Marcello Musto (ed), Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later (Routledge, 2008), £65 The current global financial meltdown highlights the need to both grasp and apply Karl Marx’s analysis of the crisis-prone and exploitative… Continue Reading
Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (Monthly Review, 2008), £25 The US media reform movement seemingly burst out of nowhere in response to the Federal Communication Commission’s attempt to relax media ownership rules in 2003.… Continue Reading
Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism (Ashgate, 2008), £60 According to the syndicalist Tom Mann, “The object of the unions is to wage the class war and take every opportunity of scoring against the enemy.” One cannot imagine… Continue Reading
John McIlroy, Nina Fishman and Alan Campbell (eds), The Post-War Compromise: British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics 1945-64 and The High Tide of British Trade Unionism: Trade Unions and Industrial Politics 1964–79 (Merlin, 2007), £18.95 each These two volumes bring… Continue Reading
Leo Zeilig, Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub–Saharan Africa (Tauris, 2007), £47.50 The revolutions in “Third World” countries in the three decades after 1945 posed some problems for Marxist theory. Leadership in those revolutions did not come… Continue Reading
Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, translated by David Fernbach (Brill, 2007), £139.10 Heide Gerstenberger’s Impersonal Power is an ambitious book. It tries to give an explanation for the form and content of the bourgeois… Continue Reading
Jerzy Borzecki, The Soviet–Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe (Yale University, 2008), £35 After 1917 it was not just the best known Bolsheviks who saw the October Revolution as the beginning of the international revolution—millions of… Continue Reading
BR Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), £50 Neville Hoad, African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), £12.50 Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy… Continue Reading
Iain Ferguson, Reclaiming Social Work: Challenging Neoliberalism and Promoting Social Justice (SAGE, 2007), £21.99 This summer Wirral council announced it would shed up to 30 social worker posts because the “personalisation agenda” means these qualified social workers are no longer… Continue Reading
Tareq Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2007), £50 Early on the mornings of 14 and 15 February 1949 a macabre sight met the eyes of passers-by in Baghdad. Bodies dangled on… Continue Reading