Archive | Review

“This provocative set of essays challenges many conventional assumptions and assessments about contemporary global capitalism. The comprehensive analysis of war and geopolitics, the political economy of international trade and finance, the struggle of different powers to control nature and the planet with its ecological and distributive implications, makes it essential reading.” —Jayati Ghosh

Every May 10th marks Afro-Venezuelan Day and commemorates the 1795 Coro Rebellion. The May 1795 revolutionary events are the centerpiece of Enrique S. Rivera’s The Untold History of Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation and the Anti-Slavery Revolution.

Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings has just been published in English translation by Penguin in its series of classic international literature. It comes 60 years after the original German novella appeared. The translator is Lucy Jones.

In 2017, Japanese Marx scholar Kohei Saito published ‘Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism’, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize the following year.

‘Beyond Capital’ helps us to understand why capitalism continues to persist despite endless crises, by drawing our attention to the messiness of human beings and the multiple circuits that reproduce capitalism as a complex and contradictory totality.

Much has been written about climate change or, to use a more truthful term, global warming. But not much has been written about “Organising Responses to Climate Change,” which is the title of Daniel Nyberg, Christopher Wright and Vanessa Bowden’s new book.

This new edition of Marx’s 1875 ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ comes with a few surprises in translation for Marxists who have previously interpreted it as justification for the continuation of wage-labour and commodity production, under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the ‘first phase’ of socialism/communism.

Michael & Debby Smith write about 30 years of living with a parrot whose intelligence and emotional awareness challenges our human-centric world view.

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike. That marked the beginning of a wave of job actions that would reach West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Los Angeles, and other cities and states before returning to Chicago in 2019.

BRUNI DE LA MOTTE recommends a classic of East German literature that gives a human face to difficult political choices.

Already a century ago, political thinkers and philosophers were confronted with an apparent paradox: the failure of revolution.

Would Florida’s Fascistic Governor Ban This Play and Burn the Script?

David Gespass has been on the editorial board of the National Lawyers Guild Review for over twenty-years including several years as Editor in Chief. He is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. David is doing his best to retire from the active practice of law with only moderate success.

Tariq Ali’s new book examines the disconnect between Churchill’s popular image and the larger context of his life and times.

In the spring of 1860, wealthy businessman Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could illegally kidnap and ship Africans from Africa to Mobile, Alabama, without being detected by federal officials.

History doesn’t happen because a small group of people share a complete political identity; it happens because masses of people shed their timidity, risk their reputations, livings, freedom, and lives, and let the actuality of revolution guide their every move.

Jonathan Crary’s new book excoriates the digital world of late capitalism.

Readers of the first volume of Capital sometimes mistakenly conceptualize capitalism in terms of a relationship between workers and a single capitalist. In doing so they fail to notice that for Marx capitalist society is not one big capitalist enterprise.

There is much more here than can be covered in a brief review, including interesting discussions of language, laughter, neo-mercantile capitalism, digital information and abstract nature, a correlate to abstract labor.

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.