Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics (Manchester University Press, 2011), £60 At a time when the “thinkers” of Blue Labour are attempting to rewrite the history of the English working class… Continue Reading
Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned, 2nd edition (Zed, 2011), £18.99 When I first became interested in Marxist political economy, I longed for a critique of mainstream economics written by someone who was thoroughly familiar with the discipline.… Continue Reading
Dai Smith, In The Frame: Memory in Society, 1910 to 2010 (Parthian 2010), £20 Dai Smith’s 446-page book In the Frame—”an alternative history of the past century in Wales” as he calls it—is an occasionally unwieldy collection of essays on… Continue Reading
Michael Lavalette (ed), Radical Social Work: Social Work at the Crossroads (Policy, 2011), £21.99 Right now there is a crisis in social work. The global economic crisis has meant devastating cuts to welfare provision while neoliberal policies have seen an… Continue Reading
Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar (eds), Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review, 2010), £14.95 When prices for many basic foods spiked in 2007 and 2008, thousands rioted in more than 30 countries from Bangladesh to… Continue Reading
John Bellamy Foster, Brett W Clark and Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (Monthly Review Press, 2008), £10.95 Intelligent design—the notion that the complexity we see in the universe could only have arisen due to the intervention of a “designer”… Continue Reading
Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production (Pluto Press, 2011), £16 The debate on the underlying causes of the Great Recession has divided Marxist and radical economists. Conventional left accounts of the crisis are rooted in the idea of a… Continue Reading
David Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (Verso, 2008), £12.99 To state that race is socially constructed may be construed as a tired and even irrelevant point to make in a contemporary… Continue Reading
Simon Assaf’s article “Libya at the Crossroads” in International Socialism 133 included a misinterpretation of my position on Libya as one that “argued that the left had no choice but to support intervention”.1 The myth that I advocated “support” for… Continue Reading
For more than a decade Bolivia has been rocked by mass upsurges and mobilisations that have posed the necessity and possibility of fundamental political and social transformation.1 In 2005 the social movements that led the country’s water and gas wars… Continue Reading