Portside

This little book has become an unlikely political best-seller in these unlikely political times.

For three decades, eight members of the Quimpo family dedicated themselves to the anti-Marcos resistance in the Philippines, sometimes at profound personal cost. In this memoir, they tell stories that comprise a family saga of revolution, persistence, and, ultimately, vindication, even as easy resolution eluded them. The authors are also critical of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its rural-based strategy of protracted people’s war.

That the Nazis based their racist laws in large part on U.S. white supremacist law is a widely known fact. This new study is a contemporary and detailed look at the correspondences between the two legal regimes.

On the centennial of the Russian Revolution, John Reed's first-hand look at the uprising of workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors is fit reading about a mass movement that overthrew the old aristocracy and then the bourgeois class itself. An exposition on ordinary people making history for themselves, the book is a gripping account of events in Petrograd, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks lead the various workers councils in finally seizing state power.

This new book, says Peter E. Gordon, argues that "ever since the fall of communism, a culture of defeat has characterized the left’s understanding of political history and theoretical critique." Gordon guides us through the intricacies of the case author Enzo Traverso makes in this volume.

From outlawing bowling in colonial America to regulating violent video games and synthetic drugs today, Mark Stein’s Vice Capades examines the nation’s relationship with the actions, attitudes, and antics that have defined morality. This humorous and quirky history reveals that our views of vice are formed less by morals than by power.

This new book highlights the technology at the heart of what reviewer Jill Leovy calls "surveillance-driven policing," and the heightened dangers this new set of law enforcement tools pose to democracy.

A review of the martyred German/ Polish Marxist's revolutionary's writings, with special emphasis on her seminal work, Reform and Revolution (1900, revised 1908). The classic essay is available in numerous collections of her work, and is accessible on line at Marxists.org

Here is yet another entry in the history of how the blacklist impacted Hollywood during the McCarthy era, and how artists resisted through their art.

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.