For the first time in living memory, the opportunity to build a mass socialist movement within the UK feels possible, and it could even be on the cusp of obtaining state power. Yet despite the leftward shift of the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, in Wales it’s hard to be filled with much enthusiasm. Here, any hope is met with the daily reality of what living under a Labour government is actually like when the centre-right of the party clings on to power.

Read the full article at New Socialist

The most pressing issue of alternative politics today is how to establish even the possibility of conceptualising (and later actualising) a different way of organising society. When neoliberal capitalism has successfully assimilated into itself all means of cultural production, it becomes almost futile to articulate an alternative. This is why futurist, utopian thinking becomes so necessary: it is a politics of desire, one that seeks to make a clean break between the current political climate and envisage one that is edifying for more than the very privileged few. What we do not have, currently, is the conceptual framework necessary to express, and then realise, that desire.

Full article available in Poetry Wales Spring 2017