When I was a young child, I would sometimes stay a weekend in the summer holidays with my cousins – who were of a similar age – on their farm. I grew up in north London: all concrete and cars, and fumes and arcades, and long black railings and grey school playgrounds, and rising tower blocks and rushing roads. Looking back, the farm of my uncle and aunt couldn’t have been more than a thirty- or forty-minute drive from where I lived in the city; the farm itself was situated only a few fields away from the motorway you would need to traverse to get there. Hardly the back and beyond.
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Tony McKenna’s journalism has been featured by Al Jazeera, Salon, The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, New Internationalist, The Progressive, New Statesman and New Humanist. His books include Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective (Macmillan), The Dictator, the Revolution, the Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin (Sussex Academic Press), Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art (Zero Books), The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution (Bloomsbury) and The Face of the Waters (Vulpine). He can be reached on twitter at @MckennaTony
