Portside

China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was a well-known Cold War era CIA-sponsored organization whose role was to promote an international anti-communist, pro-US cultural policy. This latest study examines the well-funded and influential intellectual periodicals the CCF bankrolled all over the world.

Naomi Klein, the author of No Logos and other sharp critiques of capitalist culture and power, offers in her latest publication an in-depth elaboration of the book's title and a call-to-arms for a resistance that goes beyond criticism of Trump's malign politics to the need for mobilization on hundreds of viable and necessary fronts.

This new book joins a growing literature that takes a look at and tries to uncover the roots of today's right wing movement.

Hugo Chavez, with Ignacio Ramonet, Chavez: My First Life (translated by Ann Wright) Verso, 544 pp, Hardback, $36.00, August 2016, ISBN 978 1 78478 383 9 A balanced look at the early days and years in power of Venezuelan general cum President Hugo Chavez, who, while widely accused of authoritarian practices against his opposition, was singular among Latin American populist leaders in never aligning with the nation's bourgeoisie or turning on his left allies.

A new book examines Du Bois's radicalism, tracing its career-long development.

British artist, novelist, prodigious essayist and poet John Berger, best known for her magisterial and approachable Ways of Seeing and who died in January, is remembered here for his radical approach to Art, when it functions to make sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, when it becomes a meeting place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, what Berger called guts and honor.

A writer tells the story of his left wing family. Reviewer Scipes takes us on a tour.

A writer tells the story of his left wing family. Reviewer Scipes takes us on a tour.

With all the toxicity coming out of the White House and the GOP-dominated Congress, it's important to remember how insufferable were the politics of the neoliberal Democrats in power under Bill Clinton. The book under review (an article derived from the book is below) should help us remember how malignant were the Clinton years when it came to economic and social justice.