Archive | Review

An excellent history of the sixteenth-century radical Thomas Müntzer brings the radical Reformation and the dawn of the modern era into focus, finds Dominic Alexander.

An establishment friendly history of the first Labour government, in 1924, shows how willingly a Labour leadership can be captured by the ruling class, finds John Westmoreland.

After his brief space journey in July 2021, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos said, with disarming frankness, “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this.”

Archeology has always been a political science. Since its inception the field has attempted to trace our lineage as a species along the lines of identity, territory and culture. Though often portrayed as a discipline slightly closer to the hard sciences than historiography, it is much closer to its distant cousin in the social sciences than towards anything resembling an empirical practice.

Primitive accumulation is the historical process through which capitalists stole their wealth or took it by force. Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus has contributed an excellent new book on this history, covering the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism in depth while demonstrating its continuing relevance to the modern world..

Grace Blakeley is a media star of the radical left-wing of the British labour movement. She is a columnist for the left-wing journal, Tribune, and a regular panellist on political debates in broadcasting—often the only spokesperson on the left advocating socialist alternatives.

Since the global financial crisis, big banks have taken a backseat, and asset managers have become the—often self-appointed—new experts and administrators of capitalism.

The film Civil War addresses the paradox that the only way to stop polarisation is to take a side.

Vulture Capitalism demolishes the idea of the ‘free market’ in the corporate age, but has limitations in its analysis of capitalism and how to challenge it, argues Dominic Alexander.

Veteran Cleveland writer and photographer Scott MacGregor recovered a manuscript written by his uncle Hugh O’Neill, which turned into Captured! A World War II Memoir. In it, O’Neill weaves a real-life tale of his life as a prisoner of the Germans in the last year of the Second World War and Cleveland comic artist Gary Dumm, who has worked with the best of the genre, Harvey Pekar in particular, provides vivid illustrations.

This is an amazing history, one that should be on the list of every history class dealing with modern history, history of the British Empire, and further on to those studying economics, politics, and geopolitical strategies.

In this first of two extracts from Terina Hine’s new book, “A People’s History of Covid”, the impact of inequality and neoliberalism in the UK on the spread of Covid is outlined

The Reckoning is a magnificent conclusion to a quartet of books on New World slavery, explaining the role of slavery and its abolition in the rise of American power, finds Chris Bambery.

Naomi Klein’s exploration of the spread of conspiracy theory and the ‘other Naomi’ is baggy but contains useful insights, argues Lindsey German.

RON JACOBS points out that it wasn’t until anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements formed women’s liberation groups that the fundamental roots of oppression could be addressed.

Paul Buhle reviews “The Communist Women’s Movement,” a collection of documents of a global women’s communist movement.

Review of Matt Huber’s ‘Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet’

Arun Kundnani details the histories of liberal and radical anti-racism and argues that anti-racism ultimately means anti-capitalism.

For many continental philosophers, the first two decades of the new millennium were a time of vibrant matter, hyperobjects, and a weird fixation with intestinal microbes. The late Bruno Latour saw this ‘new materialist’ doctrine–which decentred the human subject in favour of the world of ‘things’, believed to have agency of their own–as a useful resource in his career-long polemic against Marxism.

Grounded in people and places at the heart of the climate crisis, ‘Oil, Water and Climate Resistance’ traces the fight in Minnesota against the expansion of pipelines carrying toxic tar sands oil through North America.