Daria Saburova has written a fascinating three-month wartime field study of the Ukrainian mining town of Krivih Rih (which happens to be the home town of president Zelensky). It focuses on the voluntary “resistance work” of working-class women in this town. (For now, “Resistance Work” of Women Workers. The Ukrainian working classes in the face of war is in French only.)
This is a “situated” investigation: it breaks with the “geo-political” approaches that dominate a section of the left (…)
Cause at Heart: Socialists & the Abolition of Antisemitism
26 July 2024, bySafety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism By Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2024. 375 pages. $19.99 paperback. Zionism: An Emotional State By Derek J. Penslar New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 321 pages. $21.30 paperback. The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism By Marjorie N. Feld New York: New York University Press, 2024. 279 pages. $30 hardback. Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial By Saree Makdisi Oakland, California: California University Press, 2022. 228 pages. $29.49 hardback. Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba By Areej Sabbagh-Khoury Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. 348 pages. $75.00 hardback.
The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo
30 March 2024, byThe Greek revolutionary Michel Pablo had a remarkable, globe-spanning career, from wartime resistance activity to his work supplying weapons and finance for the Algerian independence struggle. He’s finally gotten the biography he deserves.
Marx, Communism and Degrowth
21 March 2024, byMarx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
The life of an unorthodox Marxist
27 February 2024, byIncarcerated by a Greek dictator, narrowly escaping the Nazis in occupied France, and tried and convicted of aiding the Algerian revolution in the Netherlands in 1961: never a dull moment for the well-dressed revolutionary Mihalis Raptis. Hall Greenland has written a sympathetic but critical biography of the man better known as Michel Pablo, long-time secretary of the Fourth International.
Saito, Marx and the Anthropocene
27 February 2024, byKohei Saito has become an important voice in the debates about Marxism and ecosocialism. His books deal with four key issues: the relation between capitalism and nature; between ecology and socialism; the agents and means of attaining ecosocialism (or degrowth communism) and the evolution of Marx’s views regarding these issues.
Revisiting Rosa Luxemburg’s Writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution
27 February 2024, byThe newest addition of the planned seventeen volumes of the writing of Rosa Luxemburg, including thousands of pages that have only recently been identified and have never been available in English, is a critical contribution to our understanding of her life and work.
Boycott “celebrities” and companies that endanger the lives and violate the dignity of oppressed people
28 January 2024, by“We abolish the despicable reactionary “culture” that thrives at the expense of oppressed people, endangering their lives and sacrificing their inescapable grief.”
Black Mirror back to back
19 July 2023, byCharlie Brooker’s near-future tech frightener Black Mirror Series Six has just landed on Netflix. Some of the review responses have been lukewarm, and the worry boils down to a shift of emphasis in the series. Up to now, Black Mirror has been interrogating our relationship with technology, with what it is doing to relationships between people. We could say that it has been showing how late capitalism has mutated from classic capitalism, in which relations between people are replaced with relations between things, commodities, to a dystopic world in which we are replaced with relations between images.
Ai Wei Wei making sense
19 July 2023, byDave Kellaway reviews the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei’s exhibition currently on at the Design Museum in London until the 30th July.
