books

Does Gareth Stedman Jones Inflate or Deflate Marx's Heritage?

Alex Callinicos International Socialism
The reviewer faults the book's author for deflating both Marx's and the author's own earlier stance as a creative British Marxist historian of the working class. While the reviewer grants that Jones offers solid accounts of developments in the British working class movement and in European radical politics that made the First International possible, he faults Jones for relying on a narrow reading of Marx's political economy at the expense of its revolutionary core.

Tidbits - October 13, 2016 - Reader Comments: Sexual Harassment' 2016 Election, Readers on Jill Stein; Spain; Anti-Apartheid Struggle; Rosenberg Sons on 60 Minutes; Announcements; and more....

Portside
Reader Comments: Anita Hill-What We Can Still Learn From Sexual Harassment; Readers on The Left Deserves Better Than Jill Stein; Racism and Fight Against Public Lands; Secret Struggle Against Apartheid; Spain's Turmoil and Europe's Crisis; CCR Takes John Ashcroft to Supreme Court; Announcements: Ethel Rosenberg's sons on 60 Minutes - Sunday; Chicago forum-Contemporary Capitalism and Why We Need Marxism; New York - three different book talks; exhibit - U.S. Radical Left

Being a Revolutionary in Cuba Today

Enrique Ubieta G¢mez GRANMA
Socialist democracy, essentially superior, still has a long way to go. Being revolutionary is participating with a perspective of committed criticism. Criticizing is not reporting a known fact; it is acting on it, pushing toward its solution... Radicalism in understanding and in action; the revolutionary seeks the root of a problem, even when it cannot be extirpated immediately, even when one errs in pointing it out and moves rapidly into action....

books

Sartre and the Birth of Radical Existentialism

Ray Monk The New Statesman
A granular review of three recent books on the the political and intellectual legacy of French Marxian existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. As the reviewer notes, if you want to know why 50,000 people showed up to pay their respects at the writer/activist's 1980 funeral, these new books may provide the answer.

books

Patricide Deferred

Robert Minto Open Letters Monthly
The Frankfurt School produced some of the most noted Marxist intellectuals of the last century. Reviewer Robert Minto says this new group portrait offers an accessible entryway into the minds of these thinkers, whose work and ideas have often been labeled unnecessarily difficult and obscure.

books

Homage to E.P. Thompson

Joseph White New Politics
Labor historian E.P. Thompson is perhaps best known for his monumental and path-breaking work, The Making of the English Working Class. The collected essays reviewed here, many either out-of-print or difficult to obtain, were written between 1955 and 1963. They show Thompson as also a dedicated educator of workers, a sharp polemicist, a skilled political theorist and a tireless agitator for peace, against nuclear weapons and for a rebirth of the socialist project.

books

Wall Street's Foreign Policy Wizards

Dominic Alexander Counterfire
The Council on Foreign Relations is a supercharged, highly connected establishment think tank. While producing reports and staffing varied policy working-groups, its recommendations are invariably market-based. CFR leaders and members pass through the revolving door of the federal government to high positions of authority, no matter which party holds power. The book under review, Wall Street's Think Tank, charts the council's key links to US imperial policy.

books

Terry Eagleton: Still the most Formidable Critic of Populist Late-Capitalism

Melanie McDonagh New Statesman
Both analytical and droll, Terry Eagleton's Culture explores how culture evolved from rarified sphere to humble practices, and from a bulwark against industrialism's encroaches to present-day capitalism's most profitable export. Eagleton both illuminates culture's collusion with colonialism, nationalism, the decline of religion, the rise of and rule over the "uncultured" masses, as well a means for cultivating social life and social change.

books

Can We Combine Intersectionality with Marxism?

Laura Miles International Socialism
While a sharp contribution to discussions of women's oppression and liberation, the book under review is faulted for not demonstrating the actual radical connection between class and other forms of oppression. While rejecting a tendency to reduce Marxism to a one-dimensional critique of class, the book's author is faulted for downplaying the limits of intersectionality as not articulating--but instead fudging--the existing gulf between identity politics and Marxism.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Socialism

Geoffrey Jacques People's World
Gaining social control over the economic life of society - achieving socialism, in a word - requires not only that we know that the democratic republic is the staging ground for such change. It also requires that we recognize that the evidence of the future we want is visible and "invading" our present, to borrow a term from C. L. R. James, in forms that exist in the current conditions of our social life.
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