Sue Ferguson’s Women and Work has the great virtue of giving a history of various theoretical trends in feminist thinking about, well, work. If you have ever, like me, had the experience of wading into literature on this topic and left feeling more disoriented than before you began, Ferguson’s book does the service of putting various arguments into their context as well as relating them to one another. Indeed, one of Ferguson’s goals is diagnostic: to disambiguate trends in feminist theorizing about the relationship of women’s work to their oppression, so as to develop a more coherent socialist feminist perspective than currently exists.
Going to see ‘Belfast’ by Kenneth Branagh
21 FebruaryI went to see ‘Belfast’ by the actor and Director Kenneth Branagh with an open mind, and I left wanting to like it more than perhaps I did. It’s an autobiographical film of a small Protestant boy and his working class family at the beginning of the Troubles.
Belfast
21 FebruaryThe marketing people at Universal Pictures must have shrieked when they were told to come up with an advertising campaign for Kenneth Branagh’s new film Belfast.
Rescued from history, Rome’s dissident Communist partisans
12 January, byThis is the story of several thousand resistance fighters in Rome who were organised as the Movement Communists of Italy (MCd’I), sometimes better known by the name of their publication, Bandiera Rossa (Red Flag). They criticised Togliatti’s PCI (Italian Communist Party) for its policy of national unity with liberals and Christian Democrat forces which effectively blocked a strategy of turning the anti-fascist struggle into an insurrection for socialism. The PCI used all its resources and some unsavoury sectarian tactics to defeat this left organisation.
Forty Years Later, Reds Is Still One of the Best Films Ever Made About Revolutionary Politics
24 December 2021, byIn 1981, Warren Beatty directed Reds, a retelling of John Reed’s classic firsthand account of the Russian Revolution. The film still stands up today as one of the greatest and most faithful depictions of revolutionary politics.
What Was Chinese Trotskyism?
24 December 2021, byWhat does it mean to speak of Chinese Trotskyism, and what is its relevance for us today? [1] While early leaders of the Left Opposition in China were some of the key founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the most knowledgeable readers of Marx, this tradition had also been marginalized, vilified, and later brutally suppressed by the CCP under Mao.
A Labor Warrior Enabled
24 December 2021, byAble to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley examines the life of a unique and remarkable radical socialist political figure and writer.
Theorizing trans liberation
6 November 2021, by2020 marked an epochal shift in the movement for trans liberation, as the chant “Black Trans Lives Matter” became a feature of the multi-racial, multi-gender rebellions that swept the United States that summer. The popularization of the chant not only expressed the emancipatory desires of the most marginalized section of the trans community, but also signaled the emergence of trans liberation politics within the broader Left.
Revisiting the Jewish question
6 November 2021, byI once heard an anecdote about a Jewish comrade walking into his first meeting of a new socialist organization in the United States and asking a friend who the other Jews were in the room. The friend pointed out a handful of people—about a third, perhaps half of the room—to which the comrade responded, “This is the most goyische [non-Jewish] socialist meeting I’ve ever seen.”
Bringing Malcolm to Life
6 November 2021, byThis is a powerful new biography of one the greatest African Americans of the 20th century, Malcolm X (Muslim name el Hajj Malik el-Shabazz). His voice still resonates across the world as his speeches are played to new generations of activists.
