Review: An Ounce of Practice
Heike Becker reviews An Ounce of Practice by Leo Zeilig, discussing the themes of love, resilience and pragmatism across a varied theatres of activism.
Review: The Battle of Grangemouth: A Worker’s Story
In late October 2013, workers at the Ineos twin plant at Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, suffered an epic defeat, which in terms of the sacking of site stewards, the scrapping of the pension scheme and the imposition of a three year pay freeze and strike ban, represented one of the worst assaults on one of the best […]
Review: Ali Smith’s Autumn, the first Brexit novel
Kate Bradley argues that Ali Smith’s Autumn is precisely the kind of book about Brexit we don’t need in our changing political climate. Autumn is a novel about Brexit. It’s also a book about Pop Art and family and nostalgia. But it’s mostly about Brexit, and after reading Autumn, it’s pretty clear that Ali Smith […]
Re-reading Reed: Ten Days that Shook the World
Lisa Leak considers John Reed’s classic book on the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. The centennial of the October Revolution later this year will be a windfall for booksellers. Possibly no other event in history has been written on so extensively, or from such a vast variety of ideological perspectives: there’ll be […]
The flight of the young eagles – art of the Russian revolution
Mike Thompson visits Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 at the Royal Academy and finds amazing art in an establishment exhibition. Photo: Tom Michaelson Artists under Russia’s Tsarist regime operated in a contradictory society. They had access to the most innovative ideas of the avant-garde, but within a context where the vast majority had no access to art. […]
Review: Blacklisted
Brian Parkin reviews Blacklisted: the secret war between big business and union activists by Dave Smith and Phil Chamberlain When I was a young engineering draughtsman in the early 1970s I was involved in a shop stewards and union activist organisation in Leeds. The group comprised rank and file union members from factories across the city […]
Stressed out: Twenty One Pilots and teenage lives today
Teenager Tazmin Aldis looks at the important issues behind Twenty One Pilots’ songs which have been watched a billion of times on Youtube. Twenty One Pilots are the latest young American male duo to burst onto the music scene. Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun are perhaps unlikely suspects on today’s music charts which are typically flooded with the […]
2016: a photo diary
Photojournalist Steve Eason presents his year in pictures. My 2016, in 38 chronological pictures, as a London-based lefty photographer contributing to rs21 and other websites. The year of the Junior doctors strike, Corbyn-mania, far-right marches, The Panama Papers, Another Europe is Possible, Brexit, protests at Byron, Topshop and wildcat strikes at Deliveroo and Uber Eats. It felt […]
Sonic boom: Kefaya’s Radio International
Neil Rogall finds Kefaya’s debut album ‘Radio International a fantastic listen When fusion albums work they can be astonishing. The intersections, the borderlands, the clashes, the moments of meeting between cultures, genres, city and country can produce the most sublime music. But so often they fail. When the artists are just tinkering with other sounds, […]
Mafia III – fighting white supremacy in ‘New Bordeaux’
Arjun Mahadevan reviews a new game, Mafia 3, with a black Vietnam vet hero and in the process takes down white supremacy Mafia III is an open-world action game set in 1968 in the town of ‘New Bordeaux’, a fictionalised version of New Orleans. The protagonist is a black Vietnam veteran, Lincoln Clay, trying to […]
Review: Captain Fantastic – beyond convention and conformity
Mark Winter looks back at his favourite film of the year, the counter-cultural Captain Fantastic. From the very first shot of this movie, we enter a world outside the city, beyond convention and conformity. A deer moves timidly through a clearing in the forest. The camera pans to reveal an eye, then another, and then […]
rs21 Readers and Writers recommend 2016, part 2
In the second part of our readers and writers’ reviews of art which has moved them in 2016 we present theatre, film, music and two very different novels. Railing against corporate greed and individualism: Train to Busan Mike Thompson Horror films are at their best when they look at how people deal with being in […]
rs21 Readers and Writers recommend 2016, part 1
We asked our readers and writers to pick a cultural highlight of the year. Read on for suggestions of books, films, TV, music and even a cook book… Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh Colin Barker When I was a kid, as well as climbing trees, making dens, lighting fires, and playing cowboys, I haunted […]
Opening up a debate on black America – Beyoncé’s Lemonade
Monique Alicia Bell considers her favourite album of 2016 – Lemonade from Beyoncé I have been a Beyoncé fan since the days of Destiny’s Child, expressing my teenage moods by blasting ‘Emotions’ on repeat. As I watched women freaking out in excitement over this year’s visual album Lemonade, I decided I had to dedicate one full […]
Review: The Age of Acquiescence
Neil Davidson reviews Steve Fraser’s book The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organised Wealth and Power.
