Making sense of the Arab revolutions is an urgent priority for the radical left. New Left Review 68 carries two pieces that seek to address this task. The first, by Perry Anderson, has a strange title, “On the Concatenation in… Continue Reading
Simon Choat, Marx Through Post Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (Continuum, 2010), £65 In this book, Simon Choat analyses the relationship between the ideas of four “post-structuralist” thinkers—Jean-Francoise Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—and the works of Karl… Continue Reading
David Knight, The Making of Modern Science (Polity, 2009), £17.99 There prevails in society the notion that the practice of science is somehow objective and neutral. However, when we look at the way funding is allocated and what research is… Continue Reading
Illan Pappe, Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto, 2010), £13 In this excellent book, the Israeli academic Illan Pappe breaks from his usual style to offer a mixture of personal stories, general overviews, historical… Continue Reading
Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War (Verso, 2009) £14.99 Reading Antagonistics is a contradictory experience. Written by US academic Gopal Balakrishnan, currently on the editorial board of New Left Review, the book is on one… Continue Reading
Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 2011), £14.99 Hamid Dabashi is a prolific writer and an engaged scholar. He has written extensively on Iran, Islam and cinema. Recently, many have come to know Dabashi through his relentless support… Continue Reading
Joseph Choonara spoke to Ian Birchall, author of Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time (Bookmarks, 2011), which looks at the life of the founder of the International Socialist tradition You have made your biography of Tony Cliff as objective… Continue Reading
Lucien van der Walt’s reply to my “Marxism and Anarchism” marks a welcome step forward beyond the all too familiar “non-debate” between Marxist and anarchist tendencies on the revolutionary left.1 Essentially, his argument is that while International Socialism and anarchism… Continue Reading
Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution formed in its author’s mind during Russia’s 1905 Revolution—between 9 January, when workers marched to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar, and the mass strikes of October that gave birth to the Petrograd… Continue Reading
The trade union leaders, almost to a man, deplored it, the government viewed it with alarm, the Independent Labour Party regretted this untoward disregard for the universal panacea of the ballot box, the Social Democratic Federation asked, “Can anything be… Continue Reading