Archive | Review

As regular readers of this blog will be aware I think that Andreas Malm, even where I disagree with key points of his argument, is one of the most stimulating Marxist authors on environmental politics.

Most people who are fighting against racism are doing so with their metaphorical hands tied behind their backs because they are not clear about what race is and what it is not.

Walter Rodney was almost the same age as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr when he was assassinated on 13 June 1980 in Guyana at the age of 38.

Friends of Socialist China, located in London, is a platform dedicated to supporting the People’s Republic of China and promoting understanding of Chinese socialism. 

The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives.

By “People of the Book” it meant principally Jews and Christians. These book-based religions were an intellectual innovation. The book-basis gave Christianity and Islam an expansive power and a cultural breadth that earlier religions had not had.

First published in 1944, ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ is an investigation of the notorious relationship between the Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of European industrial capitalism from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Despite its title, Andreas Malm’s recent book ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ contains no concrete instructions on how to accomplish that particular deed.

The discussion of Marx is embedded in Federici’s signature critique of the social reproduction of labor power in capitalist societies.

First published in January 1972, Working is a baggy collection of over seven-hundred and sixty pages, most devoted to the reflections of ordinary Americans about their economic lives. From the Terkel archive, it’s clear that his interest in work was long standing and went well beyond the USA.

Michael Mann is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, who has played a pivotal role in establishing what is happening to our climate and the forces driving that change.

Martha Menchaca’s new book examines events that have shaped the lives of so many in the Lone Star State.

Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature has been arguably the most polemic ‘book’ within the corpus of classical Marxist literature.

Over the last decade, the U.S. has been quietly expanding its covert intelligence empire in Africa as part of a growing geopolitical rivalry with China.

One reason why this review came to be decades after said book’s publication involves the loss of Richard Lewontin, the great American geneticist and evolutionary biologist, who passed away last July at his home in Cambridge at the age of 92.

Originally from Chicago, Ill, George L. Jackson grew up in California. In 1961, a young Jackson convicted of armed robbery for allegedly stealing $70 from a gas station. Outrageously, Jackson was sentenced to one year to life, despite assurances from his attorney of a favorable deal if he plead guilty.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. has everything I have come to expect from abolitionist literature: a solid critique of carceral feminism, passionate archiving of black and brown struggle against state control, and a good dose of hope. But also a big dose of U.S.-centrism and a hesitancy to outline a plan to win. 

Mike Taber has edited for the first time the resolutions adopted between 1889 and 1912 by the nine congresses celebrated by the Socialist International, which is also known as the Second International.

This is an indispensable book for all those on the left interested in understanding how the science of cultural (social) anthropology developed over the last three centuries and how it is used to understand (and sometimes control) non-Western societies, especially those  that have not developed complex state structures.

Abby Martin’s second feature film is an anti-imperialist environmental documentary.