Archive | Review

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.

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.