Archive | Review

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.

In exploring the lives of the revolutionary socialist feminists of the past, Red Valkyries demonstrates the value and importance of feminism in the 21st century, argues Rachel Collett

Jon Melrod brings back to us a vital moment in the history of the U.S. labor movement, a moment in which the demographic transformation the workforce but also the lingering memory of 1960s social movements and unrest, raised the possibility of radicals racing to the front of class conflicts.

A new collection of essays provides important sceptical discussions of the impact of robotics and AI on the economy, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide To a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso 2022) and Climate Change is Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso 2022) are Verso’s two most recent “guides” to combating the climate crisis.

Maano Ramutsindela, Frank Matose, and Tafadzwa Mushonga: “The book places African states and their behaviors towards African people in conservation spaces within the global environmental agendas of powerful states and well-funded conservation organizations. It interprets conservation as an ideology referencing African landscapes without people. Such an ideology separates people from their biophysical and cultural milieus, leading to conservation violence authorized by states against their citizens.”

Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin’s poetry in Chicana on Fire (2022) is testimonial and collective.

Nicolas Graham’s book on forces of production and fossil-fuel capitalism gives an important analysis of why fundamental change is needed to solve the climate crisis, finds John Clarke

Without class struggle the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them.

In his latest book, Socialism or Extinction: The Meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, Martin Empson neatly lays out his argument as to why the climate crisis cannot be solved under capitalism.

Covid-19 and the Structural Crises of our Time (CSCT) is a very timely and important book, written by Mah-Hui Lim, a one-time sociology professor who went on to work in international banking, and Michael Heng Siam-Hang, a former professor of management studies.