The latest issue of New Left Review (II, 64) has some interesting pieces. In a careful analysis, Peter Nolan and Jin Zhang show what a high mountain China must climb, even though it has overtaken Japan as the second largest… Continue Reading
Alex Callinicos, Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World, (Polity Press, 2010), £14.99 A book’s dedication rarely relates closely to its content but this is an exception. Dedicated to the memories of Chris Harman and Peter Gowan,… Continue Reading
Mark Bould and China Mieville (eds), Red Planets, Marxism and Science Ficiton (Pluto Press, 2009), £19.99 This collection of essays provides a critical analysis of science fiction (SF) within the media of film and novels. The genre, which involves exploring… Continue Reading
Donald Filtzer, Wendy Z. Goldman, Gijs Kessler and Simon Pirani (eds), A Dream Deferred: New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History (Peter Lang, 2008), £52.70 The great American poet, Langston Hughes asked “What happens to a dream deferred? Does… Continue Reading
Richard B Day and Daniel Gaido (eds), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, (Haymarket, 2011), $36 “The revolutionary centre is moving from the West to the East,” writes German socialist Karl Kautsky in 1903 in the first article in… Continue Reading
The previous issue of this journal carried an article arguing that sex work is fundamentally the same as other forms of wage labour in capitalist society.1 They argue that the primary response of revolutionary socialists to the growth of the… Continue Reading
My book The Russian Revolution in Retreat will not “resonate with the tens of thousands of young people now open to socialist ideas”, according to Kevin Murphy’s negative review in International Socialism 126.1 I hope he’s wrong. In my experience,… Continue Reading
“Trotsky is the one for whom there is no room either in pre-1990 Really Existing Socialism or in post-1990 Really Existing Capitalism, in which even those who are nostalgic for Communism do not know what to do with Trotsky’s permanent… Continue Reading
Michelangelo stands at the very summit of human fame, or celebrity as we now call it. His position is secure among that very small band of individuals—Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart, da Vinci and so on—who seem to tower over history,… Continue Reading
Editor’s introduction “A spectre is haunting South Asia—the spectre of Maoism,” the Financial Times rather melodramatically announced in April 2006, reporting that the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had described Maoist guerrillas as “the single greatest threat to Indian national… Continue Reading