Reviews

Facts and debates about trade

Paul Hampton reviews Gary Buckman, Globalization: tame it or scrap it? , Zed Books, £9.99 This book brings together a huge amount of information on world trade and capital flows, in an accessible form. Firstly, world trade has grown enormously over the last two hundred years. • Between 1830 and 1850 world trade doubled and between 1850 and 1880 it trebled; • World trade expanded by 40% between 1881 and 1913, but only grew by 14% between 1913 and 1937; • From 1945 until the 1960s world trade was growing by 8% per year — nearly doubling every decade; • During the 1970s trade grew at about half...

The Rosenbergs: framed but guilty?

Steve Cohen reviews “An Execution In The Family” by Robert Meeropol, St Martins Press New Labour is a clean machine. On the bridge over Victoria Station in Manchester there used to be a slogan daubed well before the age of spray paint. In bold white-wash it demanded “Save the Rosenbergs”. This was obliterated by the Labour council some time in the 1990s. I want to restore it. Thanks to that slogan, by my eighth birthday I’d become politicised on one significant issue — the cruelty, corruption and anti-communism of the USA political and judicial system. In particular I understood that we were...

Splitting the movement?

Philip Havering reviews Anti-capitalism: where now? Edited by Hannah Dee. Bookmarks, 2004, £6 In his keynote chapter in this book, published by the SWP, Alex Callinicos describes the political differentiation that he sees in the global justice movement. He dates it from the Genoa demonstration of 2001 and, especially, 9/11 and Bush’s war on terror. Three “parties” have emerged: a reformist right associated with ATTAC France; a radical left (Rifondazione in Italy, the LCR in France and the SWP in Britain); and the autonomists. For years the SWP has played along with the leading reformist...

Ramadan’s Islam

Rhodri Evans reviews To be a European Muslim , by Tariq Ramadan. (The Islamic Foundation, Leicester.) If you read this book by Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim professor top-billed at the European Social Forum, from a certain angle, it is easy to convince yourself that he is a progressive thinker. He rejects the idea of the ultra-Islamist Hizb ut Tahrir that Europe is an “abode of war” for Muslims, somewhere they can live only at war with the society around them. On the contrary, he emphasises that Muslims in Europe have more freedom of religious practice than in many avowedly Muslim countries...

South Africa, China, the USA

Paul Hampton reviews Frank Glass: the Restless Revolutionary by Baruch Hirson (Porcupine Press) Frank Glass was a pioneer Trotskyist of the 1920s and 30s. But his life and work has been largely forgotten, written out of history by the Stalinists and ignored even by genuine Marxists. Baruch Hirson (who died earlir this year) provides a critical and inspiring account of Glass’s politics. But also tragic, because while Glass helped bring Trotskyism into being he also presided over its metamorphosis into “orthodox Trotskyism” after Trotsky’s death. Frank Glass was born in Britain on 25 March 1901...

Change the world without taking power?

Can we change the world without taking power? Without organising ongoing, structured, political movements (parties)? John Holloway, in a much-read book (Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto 2002) says we can. He is wrong. If we don’t take power — if, to be more exact, activists do not agitate, educate, and organise to push the working class towards sufficient organisation, confidence and assertiveness for the working class to take power — then the Blairs and Bushes, the Schröders and Putins, will keep power. If, at points of crisis and turmoil, we counsel the working class to step back...

The psychopath

Mark Osborn reviews The Corporation by Joel Bakan “The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” is the subtitle of The Corporation , a new film and book, released in the UK at the end of October. The book’s author points out that corporations have similar legal rights to human beings and asks: if corporations are like people, what sort of people are they? He concludes that, as they are legally obliged to put the interests of shareholders first, and place profits above all else — a pathological compulsion — the corporation is a psychopath! For example, General Motors knowingly put a fuel tank...

Review article: Neither “liberal” armies nor terror

Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism is a New York Times bestseller. It is an argument from within — broadly speaking — the left in favour of the war on terror, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. Clive Bradley critically examines that argument. Berman makes many qualifications in his book. He is sympathetic to the concerns of others on the left regarding civil liberties, American imperialism, and so on; he is sharply critical of how the Bush administration has handled the war on terror (“… the great, frightening truth of all modern history [is] the chance occurrence that, at a moment...

How corporate culture infected the NHS

NHS plc , by Allyson M Pollock: Verso, 2004 "When the history of the period following Labour's 1997 election triumph comes to be written," writes Allyson Pollock in this new book, "people will ask with some incredulity how it was that the Labour government managed to dismantle so much of their hard-won welfare state without the public understanding what was happening, and without serious opposition from the government's own party." NHS plc, published by Verso last month, is a truly depressing read but, like unpleasant tasting medicine, sometimes such things are necessary. So much of what has...

Fighting corporations...in the name of capitalism

Jim Byagua reviews The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap by Ralph Nader (Regan Books) Ralph Nader’s controversial stand in the 2004 US Presidential elections is vehemently opposed by Democrats and many on the liberal left. They view his candidacy in 2000 as the major reason George W Bush is in the White House. He has been attacked for not falling in behind the “anyone but Bush” pro-Kerry movement. It is odd that the The Good Fight doesn’t explicitly discuss why Nader is standing in the current Presidential election. There is no attempt to tackle the argument...

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