I agree with Ellen Wood. It is important to start with what we have in common. That’s why, in my review, I described the ‘main thrust of The Retreat From Class’ as ‘one which this journal can only strongly endorse’.1… Continue Reading
This article by Ellen Meiksins Wood first appeared in International Socialism in 1987. It is a reply to a book review by Alex Callinicos of her book The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism. Callinicos’s rejoinder to Wood is… Continue Reading
A review of Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (Verso, 1986) No sane observer of the British political scene could doubt that the current is pulling rightwards inside the labour movement. The New Statesman recently… Continue Reading
The centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising is fast approaching. The latest issue of the Irish Marxist Review commemorates with a special issue. Kieran Allen assesses the myths and reality of the rising, Mary Smith reveals the neglected history of… Continue Reading
Cal Winslow (ed), E P Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics (Lawrence & Wishart, 2014) £15.99 This collection of E P Thompson’s writings covers the period from 1956 to 1963, a tumultuous but also highly… Continue Reading
John Parrington, The Deeper Genome: Why There is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye (Oxford University Press, 2015), £18.99 John Parrington has written a lively and engaging popular science book about the history of genetics or what… Continue Reading
Antonio Gramsci (edited and translated by Derek Boothman), A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-Prison Letters, 1908-1926 (Lawrence and Wishart, 2014), £25 The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci is widely acknowledged, even beyond the left, as one of the most important… Continue Reading
Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2015), £9.99 Arun Kundnani’s book about Islamophobia deliberately references the 1966 Hollywood movie, The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! With its repetitive title… Continue Reading
John Newsinger, Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939 (Bookmarks, 2015), £7.99 John Newsinger opens this timely account of working class struggle in the first half of the 20th century with what at first seems an incongruous statement: “We… Continue Reading
Kevin Ovenden, Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth (Pluto Press/Left Book Club, 2015), £11.50 I’m writing this review on the eve of a general strike (3 December) in Greece, the second against the Syriza government since it was re-elected in September. Alexis… Continue Reading