Many on the left viewed last year’s food crisis and price rises as a blip, a delayed by-product of the debt-induced boom of the mid-2000s aggravated by speculation. According to this argument, concerns over the ability of capitalism to feed… Continue Reading
Joseph Mensah (ed), Neoliberalism and Globalisation in Africa: Contestations from the Embattled Continent (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), £40 This collection examines Africa’s special place in globalisation. Africa south of the Sahara often appears in cheery UN and World Bank reports after… Continue Reading
Ian McKay, Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada 1890–1920 (Between the Lines, 2008), £26.87 Ian McKay begins Reasoning Otherwise with the frank acknowledgement that there exists little published scholarship relating to the development of the Canadian left… Continue Reading
Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis (eds), George Padmore: Pan–African Revolutionary (Ian Randle, 2009), £14.95 This collection of essays on the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore (1902-59), appearing on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, is a timely tribute to the life… Continue Reading
Mark Cowling, Marxism and Criminological Theory: A Critique and a Toolkit (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), £50 Two periods of history have witnessed a serious and sustained Marxist engagement with the study of law. The first, not surprisingly, was in Russia in… Continue Reading
Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (Yale University, 2009), £35 Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” is the most famous building never built. Designed from 1919 to 1920 by a collective, led by the futurist painter and sculptor,… Continue Reading
Tristram Hunt, The Frock–Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (Allen Lane, 2009), £25.00 Ten years ago Paul Foot wrote a review of Francis Wheen’s engaging and jovial, if somewhat lightweight, biography of Karl Marx. In the review he… Continue Reading
Bill Dunn, Global Political Economy: A Marxist Critique (Pluto, 2008), £19.99 Political economy is as old as capitalism itself. It emerged in the late 18th century and its object of study was the way capitalist production and exchange were to… Continue Reading
Jan Willem Stutje, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred (Verso, 2007), £19.99 Ernest Mandel was a tireless socialist activist over five decades. He wrote prolifically on economics, history and contemporary politics, and was an impressive lecturer and debater in several… Continue Reading
In January 2009 a health worker and Unison activist, Karen Reissmann, brought a claim of unfair dismissal to the Employment Tribunal.1 She complained that she had been dismissed for publicly criticising cuts at her trust. After her dismissal 700 of… Continue Reading