Reviews

London: Bread and Circuses

by Jonathan Glancey, Verso £7 Since the 80s London has been turned over to the play of market forces. The institutions which previously had any form of public service remit have been broken up, sold off, underfunded and downgraded to second class provision or abolished by successive governments. The quality of life has fallen as the city becomes less and less 'livable' in the face of failing infrastructure, a higher cost of living and a widening gap between rich and poor. Jonathan Glancey - the Architecture Correspondent of the Guardian - contrasts London today with the best of public...

Tressell: The Real Story of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist

by Dave Harker, Zed Books (This year is the 90th anniversary of the publication of the book.) The TV chat show host Jonathan Ross interviewed star of the Royle Family Ricky Tomlinson recently. Tomlinson was jailed for his part in the first ever national building workers' strike in 1972 and he explained that he was fighting for 'a few quid extra', safety boots and a toilet to use on site - basic things. "Surely that was a long time ago?" asks Ross. "No, things are worse now" said Tomlinson. It is with good reason, then, that Tomlinson often recommends The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists , the...

George Galloway.and the Making of a Pseudo-Socialist Hero

by George Galloway. Allen Lane, £10 "By their heroes ye shall know them… for in the individuals whom they exalt and glorify and hold up to the youth as example, every class and every movement unfailingly reveals its standards of worth, its morality, its very soul. Thus, the communist workers of Germany glorified the name of the courageous and incorruptible Liebknecht who sacrificed his life in battle for a great cause. The degenerate Nazis countered with the dedication of their official hymn to Horst Wessel, the pimp who was killed in a brawl." James P Cannon, 1952 By their heroes ye shall...

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya

by Anna Politkovskaya This is not a weighty political analysis of the conflict in Chechnya, but a collection of newspaper articles by Politkovskaya in which the focus is on the "inhumane empirical detail". Much of the book consists of personal stories. Many of the people of whom those stories are told are no longer alive. Reading it is certainly a depressing experience. The Chechnya described by Politkovskaya and by those who are given a voice in her articles is a physical and moral wasteland, one in which basic human values have been eroded by nearly a decade of bloody conflict. The Russian...

Lorimer's dystopia

An outdated dystopia Review of Imperialism in the 21st century, by Doug Lorimer. Resistance Books, 2002, $4.95. According to Doug Lorimer, the Cold War of 1947-1989 was a conflict between "the world's chief imperialist power", the USA, and countervailing forces. Those countervailing forces he describes negatively as "an enormous wave of political rebellion and social insurgency" or "anti-imperialist rebellions", but positively as "the mass resistance of the Soviet workers and peasants and local worker-peasant movements under Stalinist leadership", "the Soviet workers and peasants in uniform"...

The Vulnerable Planet: a Short Economic History of the Environment

By John Bellamy Foster, 1999, New York, Monthly Review Press The author, now one of the Editors of Monthly Review, is a regular writer on environmental problems. In 2000 he wrote a 310-page study of Marx's Ecology: materialism and nature. More recently, in the January 2003 issue of Monthly Review, he has analysed the failure of the Rio and Johannesburg Earth Summits. The Vulnerable Planet, while a short work (only 168 small pages) is a splendid introduction to the problems we face, as well as to the literature where we can go further. The book is organised in the following chapters: the...

Groundswell: the rise of the Greens

by Amanda Lohrey in Quarterly Essay, No. 8 2002 Amanda Lohrey's essay on the history of the Greens proclaims "the political potency of ecology". "This movement and its ecological narrative have the power to subsume the traditional grand narratives of capital and labour and indeed to some degree they already have." "The Green constituency is based on…a new paradigm or grand narrative of what politics is about, i.e. the 'ecological'." She attributes this to the material reality of environmental destruction as an issue of universal impact, though (by the way) with greatest impact on the poorest...

Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap... and flog the workers

The Oxfam report Trading away our rights: women working in global supply chains was published to coincide with 'Fair Trade Fortnight'. Matt Cooper gives his view. Walk into any supermarket in Britain and look at the fruit and veg - it's grown in Kenya, South Africa or Honduras. The jeans in the clothes shops and the supermarkets are made in Romania, Taiwan or Cambodia. The cut-throat nature of modern retail means that the clothes are constantly discounted in a culture of the year-round sale, the fruit in two-for-one promotions. Now consider the case of Rokeya in Bangladesh, who worked sewing...

Post-modern, pre-rational?

'How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: a History of Modern Delusions' by Francis Wheen This book comes with a fluffy duck on the cover and a recommendation from Nick Hornby, so I expected to find it dire. Fortunately my expectation was confounded. This is a sustained political polemic from one of the most talented polemicists alive. The book covers the last twenty-five years, starting from the two catastophes of the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, cataloguing the many competing and complimentary forms of irrationality which have...

The new economy of terror

Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks by Loretta Napoleoni This book looks at the filthy-dirty business of the funding of modern "terror" organisations. If there are differences in the roots of and political outlooks of these groups - between for instance the Tamil Tigers and Islamic Jihad, between the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and al-Qaida, Napoleoni is not much interested in them. She quite explicitly sets out to write an "economic analysis" and to avoid political concepts. This, she says, is a new way of looking at the problem. I don't know about...

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