Review: 13th
Filmmaker Tony Aldis reviews the new Netflix documentary 13th, looking at the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter and the industrial prison complex. 13th is a new film by Ava DuVernay, the director of the much acclaimed Selma. In this new work she again deals with the issue of black civil rights in the United […]
Review: America’s Hate Preachers
William C reviews America’s Hate Preachers, Hannah Livingston’s documentary on the homophobia and Islamophobia of the Christian far-right in the United States. “To me, LGBT stands for Let God Burn Them.” The churchgoers laugh as if they’re listening to a cute anecdote about a child learning to walk. This scene, shocking yet typical, sets the mood of America’s […]
“I Daniel Blake” – Dissecting the DWP
Adam DC reviews Ken Loach’s latest film. Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or award winning film “I Daniel Blake” exposes the reality of ‘Benefits Britain’. Written by his long time collaborator Paul Laverty, the film is a dignified and sharp polemic about the injustices that occur in our benefits system, and the solidarity and courage of the […]
Review: The Ministry of Nostalgia
Amy Gilligan reviews Owen Hatherley’s book The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity (Verso, 2015) The Ministry of Nostalgia is an exploration of the way a particular version of the past, particularly the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, continues to be used under neoliberalism. This “austerity nostalgia” is typified in the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and […]
Review – Sex and the Weimar Republic
Colin Wilson reviews Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis by Laurie Marhoefer. This book offers a glimpse of a different kind of LGBT politics. Today we’ve made advances, but in the context of neoliberalism. In the Weimar Republic – Germany from 1918 to 1933 – there also existed a […]
Policing the Planet – charting changes to policing under neoliberalism
Sølvi Qorda reviews Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton Police killings have reached a shameful apex this week, the highest number in one week in an already-murderous year. How can we begin to comprehend a world where Americans will apparently express […]
Review: Lean Out
Kate Bradley reviews Dawn Foster’s Lean Out (Repeater Books, 2016), a book that challenges the liberal feminism promoted by Sheryl Sandberg’s business advice book, Lean In. Lean Out was a book that needed to be written. Liberal feminism is little better than no feminism at all, and now, instead of having to explain why every time […]
Eleanor Marx – Unrestrained by convention, unafraid to live her contradictions
The recent biography of Eleanor Marx shows she didn’t just interpret the world but acted to change it, says Charlie Burton. ‘Tussy is me’, Karl Marx once said of his youngest daughter, Eleanor. For not only did Tussy (the nickname given to her in infancy) inherit her father’s looks, she also inherited his thrust for […]
A flawed revolutionary icon – a review of The Politics of Che Guevara
Mike Gonzalez reviews Samuel Farber’s recent book, The politics of Che Guevara, published by Haymarket Books. For two generations of activists, Ernesto Che Guevara has symbolized a kind of selfless heroism. His relative youth at his death in 1967 (he was 38) conserved his air of rebelliousness and the image of a man interested only in the […]
Review: Red Rosa
Caliban’s Revenge reviews Red Rosa, a graphic biography of German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans. The uses and abuses of Rosa Luxemburg as a revolutionary icon are many, and they tend to focus excessively on the tragedy of her death or on her intellectual relationship with Lenin. Old Stalinists display great alabaster busts that […]
Review – Edward Upward: Art and Life
Andrew Stone reviews a recent biography of the left-wing writer Edward Upward, Edward Upward: Art and Life by Peter Stansky Edward Upward was one of the less-feted members of the ‘Auden Circle’, a generation of politically engaged writers of the left during the 1930s. Of its leading members, Auden was to move decisively to the […]
Selling Brazil – review of Dave Zirin’s “Brazil’s Dance with the Devil”
Ruth Lorimer reviews Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics and the Fight for Democracy by Dave Zirin, published by Haymarket Books.
The story of a Bolshevik worker-intellectual: a review of Barbara Allen’s ‘Alexander Shlyapnikov’
Ian Birchall reviews Barbara C Allen’s Alexander Shlyapnikov 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik, published by Haymarket Books.
The Somme: Remember…and explain
Ian Birchall reviews Neil Faulkner’s new pamphlet, Have You Forgotten Yet? The Truth about the Somme I happened to be on Waterloo Station on 1st July. When I saw dozens of young soldiers assembling, I wondered for a moment if our rulers had launched a military coup to reverse the referendum. Later I learned that it was […]
Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach
Albert Deck seeks inspiration from the new documentary about socialist filmmaker Ken Loach. Sometimes I find that I like the idea of Loach’s films more than I do the experience of watching them. Ladybird Ladybird, and Family Life being examples of this raw film-watching experience. There are no easy answers, no redemption for the characters […]