Reviews

Foster: soiling his own nest

John Bellamy Foster's latest book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022) continues a trajectory that risks spoiling his contribution to understanding ecological questions from a Marxist perspective

Busting myths about migration

Speaking at the Tory Party conference in October, Suella Braverman claimed that a “surge” of migrants is heading for the UK which “could bring millions more migrants to these shores.” Braverman stated that migration was backed by the UK elite with their “luxury beliefs”, claiming that their wealth protected them, and that “migrants won’t be taking their jobs… [migrants] will be mowing their lawns or cleaning their homes… [the out-of-touch rich] have no use for their British passports unless it is taking them to their second homes in Tuscany.” Braveman is a dull-witted, far-right politician...

A book about contradictions

Imagine your loved one is facing public accusations of misconduct from an anonymous Twitter account. This is the scenario explored in Yomi Adegoke’s The List , where Ola, a feminist writer, discovers that her fiancé, Michael, has been put on a list by an anonymous Twitter account detailing abusers in the media industry. And it’s only weeks away from their wedding. Adegoke has risen to fame as a Black feminist journalist having previously co-authored Slay In Your Lane , a book and then podcast that interviewed successful Black British women and was envisioned as “ Lean In , but for Black women”...

The cross in the White House and the flag in the sanctuary

Bradley Onishi’s book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism — and What Comes Next is an attempt to trace back from the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capitol the influence of White Christian Nationalism (WCN) and see how it has become, according to Onishi, a core part of the Trump-MAGA movement. He concludes that 6 January will not be the last attempt at a coordinated, violent insurrection against democracy. He also tells his personal story about how he became a born-again Evangelical in Orange County, California, a teenage zealot in the Rose Drive Friends Church...

The Communist Women’s Movement – high point of first wave feminism

A century ago, an international communist women’s movement began to develop a perspective for women’s self-liberation that still resonates today. The record of those early struggles has been translated into English for the first time by Mike Taber and Daria Dyakonova, The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922 (Brill 2023). The book provides a history of the greatest working class-based women’s movement to date, through the voices of the women involved and one that has great relevance for today’s socialist feminists. Communist Women’s Movement In 1917, the Russian working class took power led...

Stalin in London: not the true story

Stephen May’s Sell Us The Rope is a new novel about the London congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1907. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg play leading roles in the story. I know: it sounds great. But before you click on ‘Buy Now’ on Amazon, let me tell you a bit more. The book’s premise — that Stalin was a long-term, paid informer for the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana) — made the story especially interesting for me. The fact that it had a positive review in the New York Times — that was icing on the cake. Sadly, this is a very disappointing book. The...

A critical eye on Nancy Fraser

At a discussion on Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism as part of the ongoing South London Socialist Feminist Reading Group, we reached very different conclusions to Stuart Jordan’s review for Solidarity 680 . We thought it would be worth highlighting the key disagreements to open up some discussion. Fraser is right that capitalism is structurally entangled with questions of racial injustice, crises of social reproduction, and ecological disaster. There is a tendency within left circles to say that these things are important for the “health” of our movement; that the left must be anti-racist...

Kim Moody's "Breaking The Impasse": Review

Introduction Kim Moody argues in his book, Breaking the Impasse , written in 2020, that American politics is in a political cul de sac. This “impasse” is characterised by the Republican Party lurching further right and the Democratic Party taking a more centrist political and neoliberal economic positions. He argues against left-wing and socialist ventures into the Democratic Party and instead for building a mass working-class based party which “should seek to be a central piece in building the organized power of the working class” independent of positions this party may hold or seek to hold...

If the Barbies aren't scissoring, is it even Barbieland?

• Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023) — BEWARE: SPOILERS! I went to see Barbie wearing pink. My friends were wearing pink. When we arrived at Peckhamplex in South London, almost everyone else was wearing pink. People walking past the cinema to do something else were wearing pink. Not since 'The Queue' has London given itself over to such an all-consuming cultural event. Variety reports that the marketing budget allocated to Barbie was a staggering $150 million — $5 millionmore than the film's production costs. Indeed, much of the film’s success can be put down to the fact that before it hit...

Larisa Reisner a Bolshevik, revolutionary life

Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) lived an extraordinary life. She fought for working-class socialism at its high point a century ago, but died just before Stalin snuffed out the workers ’ state she had fought to defend. Cathy Porter’s newly updated Larisa Reisner: A Biography captures Reisner’s passion and sheds new light on her life. EARLY LIFE Larisa Reisner was born on 2 May 1895 in Lublin, then in tsarist Poland. (Both her names are often misspelt with two “ss”.) In 1898, her father Mikhail Reisner was exiled to Siberia for his political activities and for the next five years the family lived in...

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