A review of Donny Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War: Resistance Versus Empire (Pluto, 2012), £19.99 The Second World War (1939-1945) was the bloodiest conflict in human history. But for millions it was and still is the… Continue Reading
Mikko Lahtinen (Gareth Griffiths & Kristina Köhli, trans.), Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism (Haymarket, 2011) There are two mainstream interpretations of the work of Niccolò Machiavelli: he is seen either as the “the father of… Continue Reading
Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will be Killed for in the 21st Century (Polity, 2012), £20 In this translation of a book originally published in German in 2007, Harald Welzer makes a gloomy argument: that climate change is already… Continue Reading
Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (Verso, 2012), £7.99 Slavoj Žižek has been an important point of reference for many activists and intellectuals who were caught up in the protests of recent years, from the student revolt to the… Continue Reading
Gregory Elliott, Hobsbawm: History and Politics (Pluto, 2010), £12.99 For many, Eric Hobsbawm represented the archetypal Marxist historian. His many works on empire, class, nations and states are for many new to Marxism the first way in to understanding a… Continue Reading
A review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket, 2012), £22.99 This is a book in the grand style. This is true physically—getting on for 700 pages of text, 70 of notes and nearly another 70 of… Continue Reading
Sam Farber, Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment (Haymarket, 2011), $24 Discussions around Cuba have an unfortunate tendency to generate more heat than light, particularly on the left. Sam Farber’s new book, in the same spirit as… Continue Reading
Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire and Revolution (SUNY, 2012), $80 Ethics has been a problematic area for Marxism ever since its beginnings. Marx himself wrote very little on the topic, and what he did write seems paradoxical. On… Continue Reading
David Renton, Struck Out:Why Employment Tribunals Fail Workers and What Can be Done (Pluto, 2012), £19.99 In this new book developed from his earlier article in International Socialism,1 socialist barrister David Renton examines the disparity between the ambitions of workers… Continue Reading
Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (Penguin, 2009), £14.99; Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500–700 (Oxford University Press, 2011), £35 When Chris Wickham’s… Continue Reading