Reviews

Bodies Under Siege

• Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global , by Sian Norris (Verso, 2023) In the last year, four women in the UK have been prosecuted for carrying out illegal abortions. This is especially shocking when you consider that in the 160 years prior there were only three. There has been a corresponding rise in criminal investigations, which are not only invasive and traumatic for those involved, but also suggest that further prosecutions are coming down the line. But why now? In her book, Bodies Under Siege, Sian Norris sets out the links between the rising far...

Capitalism and converging crises

Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism tells us that capitalist society is an insatiable glutton that “makes a meal of our creative capacities and of the earth that sustains us — with no obligation to replenish what they consume or repair what they damage”. Racism, sexism, ecocide and creeping authoritarianism are “non-accidental” features of capitalism’s deep structure. Through blind, systemic parasitism on human and extra-human nature, capitalism undermines the social, political and natural bases of its own existence lurching into ever-escalating crises which resolve periodically into new...

The left and a famous cartoonist

The Ruling Clawss , by A. Redfield, was originally published by the Daily Worker (US) in 1935. It is now republished as The Ruling Clawss: The Socialist Cartoons of Syd Hoff . Hoff was unknown to me. But after a career as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and Hearst publications from the 1930s he found fame in the USA as a children’s author and illustrator, with Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) selling more than ten million copies. The cartoons in The Ruling Clawss are from 1933-35. They appeared in the Daily Worker as a single panel strip poking fun at the wealthy and ruling class during the...

A primer of tankie-talk

How to Tankie — The Anti-Imperialist’s Guide to the Modern World is a small handbook (“this might be considered a work of satire”) of the responses used by “tankies” against those of us who “think that a Russian tank where it isn’t invited is as bad as an American one where it also isn’t invited.” A “tankie”, it explains, “used to be someone who followed the official Communist Party line in all things, most particularly when the Kremlin sent in the tanks”. By extension, it describes those today who think of themselves as left-wing but back Putin over Ukraine, Xi Jinping over Hong Kong and the...

An anti-racist politics “with DuBois”

Writing 120 years ago in the introduction to his Souls of Black Folk , the American intellectual W E B DuBois declared that the “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line.” These were the bleakest of times for Black Americans who faced Jim Crow, lynching, terror. And in Africa and Asia the European empires continued to repress and exploit Black and Asian populations. The Souls of Black Folk was a demand for Black freedom and also a polemic, in the first instance against Booker T Washington. Washington was criticised for attempting to make a pact with dominant white...

The politics of emotional life

Alva Gotby’s They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life is the latest contribution to a growing series of Verso books on the topic of Social Reproduction Theory, in which Gotby explores the concept of emotional reproduction. She defines this as, on the one hand, the work of generating certain feelings in those around us, and, on the other, the work of maintaining the social norms that are both “cause and effect” of emotional labour as we know it. Family The nuclear family, Gotby explains, remains the “proper place of intense feeling”; the source of emotional well-being and where we’re...

No Surrender is our motto and our duty

No Surrender is an important social realist novel about the battle for votes for women. It was written in the moment, at the height of the campaign, by an active suffragette, Constance Maud. Maud was a champion of working class women activists in the suffragette movement at a time when they were dismissed and disregarded by the autocratic leadership of the militant, headline grabbing Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Through their graphic novel, Sophie and Scarlett Rickard have taken No Surrender and breathed new life into it for a 21st century readership. Christabel Pankhurst had...

Abolish the family?

• The Anti-Social Family , by Michèle Barrett (1982) • Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation by Sophie Lewis (2022) I love my family. I assume, bolstered by stats and anecdotes, that they're nicer than average, or at least less violent. Maybe you love yours, or like them or hate them. Maybe all three. The family is the site of the majority of violence against women and children. The family is the privatised unit of care, driving alienation, isolation and endless domestic drudgery. The family can be a place of security, care, love and support. The vast majority of people say...

Country and city in Estonia

Indrek by A.H. Tammsaare is volume 2 of the "Truth and Justice" pentalogy The second of A. H. Tammsaare’s classic five volume epic of Estonian life is now available in English. I reviewed the first volume, ‘Vargäme’ online in Solidarity 638 . At the end of that volume, Indrek, son of the farmer Andres Paas, leaves Vargäme, the remote village of his birth, to settle in the university town of Tartu. In some respects it is a classic tale of country bumpkin meets the city. He attends the boarding school of odd-ball Headmaster Maurus, a figure straight out of Dickens (minus the violence). Indrek’s...

The best biography of Connolly

I’m not sure if I’ve read every serious biography or study of the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, but I think I have just read the best. Whereas others have sought either to claim him for their own particular project or discredit him as a nationalist renegade, Liam McNulty’s recent book, James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist does Connolly the honour of trying to properly understand his ideas and political development. Connolly has too often been the victim of selective and partial readings, whether from nationalists who ignore his long record of activity as a...

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