The 1968 political events did not last just a few months as some commentators want us to believe in an attempt to strip them of any relationship with what happened before or after. The Hot Autumn was not an improvised explosion but the result of a combination of structural factors and the rise of a new consciousness. It was linked to the social and cultural transformations caused by the modernising processes of a society that was rapidly changing, from an economic structure that was prevalently agricultural to an industrial one. It resulted in a deep-going mixing of the population due to the internal migration of millions of people from the south to the north of Italy.
Is Fascism Inevitable?
20 May 2018, bySince the global financial crisis in 2007-8, and the consequent anti-capitalist mobilisations like the Occupy! movement and the struggle against austerity in Greece, there have been a series of books arguing for major reforms to capitalism.
Making Gaza “Uninhabitable”: A Requiem
9 April 2018, byNorman Finkelstein’s lifetime of scholar-activism includes a long record of skewering highly acclaimed pundits and propagandists of the “pro-Israel” and media establishments. His first target was the fraudulent “demographic study” of Mandate Palestine by Joan Peters, purporting that the Arab population were newcomers attracted by Zionist economic development. Finkelstein’s demonstration of this fakery was published in his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
History From Below
7 April 2018, byLeon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution remains a singular work of Marxist historiography. Written by one of its leading participants, Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution was completed in 1930, with Trotsky recently exiled from Russia and living in Turkey.
This Land Is Our Land
6 April 2018, byBetween 1922 and 1925 my great-uncle, the journalist Najib Nassar, rode on horseback throughout Mandate Palestine and the newly created country of Transjordan. He published his observations as a series of letters in Al-Karmil, the weekly newspaper he edited in Haifa. In a number of these letters Najib voiced his fears about the fate of Palestinian farmers, especially in the north of the country, where absentee Arab landowners were selling their large estates to new institutions of the burgeoning Zionist movement.
Reproductive Justice in an Age of Austerity
8 March 2018, byThese two books about reproductive politics present contrasting situations. Health Policy in a Time of Crisis is focused, detailing how women are able to access publicly funded abortion in Catalunya [the region in Spain seeking its independence]. Politics, however, impinges on that story as we’ll see.
Memories of Struggle and Despair in the Philippines
9 August 2017, byIn the foreword to Subversive Lives: A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years, the authors write it “was not intended to be about communists and communism”—still the book provides remarkable insights into the Philippine communist movement. The book is a collective memoir of the surviving Quimpo family, relating their lives during the years of the Marcos dictatorship from the early seventies to the mid-eighties. With many of the siblings involved in the revolutionary movement, their memories furnish stories of underground organizing, imprisonment and torture, repression and resistance.
"I am not your Negro"
8 August 2017, byNow and then, and despite its capitalist and racial biases,our culture throws up something that can speak quite eloquently and uniquely about the times we’re living through. In this case, I’m referring to an amazing documentary film that has been released recently, “I am not your Negro”, by Raoul Peck, an acclaimed Haitian director with major films to his credit.This latest work is well worth seeing and has been well received here.
The Politics of Some Bodies
2 April 2017, byAt a time when Marxist politics is struggling more than ever against the current, queer Marxist scholarship is enjoying a slight, startling, heartening resurgence. [1] Holly Lewis’ The Politics of Everybody is a major contribution to the trend.
Getting Away With It: Israel and Global Occupation
18 March 2017, byAt the heart of Jeff Halper’s War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification is the question “How does Israel get away with it?” In other words, how is Israel able to continually occupy Palestinian territory in contravention of international law?
Footnotes
[1] Certainly if the annual Historical Materialism conference in London is a barometer — the 2016 edition featured no fewer than seven panels in its new queer track
