Archive | Review

Trump’s Operation Metro Surge was a direct attack on our union.

The idea emerged early on—specifically, for example, in the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which reported to the National Security Council—that the fight against the world communist movement and the Soviet Union should no longer be waged solely through “hard” anti-communist propaganda, but, as a 1953 PSB paper states, also through “long-term intellectual movements, which will appeal to intellectuals, including scholars and opinion-forming groups.”

Kennard’s Irregular Army alarmingly exposes the open door to violent, far-right elements in the US army. This should be connected to imperial overreach, argues Reece Goscinski.

JAMES WALSH is moved by a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture, and a plea to work with, not against, the materials and minerals of our world.

This book is a great tale of the lives of working-class New Yorkers.

RON JACOBS welcomes the political lessons for today, about organisation and withdrawal from conflict, made by an erudite and conversational biography.

Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick’s book, “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” offers a powerful critique of how the Israel Lobby subverts democracy at home and ensures U.S. support for Israeli aggression, apartheid, and genocide abroad.

The McCarthy Era and the controversies of the 1960s and 1970s might not seem terribly relevant to a new generation of activists. But the old questions remain, and the left still needs to confront them.

During the 1960s and 1970s, it was an oft-repeated quip that the European left was long on theory and short on practice, while the North American left was strong on action, but allergic to theory.

Countless historians writing Cherokee history have maintained that the majority of Cherokees remained at peace with the American colonists during the so-called American Revolution.

The struggles over what kind of place we inhabit and what kind of people we want to be is a form of general political and social struggle that is central to what socialist consciousness must embrace. It is oppositional to the alienated and exclusionary nationalism that frequently attaches to the toxic form of developmentalism that too often corrupts anticapitalist politics.

The cartoonist’s new book ‘Welcome To Hell’ is a gripping exploration of life in Israeli detention facilities.

Dr. Foster discusses the strong philosophical connections between the ancient Greek philosopher and Marx’s thinking which go back to Marx’s dissertation.

Chris Smalls and his best friend, Derrick Palmer, led the first successful drive to unionize an Amazon warehouse. He believes that labor must decouple from the Democratic Party, as he explains in his new book.

One of the poorest kids in town, Macy was more neglected than abused by her alcoholic father, “the town drunk.” She “found refuge” in her friends’ homes or the living room of her grandmother who taught her to read and write and play checkers. She “took solace” in the nearby public library and the public school and “the women in charge of those sacred places who were also my demigods.”

In the popular 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, the primary antagonist, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep, is the editor-in-chief of the luxury fashion magazine Runway.

JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip.

The ‘Wages of Dreamwork’ is an ambitious and timely contribution to debates on labour, culture and social reproduction under contemporary capitalism. Drawing from autonomist Marxism, feminist theory, critical management studies and the history of avant-garde artistic practice, Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel examine how creativity, desire and the search for meaningful activity have become increasingly central to capitalist accumulation.

In my 25 years as a union organizer and labor educator, my core purpose has been to help working-class people recognize and act on their own power.

I like very much Rahim’s conclusion: When speaking of the communist future, Marx thought that, as in ancient times, creating maximum wealth would cease to be the aim of society. Wealth itself would no longer be defined, as in bourgeois society, as an accumulation of more and more material goods, but conceived instead as a shared development of the needs, capacities, pleasures, and productive powers of individuals, freely associated.