Norman 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?
Marxist and Feminist Interventions
8 March 2017, byThis new edited by Shahrzad Mojab, an Iranian-born scholar and activist at the University of Toronto, is an important addition to the body of radical analysis that left feminists can use to educate ourselves about old and new theoretical, political and methodological debates on the left. It also is a signal that such debates are receiving new energy in the 21st century by new generations of left feminist intellectuals and activists dissatisfied with the academic compromises that institutionalized feminism has made, and the failure to incorporate feminist insights into Marxist-inspired theory and politics.
Redeeming the revolution
24 January 2017, byNearly a century ago, the workers and peasants of Russia overthrew the Provisional Government and established the world’s first socialist republic. It was a seminal moment in human history. For the capitalists of the world, it was an event to be feared and they marshaled their forces to contain Bolshevism. For the workers of the world, the Russian Revolution was an inspiration to take the socialist road. Now, as we approach the Russian Revolution’s centenary, its influence appears buried beneath not only the onslaught of anticommunist propaganda, but from the salvos of Stalin’s counterrevolution which crushed so many hopes. Yet the world still needs the alternative which the Bolshevik Revolution represents – working class democracy, socialism, and internationalism. October 1917 – Workers in Power does a magnificent job with its scholarly, primary sources, bibliography, time-line and a glossary to help for those curious about socialism and seasoned activists to reassess and redeem the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution.
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
