In the 1950s and early 1960s, a group of remarkably talented left-wing intellectuals (almost all men) emerged in Britain, focusing both upon the radical interpretation and development of the core disciplines of the humanities: literature and history, and to a lesser extent, politics and philosophy; and also upon socialist political activism.

The tradition of concise introductions to Marxist theory is a long one, stretching back perhaps to Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Alienation, Spectacle and Revolution enters stridently into this tradition with an acerbic, tremendously illuminating, and urgent style.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

Sometimes, the greatest theoretical works come to us in the form of lectures rather than systemic books. This is the case with Karl Radek, whose lectures on the Chinese Revolution have recently been published by the Historical Materialism book series.

As the title reveals, Chukhrov is particularly interested in two aspects of Soviet socialism: desire and boredom. For a libidinally conditioned capitalist subject, socialism as a non-libidinal economy appears boring and unsexy.

Upon reading Sohn-Rethel it becomes clear that his work is important for contemporary debates on ecology, the Marxist critique of science and debates on post-revolutionary societies such as the former Soviet Union.

More than 100 years after her murder by counterrevolutionary soldiers during the German Revolution of 1918-1919, Rosa Luxemburg continues to demand attention.

Katherine Angel’s intervention into post-feminist discourse fits the script of recent events and sits at what’s hopefully the tail end of post-feminist discourse, otherwise known as ‘the sex wars’.

In Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism its author, Ashley J. Bohrer, presents a tour de force, offering and contributing to a wide-ranging debate that has occupied left academic and activist audiences for some time now.

One of my frustrations with contemporary Marxist philosophy is the way in which the word ‘dialectical’ is often employed like a magical wand to sanctify various relational phenomena.

The collection begins with the essay, ‘Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)’, that more broadly reviews Luxemburg’s theoretical contributions and political interventions from 1871 to 1919.

Michael Burawoy’s Symbolic Violence is a Marxist critique of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. This fascinating book explores some of Bourdieu’s contradictions by staging a series of ‘conversations’ between the French sociologist and a range of important, mostly Marxist, thinkers whose writings Bourdieu ignored or dismissed in footnotes, even though he ought to have engaged explicitly with their ideas.

For Jairus Banaji, theory and history are tightly interwoven: without history, theory ends up ‘bad abstraction’; without theory, the intelligibility of history is doomed to fail.

Shortly before reopening their doors on 27 August 2020, the British Museum removed a bust of its slave-owning founding father, Sir Hans Sloane, from a pedestal to a glass cabinet.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has slammed into the global system with almost the same impact we might expect from an asteroid strike. All aspects of economic, cultural and political activity on the planet have been devastated and disrupted in ways that seemed unimaginable just a few months ago.

As well as being significant in terms of Shakespeare’ s own aesthetic output, The Tempest provides a vivid window into the tumultuous historical currents and contradictions of the epoch in which the great playwright lived, syphoning them into its ethereal and haunting poetry. Helen C. Scott’s excellent and timely study of the play is a book of two parts