Archive | Review

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’

While the framework of “vectoralism” proposed by McKenzie Wark in Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? proves inadequate for understanding contemporary political economy, the concept of value chains developed by Intan Suwandi (Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism) offers a promising alternative.

This article discusses Susan Ferguson’s Women and Work and how it advances contemporary debates about social reproduction within and beyond Marxist feminism. In particular, I emphasise its call for avoiding hierarchising struggles against oppression and those against exploitation, and for centring a dual-terrains approach. – Maud Perrier

‘The increased atomization of society and associated political economy of capitalism justifies the logic of reductionism’. – Richard Lewontin

“Except for Palestine” is a remarkable little book. Within it, the authors Hill and Plitnick present the larger picture that the self-proclaimed progressive “universal” values of the United States are argued for in many troubled spots of the world, except for Palestine.

A new book from UT Austin research professor Raj Patel and UC San Francisco physician Rupa Marya argues that our bodies, our society, and our planet are inflamed.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) was one of the most inspirational figures of the 20th century. But most people know the writer and activist for her determination to overcome the barriers facing people with physical disabilities in her lifetime, not for her equally fierce determination to replace American capitalism with a system in which the workers control the means of production.

When the big shutdown finally takes hold in the Bakken, the frackers will have gone and most wells abandoned, and people in the region will still have to deal with the illegal trash dumps, polluted streams, health problems, and other unfortunate effects of the boom.

Two new books trace anti-police uprisings to the urban riots of the Civil Rights era. But as twenty million people took to the streets in 2020, why did so few pick up a brick? And would the movement to which they belong be better off if they had?