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The Political Economy of Imperial Relations offers a much needed historical and theoretical intervention into the relationship between Britain and Malaya after the Second World War. It challenges existing accounts and details a strong continuity in this relationship from 1945 until 1960.

Building on recent work on the political and everyday nature of comedy, this paper seeks to situate the genre of stand-up comedy as a form of capitalist social relations. The paper focuses on the emergence of Alternative Comedy in the 1980s in contrast to the comedy of Working Men's Clubs. This cultural development is placed in the context of Marx's understanding of capitalist society and a critique of Adorno's notion of the culture industry. The paper argues that this radical change in British comedy was only made possible by the policies of the British state in the 1980s. In particular, the paper considers the changing ideas comedians had of property, propriety and performance. While Alternative Comedy was highly critical of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, it owed its existence to these modes of state management. The paper contends, then, that comedy can be seen as a form of class struggle and should not be judged by its capacity to be a mere instrument of resistance, or condemned by some spurious inability to achieve this. The paper concludes by considering the development of comedy production since the 1980s.

The paper focuses on Britain's relationship with Malaya shortly before and after its independence from the British Empire. The paper looks at the negotiations concerning the financial settlement prior to independence. Britain sought to keep Malaya within the Sterling Area at all costs, even after de jure convertibility had been achieved, due to its high dollar earning capacity, which remained important due to persistent trade deficits with the US since the end of the Second World War. The paper argues that this settlement, while seemingly very generous for an independent Malaya, was still very much intended to maintain Britain's role within the global economy, to ensure Sterling's status as an international currency, and to support conditions for British economic growth.

Approaches to depoliticisation have tended to focus on its use as a domestic strategy. The purpose of depoliticisation, whether discourse-, rule-, or institution-based, is to distance or limit the political character of a particular issue or policy. Where the literature on depoliticisation tends to be lacking is in its international role. This paper seeks to explore how imperialist policies, that is policies intended to dominate one state by another, have been depoliticized by being channeled through technically- managed or apparently economic institutions. The paper situates an account of depoliticisation in terms of the nature of global capitalist society, and seeks to explore how imperial strategy was depoliticized through the Sterling Area. The paper looks at an episode in British-Malayan relations in which the apolitical character of the Sterling Area is brought into question. The purpose of this strategy of depoliticisation, as with its domestic instances, is to remove accountability from state managers, provide them with greater governing autonomy and to limit social instability, while at the same time trying to remove barriers for capital accumulation on a global scale.

The purpose of this paper is to provide the basis for a theory of imperialism that is consonant with open Marxism. The paper argues that accounts of imperialism heretofore have been contingent and focused on the appearance of imperialism, and spent little time considering its essence as a manifestation of the state's power and desire to maintain the circuit of capital both nationally and internationally. The paper seeks to show that open Marxism is well placed to achieve this, and to move towards an idea of an open Marxist theory of imperialism.

This article develops a critical engagement with the politics of British satire. After first engaging the mainstream critique of satire—that it promotes cynicism and apathy by portraying politicians in stereotypically corrupt terms—we develop a performative approach to comedy as an everyday vernacular of political life. Beyond a focus on 'impact', we suggest that satire can be read as an everyday form of political reflection that performs within a social context. This argument yields an image of Morris, Iannucci and Brooker as important critics of contemporary British politics, a point which we explore through their interventions on media form, political tragedy and political agency.

This article develops a critical engagement with the politics of British satire. After first engaging the mainstream critique of satire—that it promotes cynicism and apathy by portraying politicians in stereotypically corrupt terms—we develop a performative approach to comedy as an everyday vernacular of political life. Beyond a focus on 'impact', we suggest that satire can be read as an everyday form of political reflection that performs within a social context. This yields an image of Morris, Iannucci and Brooker as important critics of contemporary British politics, a point which we explore through their interventions on media form, political tragedy and political agency.

This article seeks to review the recent incarnation of a long-standing engagement in international political economy (IPE) and critical theory between open Marxist perspectives (OMPs) and their critics. The paper aims to identify the enduring relevance of this debate in order to constructively think about the possibility and future of critical social inquiry in our time. It criticises elements on both sides of the debate that no longer serve but rather hinder achieving this objective. We argue that the recent criticisms make a number of important constructive points that could help enhance the explanatory power of OMPs yet still portray the latter uncharitably. We propose to take the emphasis on openness in OMPs seriously as a scholarly and political orientation without immersing the debate with the charges of reductionism, instrumentalism, determinism and functionalism which are frequently raised by various versions of Marxism against one another – often to little avail.