Archive | Review

Garcia’s series highlights the imposition of racism as an insidious paradigm, defining who is, and what makes, an “American.”

What passes for Critical Theory today is nugatory; it is philosophically weak, and politically compromised. In Thompson’s words, the project has ‘abandoned the search for the real mechanisms and sources of social power’.

This marvelous work of history is a must read for anyone trying to understand the dynamics of slavery in the United States in the pre-Civil War period. Walter Johnson locates slavery as playing a central part in the development of a particularly racialised and oppressive capitalism in the slave states.

A history of the left in the Labour Party highlights the need for a strong extra-parliamentary movement, argues Chris Nineham.

VA’s Jeanette Charles reviews Maroon Comix, a book that tells the tales of maroons’ fight for freedom and self-determination and their legacy for today’s struggles.

Faith that environmental catastrophe can best be avoided by technological gadgetry rather than a change in social relationships received a big shot in the arm with the May 2018 publication of Energy: A Human History by prolific author Richard Rhodes. Rhodes profoundly misses the connection between technology and class relationships when he presents nuclear power as a socially neutral source of energy. Rather than pointing to a solution for climate change, his radiation denial mirrors Donald Trump’s climate denial in its derogation of scientific research and its personality attacks.

Leading Earth System scientists warn: “The Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions.… Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System.”

A review of, ‘Sorry to Bother You’.

The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, has high praise for historian Robin D.G. Kelly’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Depression.

Moseley’s interpretation establishes the internal coherence of Marx’s theory, thereby creating a more solid basis for its further development on our own, Marxist, terms. Stated differently, there is no need to import unrealistic, abstract-ideal concepts from other economic theories in an attempt to “modernize” Marxist economics.

Karl Polanyi’s reciprocal, redistributive substantive-socialism; ‘Corbynomics’ as fair and caring socialism.

All those who like me have learned much from Paul Sweezy’s down-to-hearth, pragmatic but scientifically loyal Marxist approach will be delighted by Tom Mayer’s review of the book written by Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, editors, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964