
My attentions have largely been elsewhere: social media, helping run the Counterfire website and, most importantly, activism across a number of groups - Stop the War, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Coalition of Resistance and recently also Save Newcastle Libraries - in Tyneside. Since September I've been back in full-time teaching and there's no doubt that full-time work is the enemy of frequent blogging! My long commute is good for tweeting and emailing, but engaging in proper writing while travelling is a bridge too far for me.
But I like to think there's still a decent end-of-year selection here. It's a very diverse bunch in terms of content - I've never settled on a distinctive niche as a blogger (which may be a weakness) - though of course commitment to revolutionary socialist politics runs through it all. Austerity, imperialism and the left are the closest you will get to unifying themes.
A number of these pieces were originally written for Counterfire then I re-posted them here; a few were the other way around; a few appeared only at Luna17. The more sharply polemical items - like those responding to Norman Finkelstein (on BDS), Mehdi Hasan (on issues arising from Galloway's Bradford West victory) and Derek Wall (on left-wing sectarianism) - haven't been published elsewhere.
Finally - and on a sobering note - I think only one of my blog posts this year can be regarded as having significantly influenced a specific debate. My reply to Mehdi Hasan did the rounds in the twittersphere and notched up vastly more hits than almost anything else I posted this year. There was a tangible sense of it shifting the terms of online debate around Hasan's original argument. Otherwise, however, it's a case of 'having no illusions but not being disillusioned' (to steal a phrase from Sam Gindin, writing about the US trade union movement in Socialist Register 2013, which I will shortly be reviewing).
So, here is my selection from Luna17 in 2012. Click on the title to read more:
So, here is my selection from Luna17 in 2012. Click on the title to read more:
What is sectarianism? (April)
Trade unions: patterns and prospects (September)
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