In the 2008 crisis, government subventions were used to fight it – urging consumers to purchase cars and property – but the price of the temporarily recovery was rising state debt with no control. The decline of the core of capitalism, the US economy, will drag in the whole world. By deploying all of its anti-crisis tools accumulated over its history, the by now ‘outworn capitalism’ is not able to curb its serious diseases. We cannot expect a simple replacement of the unipolar world with an effective multipolar one but a very lasting decline. Barbarism is marching on the streets but the suppressed are also preparing to rise up.

István Mészáros wrote already about the structural crisis of capital in the early 1970s with a strong ecological critique. The capital system, points out Mészáros, is not a mechanism that can be logically controlled. On the contrary, the logic of capital overwrites everything, including heath care, education, production and the ecology. The drive for eternal accumulation undermines the conditions of existence. The logic of capital contradicts the ecological approach but a socialist society will be built on social and ecological sustainability.

By examining the systemic contradictions of present day capitalism, Giovanni Arrighi came up with a provocative hypothesis, namely no state could became globally hegemonic after the demise of the hegemony of the US, thus the further operation of global capitalism can be questioned. However, he later he forecast that China will be the next hegemonic power. The profound analysis economic, geostrategic and ecological factors suggest that Arrighi was over optimistic concerning China as its way to hegemony is full of barriers, similarly to the huge obstacles in the way of capitalism to long term existence.

The study outlines the practice of ‘history policy’ of the Czech, Polish and Hungarian political right in the past 20 years. This summary is a reaction to the frontal attack on national history by the Hungarian right wing government, which declared the period 1944-1989 as criminal, expelling it from the thousand year long history of Hungary. Although this phenomenon is not typically Hungarian – there were also attempts in the Czech Republic and Poland for biased reinterpretations – the criminalisation of history is uniquely extreme here.

Analysing social developments from a Marxists point of view is traditional in this journal, while this approach is mentioned in other circles mostly with a negative context, if it is mentioned at all. To hear about Marxism inspired art, for instance films, or about analyses and debates about the link between Marxism and films, we have to go back in time or far away, leaving the Continent arriving in the Preston University, US – from where the author reports.