The most interesting easily accessible article this quarter is “From Çayönü to Çatalhöyük” on the English version of the website Urkommunismus (“Early Communism”).1 It is an analytical account by Bernhard Brosius of the results of archaeological excavations of one of… Continue Reading
Shaun Breslin, China and the Global Political Economy (Macmillan, 2009), £19.99 Jenny Clegg, China’s Global Strategy (Pluto, 2009) £19.99 Nobody knows how long or how deep the world economic recession is likely to be. For China the stakes are especially… Continue Reading
Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ‘68—Rebellion in Western Europe and North America 1956-1976 (Oxford University, 2008), £19.99 When International Socialism’s editors asked me to review this book I was in the middle of a speaking tour of the wave of… Continue Reading
Jeffrey B Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (Colombia University, 2008), £27 Hubert Harrison was a towering figure in US black and socialist politics in the early years of the 20th century. He was known as the… Continue Reading
Michael Eaude, Triumph at Midnight of the Century: A Critical Biography of Arturo Barea (Sussex Academic Press, 2009), £45 “A lump of grey mass, the size of a child’s fist, was flattened out against the glass pane and kept on… Continue Reading
Heidi Armbruster and Anna Laerke (eds), Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics and Fieldwork in Anthropology (Berghahn Books, 2008), £45 I enjoyed reading this collection—in part because it reminded me of when I was at the London School of Economics as a… Continue Reading
Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Marx’s Capital (Pluto Press, 2008), £12.99 The left has good reason to return to Capital, given the unrest gripping economic wisdom. Images of Nicolas Sarkozy thumbing the pages of Le Capital titillated the Economist and,… Continue Reading
Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (second edition) (Princeton, 2008), £19.95 Occasionally mainstream economists manage to produce works of genuine use. This is one of them. The eruption of the credit crunch and then the… Continue Reading
Jeanne Flavin, Our Bodies, Our Crimes (New York University, 2009), £30.95 “When she said, ‘rights terminated’, I just felt lost… Those are my kids…you snatch them, that was my world. You just took that. What I’m a fight for? What… Continue Reading
Samuel Guicheteau, La Révolution des Ouvriers Nantais: Mutation Economique, Identité Sociale et Dynamique Révolutionnaire (1740_1815) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), €19 A revisionist school, premised on the notion that the French Revolution was not bourgeois and capitalist, has dominated the… Continue Reading