Colin Leys

In 1924 Norman Leys shocked liberals by revealing the truth about settler colonialism in a best-selling book called, simply, Kenya. He showed that settler colonialism had nothing to do with a ‘civilising mission’ but meant the ruthless exploitation of African forced labour. In 1910 he had exposed the duplicity of the Governor of Kenya in moving the Maasai out of their traditional land to make way for settlers. The Governor was forced to resign. Leys was demoted and exiled. Leys campaigned tirelessly to try to change public opinion in Britain. He exposed the racism behind popular support for the settlers and was prepared to accept the unpopularity this caused. The book tells the story of what made a medical doctor a champion of African liberation decades before it was fashionable, and why he had the impact he had. With a Foreword by Paul Gilroy, two maps and one photos. Annexes present selected original texts.

Jeremy Corbyn's rapid ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party, driven by a groundswell of popular support particularly among the young, was met at the time by a baffled media. Just where did Jeremy Corbyn come from? In Searching for Socialism, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys argue that it is only by understanding Corbyn's roots in the Bennite Labour New Left's long struggle to transcend the limits of 'parliamentary socialism' and democratise the party, as a precondition for democratising the state, can you understand his surge to become leader of the party. Closely analyzing the forces inside the party aligned against Corbyn's leadership, Panitch and Leys explain what happened between the validation of the Corbyn project in the 2017 election, while advancing an ambitious programme of democratic socialist measures unmatched anywhere since the 1970s, and the electoral defeat amidst the Brexit conjuncture of 2019. They argue that while this defeat marked the farthest point to which the generation formed in the 1970s was able to carry the Labour new left project, it seems unlikely that the new generation of activists will quickly see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party, so as to fundamentally change it. In the face of the contradictions being generated by twenty-first-century capitalism, and the need for discovering and developing new political forms adequate to addressing them, this book is required reading for democratic socialists, not just in Britain but everywhere.

Revealing the British coalition government's plans, this examination demonstrates how a small "policy community" inside and outside the department of health have schemed for 10 years to replace the National Health Service (NHS) with a U. S.-style health care market without informing parliament or the public. While ex-ministers, officials, and the like profit from lucrative positions in private health companies, the population must cope with the increasing health care costs and the diminishing quality of care. With accounts from NHS patients and doctors, the key strategies of implementation are uncovered and the companies involved--their lobby, their businesses, their fortunes, and, in some cases, their crimes--exposed.

"He has this wonderful and rare capacity to delineate the most complex of arguments in the most limpid prose. He never takes refuge in jargon. He demolishes pretentiousness. He is disarmingly honest. He hits you between the eyes. He is not afraid to be a lone voice as, increasingly, nowadays he is, the still small voice of humane sanity in an increasingly barbarous and market-oriented world. He makes immediate sense to anybody voting marginally to the left of Genghis Khan, Mrs. Thatcher or Newt Gingrich." —John Lonsdale, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. This book is a "stock-taking" of development theory at the end of the 20th century. It argues that the assumptions on which development theory has rested since the 1950s no longer hold. The postcolonial "third world" for which development theory was originally developed has fractured into increasingly diverse regions, while the end of the postwar regime of regulated international trade and capital movements has drastically curtailed the scope for state economic intervention. A much broader based, more historical and more explicitly political theoretical effort is now called for.

When Namibia gained its independence in 1990 after 23 years of war, most of the eleven Namibians whose life histories make up this book were in their mid-thirties. To that point their whole adult lives had been lived in the struggle, more than half of them in exile. Few of them owned anything. None held prominent jobs. Most had endured hardship, hunger, sickness and fear, and witnessed terrible cruelty and suffering. All had lost family members or friends. Yet their outlook was triumphant and optimistic and their stories are full of enthusiasm, energy, determination and purpose. When you read their stories you are not surprised that they have since become well known in their chosen fields. Yet when they told these stories most of them were not well known. They just happened to be people we came to know and like in the course of our work (Brown as a journalist and development consultant, Leys as a social science researcher) and whom we asked if they would tell us their stories. They tell a story of a country as a whole during those years, a story of how a whole generation matured in the struggle, becoming skilled, disciplined, cosmopolitan and tough.

With the globalisation of the capitalist economy the economic role of national governments is now largely confined to controlling inflation and facilitating home-grown market performance. This represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between politics and economics; it has been particularly marked in Britain, but is relevant to many other contexts. Market-Driven Politics is a multi-level study, moving between an analysis of global economic forces through national politics to the changes occurring week by week in two fields of public life that are both fundamentally important and familiar to everyone.television broadcasting and health care. Public services like these play an important role, because they both affect the legitimacy of the government and are targets for global capital. This book provides an original analysis of the key processes of commodification of public services, the conversion of public-service workforces into employees motivated to generate profit, and the role of the state in absorbing risk. Understanding the dynamics of each of these trends becomes critical not just for the analysis of market-driven politics but also for the longer-term defence of democracy and the collective values on which it depends.

This trenchant account of the last twenty-five years of the British Labour Party argues that Tony Blair's modernizing tendency was profoundly mistaken in asserting that the only alternative to traditional social democracy and narrow parliamentarianism was an acceptance of neo-liberalism. In blaming the Labour left, rather than the social-democratic right for the party's years in the electoral wilderness, the modernizers rejected the creativity and energy which the party's New Left had mobilized, and without which their own professed aim of democratic renewal was unlikely to be realized. In this new edition, the authors, in collaboration with David Coates, review the debate in light of the Blair government's first three years in office.

Students of armed liberation struggle should find much to challenge received wisdom. It took 23 years of armed struggle before Namibia could gain its independence from South Africa in March 1990. SWAPO's victory was remarkable in the face of an overwhelmingly superior enemy. How this came about, and at what cost,is the subject of this study which is based on unpublished documents and extensive interviews with a large range of the key activists in the struggle. The study should be of interest to everyone concerned with southern Africa. North America: Ohio U Press