The latest issue of Historical Materialism (18.1) has a symposium devoted to the late Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing. Two of the contributions stand out. The American Marxist geographer Dick Walker in a lively, wide-ranging piece takes on both… Continue Reading
Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, 2009), £18 Black Flame is the first of a two-volume project that attempts to re-examine the history and theory of “anarchism’s… Continue Reading
Terry Thomas, Criminal Records: A Database for the Criminal Justice System and Beyond (Palgrave, 2007), £45 In this important, historically informed mapping of contemporary criminal records policy Terry Thomas overviews the emergence and growth of criminal records from the Victorian… Continue Reading
Jane Hardy, Poland’s New Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2009), £ 13.99 Throughout the Cold War, Poland played a central role in developments within the Soviet bloc, often representing a beacon of workers’ struggle against its inherently sclerotic economy and repressive Stalinist… Continue Reading
Fred Pearce, Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash (Eden Project Books, 2010), £12.99 In the 200 years since the Reverend Thomas Malthus first penned his tract An Essay on the Principle of Population the question of… Continue Reading
Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma (Verso, 2009), £12.99 This book charts the story of the most significant film journal in history, not only in its native France, but throughout the world. Cahiers (“notebooks”) was an active—and… Continue Reading
Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (eds), Raya Dunayevskaya: The Power of Negativity—Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx (Lexington Books, 2002), £16.95 The relationship of Marx and historical materialism to Hegelian dialectics has long been a source… Continue Reading
Gabriel Kolko, World in Crisis: The End of the American Century (Pluto, 2009), £12.99 In his introduction to World in Crisis Gabriel Kolko writes provocatively that “American capitalism is tending towards committing suicide—and is taking other nations with it.” Kolko… Continue Reading
Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill, 2009), £104 So much quoted, less read and even less understood, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks must be one of the most cited works by any Marxist. Peter Thomas has produced… Continue Reading
Thomas C Patterson, Karl Marx, Anthropologist (Berg, 2009), £19.99 Karl Marx, Anthropologist is a fascinating and very wide ranging book, which draws on Patterson’s almost 50 years of study of both Marxism and anthropology. This book builds on his earlier… Continue Reading