A review of Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Verso (2020), £20. “Maritime trade, logistics and hydrocarbon transport,” Laleh Khalili argues in this detailed and enjoyable book, “are the clearest distillation of… Continue Reading
A review of Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How The World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism, Verso (2019), £9.99, and Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Verso (2019), £16.99. In The People’s… Continue Reading
A review of David Wearing, AngloArabia, Wiley (2018), £15.99. It is now 50 years since Britain formally ended its colonial rule in the Persian Gulf. However, David Wearing’s AngloArabia shows that the relationship between the British state and the Gulf… Continue Reading
A review of Anonymous, A Warning, Little, Brown (2019), £14.99, and Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America, Bloomsbury (2020), £20. No president of the United States has had more written about… Continue Reading
A review of John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Monthly Review Press (2020), £30. Since John Bellamy Foster published Marx’s Ecology in 2000, the idea that Karl Marx had little to say on environmental issues has… Continue Reading
A review of Grace Blakeley, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation Grace Blakeley (Repeater, 2017), £10.99. Stolen is a very comprehensive and readable account of the roots of financialisation in the 1970s crisis, which ended the “golden age”… Continue Reading
A review of Donny Gluckstein and Terry Sullivan, Hegel and Revolution (Bookmarks, 2020), £7. The thought of G W F Hegel might seem like an odd topic of conversation for Marxists. By the time he died in 1831, Hegel had… Continue Reading
A review of Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disturbing the Global Supply Chain (Pluto, 2018), £18.99 It is a truism that, in the era of economic globalisation, capital needs to circulate without disruption. The complex network… Continue Reading
A review of Geoff Mann, In The Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (Verso, 2019), £14.99 Geoff Mann’s (sympathetic) critique of John Maynard Keynes—“the most influential economist of the 20th Century”—is worth reading for two… Continue Reading
A review of Richard J Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown, 2019), £35 Breadth and verve made Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) the most sold and most translated of socialist historians ever to write in English. Compared with his… Continue Reading