of both national and geo-politics shifted, and as allies, both at home and abroad, became less supportive, the Panthers found themselves on less solid ground. Black Panther leader Huey P Newton, realizing this shift in the political landscape, and the futility of attempting an armed insurgency against the state without widespread support, now steered the BPP towards the idea of 'Survival Pending Revolution'. This saw the Panthers abandon the idea of immediate armed insurrection against the state and reorient towards a focus on their community engagement 'survival programs'. This article argues that Newton's orientation of the BPP away from armed insurrection and towards survival pending revolution was not simply a pragmatic choice of strategy, but rather based on a theorization of what he dubbed reactionary intercommunalism. Moreover, the article suggests that the history of neo-liberal globalization can be complicated and expanded by viewing Newton as one of the first theorists of neo-liberal globalization, and BPP survival programs as one of the first responses to the on-coming era of neo-liberalism in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the writings of Lenin, the guerrilla activity of Che Guevara, the anti-racism of the Black Panther Party and the Third World’s plan for a New International Economic Order, the idea of imperialism and the politics of anti-imperialism were a mainstay of political vernacular throughout most of the twentieth century. Yet, with the onset of neo-liberal globalisation in the Global North and, most importantly, in the Global South the idea of imperialism has seemingly disappeared or been deemed irrelevant. This special issue draws on a range of theoretical contributions that use the prism of imperialism to explore the strengths and limits of classical Marxist theories of imperialism; the relationship between Marxist, post-colonial and de-colonial approaches; imperialism and social movement theory; and the strengths of returning to ideas of Black Marxism and Pan-Africanism in the midst of contemporary neo-imperialism. These theoretical debates are in turn complemented by the collection exploring the idea of imperialism from different empirical vantage points in the Global North (Europe, US) and Global South (Africa, the Caribbean, Cuba and Kashmir). The issue thus provides both theoretically and empirically innovative interventions on how we should conceptualise and approach the idea of imperialism in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In November 1970, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton gave a lecture at Boston College where he introduced his theory of intercommunalism. Newton re-articulated Marxist theories of imperialism through the lens of the Black liberation struggle and argued that imperialism had entered a new phase called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’. Newton’s theory of intercommunalism offers nothing less than a proto-theorisation of what we have come to call neo-liberal globalisation and its effects on what W. E. B. Du Bois had seen as the racialisation of modern imperialism. Due to the initial historical dismissal of the Black Panther Party’s political legacy, Newton’s thought has largely been neglected for the past 40 years. This paper revisits Newton’s theory of intercommunalism, with the aim of achieving some form of epistemic justice for his thought, but also to highlight how Newton’s recasting of imperialism as reactionary intercommunalism provides critical insight into the rise of Trumpism in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]