Archive | Review

Two new books trace the history of global inaction over the climate emergency, and seek to identify the culprits.

As the Left in power returns, the lessons of the Pink Tide have become increasingly relevant. Recognizing governments’ well-conceived policies as well as their errors is key to understanding the comeback.

America made a neoliberal deal with the devil when it began to whittle away New Deal protections for the vulnerable.

While Afghanistan may finally be free of outside military occupation, Afghans are still suffering the deadly consequences of 40 years of U.S.-led subversion and war.

Barack Obama recounts in his memoir ‘Dreams from my Father’ reading a book about Africa as a young man. He remembered how he was filled with ‘an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target’ at the way that the dominant images of the book shifted from the independence struggles of leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah to ‘famine, disease, the coups and counter-coups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks’ (p.515).

Lucidly argued and touching in its appeal, Corine Pelluchon’s latest book ‘Les Lumières à l’âge du vivant’ will be a theoretical source both for ‘green’ and ‘red’ movements alike.

With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires.

KUALA LUMPUR: Capital flight from the global South is immense, with widespread adverse effects. A new book proposes measures to curb, even reverse capital flight from Africa. It also offers pragmatic lessons for many developing countries.

Colin Kaepernick: The idea for “I Color Myself Different” had been circulating in my mind long before I put a pen to the page, in part, because the story is based on an actual moment from my childhood. When I was in kindergarten, I was given a seemingly straightforward assignment in school: “draw a picture of yourself and your family.”

The starting point for his argument was the class nature of the capitalist state. Drawing on the writings of Marx and Engels, Lenin demolishes the idea that the state is a neutral body standing above social classes. Instead, he argues that the state exists as a means for one class to maintain its dominance over another.

The book traces Cuba’s preparedness from the threat of a U.S. invasion following its revolution through its resistance to hurricanes and diseases, which all laid the foundation for current adaptions to climate change.

Ocotal is a historic Nicaraguan city located in the Department of Nueva Segovia. It is famous for being the site of battles between the U.S. Marines and the peasant guerilla forces of Augusto Cesar Sandino in the mid-1920s.

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.