Archive | Review

For the past several decades, the media has severely manipulated the question of gangs and their socio-economic origins. John C. Quicker and Akil S. Batani-Khalfani’s new book, “Before Crips: Fussin’, Cussin’, and Discussin’” among South Los Angeles Juvenile Gangs, exposes the mainstream stigmas and half-truths surrounding gangs.

In exploring the lives of the revolutionary socialist feminists of the past, Red Valkyries demonstrates the value and importance of feminism in the 21st century, argues Rachel Collett

Jon Melrod brings back to us a vital moment in the history of the U.S. labor movement, a moment in which the demographic transformation the workforce but also the lingering memory of 1960s social movements and unrest, raised the possibility of radicals racing to the front of class conflicts.

A new collection of essays provides important sceptical discussions of the impact of robotics and AI on the economy, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide To a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso 2022) and Climate Change is Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso 2022) are Verso’s two most recent “guides” to combating the climate crisis.

Maano Ramutsindela, Frank Matose, and Tafadzwa Mushonga: “The book places African states and their behaviors towards African people in conservation spaces within the global environmental agendas of powerful states and well-funded conservation organizations. It interprets conservation as an ideology referencing African landscapes without people. Such an ideology separates people from their biophysical and cultural milieus, leading to conservation violence authorized by states against their citizens.”

Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin’s poetry in Chicana on Fire (2022) is testimonial and collective.

Nicolas Graham’s book on forces of production and fossil-fuel capitalism gives an important analysis of why fundamental change is needed to solve the climate crisis, finds John Clarke

Without class struggle the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them.

In his latest book, Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, Martin Empson neatly lays out his argument as to why the climate crisis cannot be solved under capitalism.

Covid-19 and the Structural Crises of our Time (CSCT) is a very timely and important book, written by Mah-Hui Lim, a one-time sociology professor who went on to work in international banking, and Michael Heng Siam-Hang, a former professor of management studies.

In the best sense of the word a journalist is someone who brings to the public sphere accurate, well sourced information, and rigorous analysis.

In Palestine, those attempts at ethnic cleansing, a necessity for the Zionists in regard to their demographic fears of majority Arab/Palestinian population, came up against the post-WWII decolonization movements rising from the liberal rhetoric of the western powers and the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union.

It is a testament to the power of On Necrocapitalism: A Plague Journal that a set of interventions written across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic should remain so potent and resonant as we approach its fourth year.

Bernard D’Mello’s India After Naxalbari: Unfinished History is simultaneously a history of India’s political, economic and social development since the British Raj to the present; a historical retracing of the different attempts to build a revolutionary movement in India; and a political intervention into contemporary debates within the Indian left.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a group of remarkably talented left-wing intellectuals (almost all men) emerged in Britain, focusing both upon the radical interpretation and development of the core disciplines of the humanities: literature and history, and to a lesser extent, politics and philosophy; and also upon socialist political activism.

The tradition of concise introductions to Marxist theory is a long one, stretching back perhaps to Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Alienation, Spectacle and Revolution enters stridently into this tradition with an acerbic, tremendously illuminating, and urgent style.

Robert Hennelly’s ‘Stuck Nation’ is a vigorous and well-researched analysis of the exploitative and racist nature of US capitalism, but falls short of a convincing way to be rid of it, argues John Clarke

Marcello Musto’s anthology of ‘Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation’ is both comprehensive and concise, containing within the span of 100 pages the three decades long development of the theory through more than a dozen published works and posthumously published manuscripts.

Two new books trace the history of global inaction over the climate emergency, and seek to identify the culprits.