The 2008 Socialist Register is the best buy of the quarter. In previous years reviewers in International Socialism have often balked at recommending something of book length which might contain one or two good articles and a dozen poor or… Continue Reading
Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (eds), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (Yale University, 2007), £35 Big books are fashionable these days. Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 comes at… Continue Reading
Angel Smith, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898–1923 (Berghahn, 2007), £42.68 Following the publication of Chris Ealham’s Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona (reviewed in International Socialism 106), Angel Smith’s equally outstanding… Continue Reading
Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, 2007), £9_._99 Etienne Balibar is one of the most prominent of the former students of the anti-humanist Marxist Louis Althusser. Today he is a leading figure in French Marxism, and involved with campaigns… Continue Reading
Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (eds), History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism (Verso, 2007), £17.99 Chris Wickham (ed), Marxist History Writing for the 21st Century (Oxford University, 2007), £14.99 These two volumes are timely and complement one another. Both stand as… Continue Reading
Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power (Indiana University, 2007), £17.99 Alexander Rabinowitch details the October Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, and how power was won and held over the period until the celebrations of the revolution’s first anniversary. The narrow… Continue Reading
Robert G Hall, Voices of the People (Merlin, 2007), £15.95 Since the turn of the century the number of studies of Chartism—the world’s first working class party, formed around the six points of the People’s Charter in 1837—has burgeoned. The… Continue Reading
Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (Routledge, 2007), £20.00 Is there a human nature, and is it a barrier to socialism? For generations of reactionaries, the existence of class based societies generally, and capitalism specifically, has been evidence enough to… Continue Reading
Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Postcolonialism in IsraelPalestine (Zed, 2007), £19.99 As I wrote this review in mid-November 2007, the Bush administration was claiming to be rebooting the Middle East “peace” process with its conference… Continue Reading
Paddy Woodworth, The Basque Country—A Cultural History (Signal Books, 2007), £12 “Yet many Basques today feel no identity with either Spain or France, and want independence, or something close to it”—from the preface. Bernardo Atxaga, “like many of his generation”,… Continue Reading