“From each, says the slogan, according to her ability; to each according to his needs.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Desperately seeking socialism
29 March 2019, by ,A response by GABRIEL LEVY to Dissidents Among Dissidents, by Ilya Budraitskis – and Budraitskis’s response to that response.
From Marx to Ecosocialism
29 March 2019, byThere is a growing body of ecomarxist and ecosocialist literature in the English-speaking world, which signals the beginning of a significant turn in radical thinking. Some Marxist journals, such as Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Monthly Review and Socialism and Democracy have been playing an important role in this process, which is becoming increasingly influential. The two books discussed here—very different in style content and purpose—are part of this “Red and Green” upsurge.
The state of Northern Ireland and the democratic deficit. Between sectarianism and neoliberalism
9 March 2019, byThe reviewer approached this book with some anticipation. I knew a number of the authors personally, many have a high reputation as anti-imperialist activists and trade unionists and I had worked with some as a member of the Irish Workers Union.
Nicolas Calas: The Trotskyist Time Forgot
4 February 2019, byNicolas Calas (1907-88) may be the most visionary poet, art critic, museum curator, cultural historian, and lifelong Trotskyist of whom you have never heard. Writing decades before Fredric Jameson’s classic The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) declared, “Always historicize!,” Calas embodied this precept in every dimension of his multifaceted career.
Reassessing Trotsky’s biography of Stalin
3 February 2019, byThe new edition of Leon Trotsky’s biography of Joseph Stalin, published in 2016 by Wellred Books, is a significant contribution to our understanding of Trotsky’s thinking in the last years before his assassination in August 1940.
Money, Markets, and Monarchies
2 February 2019, byAdam Hanieh talks about his new book to Jadaliyya.
Assessing Deng Xiaoping
30 January 2019, byDeng Xiaoping was one of the most important Communist leaders of the twentieth century. Celebrated by the West for his pro-market reforms, leftists should be more skeptical of his accomplishments.
The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous
10 January 2019, byA new book argues that words like “innovation” are doing more than telling you who to avoid at parties.
Mourn, then organise again
8 January 2019, byThis brilliant essay is an attempt to recover a hidden and rather discreet tradition: the tradition of "left-wing melancholia." This state of mind does not make up part of the Left’s canonical narrative: the Left is more given to celebrating glorious triumphs than tragic defeats. Nonetheless, the memory of these defeats — from June 1848 to May 1871, January 1919 and September 1973 — and solidarity with the defeated nourish revolutionary history like an invisible underground river. In the depths of resignation, this left-wing melancholia is a red thread that crosses revolutionary culture, from Auguste Blanqui to critical cinema, passing by way of Gustave Courbet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Walter Benjamin. Traverso forcefully — and counter-intuitively — reveals the full subversive, emancipatory charge of revolutionary mourning.
