A review of Gerald Horne, Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music, Monthly Review Press (2019), £22. Jazz has an unfortunate reputation these days.1 It is often seen as “high culture”, something to be respected rather… Continue Reading
A review of Terry Irving, The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe, Monash University Publishing (2020), £25.99. World-renowned archaeologist, prehistorian and linguist Vere Gordon Childe’s career spanned three decades from 1925 until 1957. He… Continue Reading
A review of Enzo Traverso, Critique of Modern Barbarism: Essays on Fascism, Anti-semitism and the Use of History, IIRE (2019), £17. Can Marxism help us to understand the Holocaust? Marxism is a body of theoretical and experiential understanding that tries… Continue Reading
A review of Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, Cambridge University Press (2019), £22.99 Brendan McGeever’s meticulously researched book uncovers truly shocking revelations about the scale of antisemitism during the civil war that followed the October 1917 Russian Revolution.1… Continue Reading
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