Review: The Politics of Everybody
Bill Crane reviews Holly Lewis’ standout book on the relationship between capitalism and oppression. One of the most promising trends on the intellectual left in recent years is the emergence of a strong and sophisticated Marxist-feminist current of academics and activists. The identification of the social reproduction of the working class as the root of […]
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 […]
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: 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 […]
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 […]
Finance, capitalism and imperial power – a review of Tony’s Norfield’s ‘The City’
Want to reform finance but maintain capitalism? Then you may have a problem. Tom Haines-Doran reviews ‘The City’ by Tony Norfield, recently published by Verso.
‘Your lunacy fits in nicely with my own’ (from ‘Sea Song’)
Starting out as drummer and singer for Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt has been making music for over 5 decades. Neil Rogall reviews ‘Different Every Time’, a new biography of him by Marcus O’Dair Robert Wyatt, now in his 70s is surely one of the most intriguing, distinctive and sometimes infuriating musicians born out of 1960s Britain. His […]
Review: The Imperial Radch trilogy
Amy Gilligan reviews Ann Leckie’s series of SciFi novels, set in a post-gender galaxy. Recently I found myself racing through Anne Leckie’s excellent Imperial Radch trilogy: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Mercy and Ancillary Sword. It’s a great SciFi series, but also quite political, addressing questions around imperialism, workers’ rights and especially gender. There is also a lot […]
A journey through utopian landscapes: Last Futures – review
Ruth Lorimer reviews Douglas Murphy’s new book Last Futures: Nature, Technology, and the End of Architecture Douglas Murphy’s Last Futures is a fascinating journey through the utopian landscapes of radical modernist architecture. Delving into plans for futuristic megastructures, plug-in cities and lunar colonies, he traces the connections between the hopes and fears of the late twentieth […]
Dismantling the NHS is turbo-charged neoliberalism: Review of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps
NHS activist Gill George reviews Youssef El-Gingihy’s book How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps The NHS is a milestone in history – the most civilised step any country has ever taken The quote above is what Aneurin Bevin told the first NHS patient ever to be treated, back in 1948; and that’s how Youssef […]
Gaza 2014: Israeli barbarity and Palestinian resistance
Sylvia Cooke reviews Max Blumenthal’s The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (Verso, £14.99 – currently £10.49 including shipping from the Verso website).
Future shock for the left: Review of Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism
Rich Belbin reviews Paul Masons recent book, PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future Paul Mason has become a familiar figure on our TV screens, from his reports on the collapse of Lehman Brothers through to his ’embedded’ interviews with those at the frontline of struggles, from China through Scotland to Greece. His enthusiastic reporting has […]
Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation
Leo Zeilig‘s biography of Frantz Fanon, The Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation, is out on 5 November. Here are a few teasers from the book with introductions by the author. In 1953 Fanon moved to Algeria to work in the small town of Blida, about 50 miles from the capital Algiers. He applied for a […]
Five books you should read on China
Charlie Hore offers some suggestions to help understand what is happening in the world’s largest country China has hardly been out of the headlines in the last few months. In August, the second stock market crash in two months sent shockwaves around the world financial system. China’s government had taken panic measures after the first […]
Paying to work for free
Olivia Arigho Stiles reviews Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso, 2012) “Interns built the pyramids”, The Baffler magazine once pronounced. So why do we know so little about this amorphous phenomenon? Ross Perlin’s eminently readable Intern Nation aims to further understanding of the function […]
The revolting establishment
Pat Stack reviews two recent books trying to get to grips with changing the world: Russell Brand’s Revolution, and Owen Jones’ The Establishment
Book review: Radio Benjamin
Andrew Neeson reviews a collection of Walter Benjamin’s radio scripts Radio Benjamin This review first appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of the rs21 magazine In the early days of radio, Marxist critic Walter Benjamin wrote and presented 80 plus broadcasts on German radio. For the first time in English, Radio Benjamin is the full […]
Review: Safe Space
Colin Wilson is full of praise for a recent book on LGBT history, but highlights a broader political problem. Safe Space: Gay Neighbourhood History and the Politics of Violence Christina B. Hanhardt Duke University Press, £17.99 Safe Space charts the history since the 1960s of community organising in three neighbourhoods identified with LGBT people: the […]
Review – How I Stopped Being a Jew
Neil Rogall reviews How I Stopped Being a Jew, the third part of Shlomo Sand’s trilogy of books about Zionism and Israel.
What’s to be done now? A review of Paul Le Blanc’s Unfinished Leninism
Jonas Liston reviews an essential collection of essays on Lenin and Leninism today (photo of Paul Le Blanc by Alex Bainbridge) The difficult experiences of the revolutionary left recently have led many to question core aspects of Marxist politics – in particular the legacy of the Russian revolutionary Lenin and the organisation he played a key […]
Fight for your right to read
Alan Gibbons, author, organiser of the Campaign for the Book and lifelong socialist discusses the attacks that the library service is facing in Britain. He is based in Liverpool where proposals to cut eleven of the city’s nineteen libraries have recently been announced. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the public library service. This should […]
Review: The Muslims are Coming!
Hsiao-Hung Pai reviews Arun Kundnani’s latest book The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014) In a period when racism is on the rise and the far right is growing across Europe, ethnic minority and migrant communities are feeling increasingly under attack. This timely and important new book by […]
Review: Playing the Whore
Becky Gardner reviews Melissa Gira Grant’s book “Playing the Whore” (Verso, 2014). This review was originally published in the Summer 2014 edition of the rs21 magazine. In her new book Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant brings the voice, experience and politics of sex workers into the current debates about the sex industry. In […]
Review: Strike for America
Tomorrow over a million public sector workers will go on strike. Amy Gilligan reviews Micah Uetricht’s recent book Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity which looks at how teachers in Chicago organised and won. Originally published in the Summer 2014 edition of the rs21 magazine The story of the victorious Chicago teachers’ strike […]
Participation, resistance and betrayal among car workers
A Unite rep reviews Militant Years, Alan Thornett’s political memoir of his life as a radical car plant worker in Oxford – and draws out some political warnings about ‘participation’ then and ‘partnership’ today.