Jane Shallice reviews An Impatient Life: A Memoir (Verso, 2013) by Daniel Bensaïd and considers what the Left can learn from these beautiful memoirs
March 2014.
Green Capitalism
11 February 2014, byThis book lives up to the description on the tin, but goes rather further. Daniel Tanuro examines why green capitalism is an oxymoron, noting that nature and capital speak different languages. Capitalism requires ever increasing economic growth, because firms need to compete against each other to survive, seeking new profit to reinvest in new capital, so they are not eliminated by rivals. Nature is reduced to monocultures by ever increasing growth and ever increasing growth tends to disrupt ecological cycles. We live in a market based world, so attempts to deal with the climate crisis have used market mechanism such as carbon trading. Tanuro shows that these have failed to halt emissions. and plans for a so called ‘green economy’ aim to commodify nature, yet such commodification values short term exchange value, not long term sustainability.
The Arab Revolutions: The Game’s Not Over Yet
10 February 2014, byLong-time revolutionary activist, historian, and analyst Gilbert Achcar has produced a provocative assessment of the Arab Spring. In The People Want, Achcar develops a Marxist analysis of the roots of the Arab revolutions, traces their trajectories since December 2010, and draws a tentative balance sheet of what progress has been made and what possibilities remain.
Dangerous Liaisons: Revolutionary Theory and Practice
23 January 2014, byCinzia Arruzza’s Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (published in English edition by Merlin Press, available from Resistance Books)
A German Lenin?
19 January 2014, byFor radicals and revolutionaries engaged in rebuilding an anti-capitalist movement in the early 21st century, the 20th century appears to be a record of disaster. Capitalism survived two great economic crises (1914-1934 and 1966-1982) that many on the left believed spelled the end of this form of class society.
Freedom Now Vision Unfinished
19 January 2014, byThis new book, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, by Paul LeBlanc and Michael Yates looks back at a piece of history from the Civil Rights Revolution that gets little if any mention today. It’s a time worth revisiting as the proposals offered in the Freedom Budget remain unfulfilled.
Chatting with an old Trot
20 December 2013, byAs a 25-year-old revolutionary, South African-born Charlie Van Gelderen was a delegate at the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938 in Paris. When he died in 2001 he was the final living link with that small group of militants who had tried to keep the continuity of revolutionary Marxism alive under the enormous pressure of fascism and Stalinism. I remember a well-attended memorial meeting for Charlie was held after he died in Conway Hall.
The Politics of Extractivism
20 December 2013, byGeopolÃtica de la Amazonia: Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista (Geopolitics of the Amazon, Landed Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation, 2012) is the latest defense of the politics and policies of Evo Morales’ leftist government by its premier intellectual, vice-president Alvaro GarcÃa Linera. As the eloquent public spokesman for Morales’ governing strategy since the election of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in 2005, GarcÃa Linera has made a name for himself in Latin American leftist thought and political theory. [1]
Why the state matters and the USA still dominates capitalism worldwide
20 December 2013, by‘In today’s world the multinationals operate outside nation states, there is a new global capitalist order in which no nation state is dominant’
The spirit of those frenzied days
13 December 2013, byA few years ago I was in an arts center in Southern Paris. While waiting for the play I had gone to see, I bought a volume of Siné’s political cartoons from a second-hand bookstall. I asked the stall-holder, a man a little younger than myself, if he had taken part in 1968. He looked almost surprised as he replied: “I was at the Sorbonne. I was twenty. I’d have been an imbecile not to take part.”
Footnotes
[1] An English translation by Richard Fidler is online at http://links.org.au/node/3152
