Archive | Review

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.

Sylvain Cypel’s “The State of Israel vs. The Jews” shows how bereft of human decency Israelis have become in their treatment of Palestinians, and how much Jewish moral patrimony has been given up in creating, supporting, and tolerating a Jewish State.

‘Revolutions’ is a major contribution to our understanding of the principal social movements which shape our modern world.

Smith begins with Friedrich Pollock’s definition of automation as a ‘technique of industrial production [in which] the machines are “controlled” by machines’, and shows that this trend of automation, while increasing labor productivity in the industrial and manufacturing sector, is also the reason for a lack of automation in the service sector.

The two books we will analyze in this essay, Bread and Beauty: The Cultural Politics of José Carlos Mariátegui by Juan E. De Castro, and Alan McPherson’s Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice, are very different in subject matter, discipline, and style.

A lively debate has ensued over the merits of the film, Don’t Look Up. People on the progressive side of the political spectrum have praised the film for its piercing honesty about the climate crisis which is communicated through the metaphor of an incoming, planet-destroying comet.

The acuity of Hunton’s insights, seen in retrospect so many decades later, offers astounding reading. Throughout, he has one clear aim: to let the peoples of the struggling masses in the emerging nations seize their own destiny.

Though he’s spent the last 35 years incarcerated—and at least thirty of those years in isolation on death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal has remained steadfast in his activism, especially in regards to police brutality, criminal punishment, and black liberation.

In the last two decades it has been common, in Marxist books on ecology, to find discussions of how capitalist agriculture developed an urgent need for fertilisers to solve the crisis of soil fertility in the 19th century.

Is inequality inevitable? Is freedom just a choice? Two materialist critiques of a widely-praised book.

A review of Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, edited and introduced by Marcello Musto.

Sarah Schulman’s recently released political history shines light on AIDS activism that often goes unrecognized.

Wen’s vision is of a China which would be increasingly self-reliant, delinking from the American dominated global capitalism and developing its own key technologies and productive capacities, while at the same time continuing to engage with other emerging economies which share a desire to be free of Western neo-imperial control.

Fighting back against extractivism, false solutions, and social and climate abuse around the world.

On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.

From the end of May until a few days before Remembrance Day (November 11) flags at Canadian public buildings were flown at half-mast. This unusual occurrence was in recognition of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves containing the remains of Indigenous children on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools.

Max Ajl’s ‘People’s Green New Deal’ is a brutal reminder for the American left that even the most celebrated and progressive developments in American politics are still simply American politics, in other words they are a politics for America, and America first.

There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings.