Portside

The role of strategy in making social movements and organizations more effective, and who creates it, are the urgent questions four authors explore in three new books. Their answers will surprise you, as they surprised me.

This history of neoliberalism focuses on how this school of thought and governance repurposed the Protestant work ethic to serve the wealthiest one percent.

Reviewing the new book by Christopher Rufo, architect of the right’s crusade against “critical race theory.”

Reviewer Pele says author Mbembe defines “necropolitics” “as the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death.” Necropolitical practices have their origins in colonialism and the slave plantation.

This book explores how social identities of various kinds have spurred the divisiveness of our politics, and how politics has itself become a kind of social identity.

When Communist writer Albert Maltz was blacklisted in the McCarthyist era, no commercial publisher in the U. S. would touch his novel A Tale of One January. A new edition slated for US distribution means his 70-year blacklist will finally end.

Maddow's new book surveys pre-WW II fascism in the United States, including the well-known figures in public life who sympathized with or were otherwise associated with the movement.

Tim Alberta is a fine guide to the world of conservative US Christians, their dispiriting march to the right, and its ugly cost.

Michael Yates reviews Ballad of an American, a newly released graphic biography of Black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. The book gives an uncompromising look at a complicated, passionate man, wholly dedicated to the cause of liberation.

Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.