Charlie 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, byDave Kellaway reviews the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei’s exhibition currently on at the Design Museum in London until the 30th July.
China’s Unarmed Prophets
19 July, byProphets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo. Greg Benton editor.
Brill Historical Materialism Series, 2015; Haymarket Books, 2017, xvii + 1289 pages, $55 paperback.
The book about the book
21 May, byPeople collect all sorts of things, and I collect The Communist Manifesto.
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
8 March, byIn Abolition. Feminism. Now. Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie make a compelling case for a feminism that is fundamentally inclusive, intersectional and abolitionist, and an abolitionist movement that is fundamentally feminist.
Making the invisible, visible
6 January, by“My job is never to tell you want to think but to draw you into a conversation and really invite you into a world where you have maybe never walked before and when you have finished and put that life down and come back into your own, you are different, you have felt something for the theoretical other… for me that is a political act.”
Ukraine: voices of resistance and solidarity
6 January, byThe war in Ukraine has generated a vast amount of reportage, analysis, opinion and debate (and also propaganda and disinformation), but the voices of the Ukrainian Left – socialists, feminists, union activists – are too seldom heard.
Saito: the metabolic rift and de-growth communism
6 January, byKohei Saito is an associate professor at Tokyo University and an erudite Marxist scholar. Not a candidate for a best-seller in the non-fiction book world, you might think. But you would be wrong in this case.
Can global capitalism endure?
6 January, byCan global capitalism endure? William Robinson tries to answer this question in his book entitled with the same question. Robinson is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a fast-moving account, Robinson covers a lot of ground in offering the reader a vision of the global capitalist crisis and the accompanying international conflagration.
US: DSA and the Democratic Party
17 September 2022, byBreaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States, by Kim Moody. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. 242 pages. $19.95 paperback
