Archive | Review

On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.

From the end of May until a few days before Remembrance Day (November 11) flags at Canadian public buildings were flown at half-mast. This unusual occurrence was in recognition of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves containing the remains of Indigenous children on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools.

Max Ajl’s ‘People’s Green New Deal’ is a brutal reminder for the American left that even the most celebrated and progressive developments in American politics are still simply American politics, in other words they are a politics for America, and America first.

There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings.

Sometimes, the greatest theoretical works come to us in the form of lectures rather than systemic books. This is the case with Karl Radek, whose lectures on the Chinese Revolution have recently been published by the Historical Materialism book series.

Tony McKenna’s new book is an important defence of Marxism, against thinkers who have confused and obscured its revolutionary core, argues Chris Nineham

Documentary about the impact of the McCarthy era on African Americans in the film industry.

The 25 page pamphlet lays out concisely and effectively why we cannot look to heads of government under a capitalist system to come to an agreement on phasing out fossils fuels, cutting emissions and creating a more sustainable economy. 

More than just bear it, capitalists today demand we love our exploitation. Sara Bennett reviews a new book on the new emotional demands on workers, arguing it aid us in our understanding of modern class relations.

In a review of a new book about the ‘Professional Managerial Class’, James Foley says middle-class activists dress up conformity as a war on cultural backwardness.

We need a model of ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, avoids the costs of private exploitation by individual firms, and does not slip into authoritarian forms of state control.

In this book Ajl covers most of the big questions facing rational, ecosocialist design: nationalization vs localism, modernization vs degrowth, techno-scientific solutions vs indigenous knowledge.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the update of his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and the financial motivations behind the U.S. new cold war on China and Russia.

Everything is always different, yes, fine–but everything is really different now.

Every thuggish movement needs its cover of respectability and even scholarly, theoretical pillars.

Healy’s exquisite book applies several recent frameworks of alienation to two groups of workers–IT workers and academics.

One of the most astonishing books that Walter Rodney–the Guyanese revolutionary and historian–ever wrote was published several years after he was assassinated on 13 June 1980.

Re-reading Guy Endore’s “forgotten masterpiece” it is striking how this novel from 1934, long-noted for its shocking and sophisticated account of slavery and resistance in the lead-up to the Haitian Revolution, is also a penetrating account of the ethical and political deformity and alienation perpetuated by the ideology of “whiteness.”

A caricatured account of Althusser’s intellectual trajectory might read something like this…

‘A Defense of Judgement’