The latest New Left Review (II/85) starts off with the worthy aim of exploring the social roots of recent resistance movements from Occupy to the Turkish and Brazilian protests of June last year. But a piece by the sociologist Göran… Continue Reading
Peter Dwyer and Leo Zeilig, African Struggles Today: Social Movements since Independence (Haymarket, 2012), £12.99 African Struggles Today seeks to explain the key role that mass social movements have played in the history of Africa over the last three quarters… Continue Reading
Mike Gonzalez and Houman Barekat, (eds), Arms and the People: Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring (Pluto Press, 2013), £19.99 In 1870 Otto von Bismarck’s conscript army, using modern means of warfare including… Continue Reading
Michael Lavalette (ed), Capitalism and Sport: Politics, Protest, People and Play (Bookmarks, 2013), £9.99 Modern sport is often criticised by socialists for reflecting, or worse, perpetuating aspects of capitalist culture. While there are chapters in Capitalism and Sport that discuss… Continue Reading
Brian Richardson (ed), Say It Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism (Bookmarks, 2013), £9.99 What is racism? Where does it come from? Why has it remained prevalent despite the changes to society? How best can we fight it? These… Continue Reading
Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000BCE–1492CE (Bodley Head, 2013), £25 This book’s greatest strength is that it tackles the plethora of fresh archaeological evidence that is challenging some taken for granted assumptions about Jewish history.… Continue Reading
Sheila Cohen, Notoriously Militant: The Story of a Union Branch at Ford Dagenham (Merlin Press, 2013), £15.95 Along the stretch of the Thames Estuary that runs from Barking and the North Circular at one end, along the A13 to Thurrock… Continue Reading
I would like to question a statement by Sebastian Zehetmair published in issue 136 of your journal in autumn 2012 under the title: “Germany’s Lost Bolshevik: Paul Levi Revisited”.1 In Zehetmair’s view, the dispute over revolutionary strategy that gripped the… Continue Reading
The issues raised by Neil Davidson’s grand work on bourgeois revolutions are not merely of historical interest, but are of the first importance to the contemporary revolutionary left. For the time being, it seems best to leave the debate to… Continue Reading
Any author who attempts to reappraise a fundamental concept in historical materialism, in this case bourgeois revolution, can at the very least expect their work to receive close scrutiny from fellow Marxists. If, more specifically, that author is prepared to… Continue Reading