Reviews

A retrospective review of Standing Fast by Harvey Swados

By Steve Cohen The revolution is not just about storming the barricades – though that’s one of the best bits. It is also about art and the imagination and living the politics of daily life – with its responsibilities, its eroticism, its building of the socialist project and the obligation to make sense of the relationship between all these. This is why Holding Fast by Harvey Swados is such an important book. First published in 1970 it covers the quarter of a century preceding the Kennedy assassination in 1963. It charts in this period the attempt by a group of worker and intellectual socialist...

Books books books

There a books Q&A doing the rounds of bloggers at the moment, and I've been tagged by Volty over at Shiraz Socialist. So here goes ...

1. One book that changed your life.

It was a song that changed my life (Going Underground by The Jam) rather than a book. But 'Ten Days That Shook the World' by John...

Imperialism, real and imaginary

Review by Paul Hampton of John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney eds. Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (Pluto) and Leo Panitch and Colin Leys eds. The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005 (Merlin) ******************** There is sharp disagreement about the nature and meaning of imperialism on the left, with two broad schools of thought emerging. These two books sum up the differences very clearly. The first view is largely a fable and is expressed lucidly by Immanuel Wallerstein in Pox Americana. He argues that after 1945 the United States became hegemonic, meaning that the...

Defend Monica Ali!

By Dan Katz Following a small — 60-strong — march in Brick Lane, East London, the companies involved in making a film of Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane have unfortunately caved in to the protestors’ demand that they stop filming in the area. This protest is the latest in a number of reactionary, communialist/religious mobilisations aimed at preventing critical voices discussing religious stupidities or backward practices inside minority communities. The Brick Lane protesters claim Ali’s book portrays them as, "ignorant and unsophisticated". They marched with placards reading, "Stop demeaning...

Neoliberalism

Review of Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, eds Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, Pluto, 271 pages, paperback, £15.99 By Paul Hampton Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of the epoch and this book is the most comprehensive analysis of the subject by Marxist and radical political economists published to date. The editors argue that: “the most basic feature of neoliberalism is the systematic use of state power to impose (financial) market imperatives, in a domestic process that is replicated internationally by ‘globalisation’.” [p.3] Neoliberalism means the imposition of privatisation...

Abandoning hope

Steve Cohen reviews A Margin of Hope – An Intellectual Autobiography by Irving Howe “What would happen if men remained faithful to the ideals of their youth?” (Pietro Spina in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine) Irving Howe was one of that group of “New York Intellectuals” so well described by Alan Wald in his own book of that title. What distinguished this group (more accurately, a loose grouping) was the political trajectory of those identified with it from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond — a trajectory which for most of them went (in a personal form of combined and uneven development) from...

The Israeli majority

Tom Unterrainer reviews The People on the Street, a writer’s view of Israel by Linda grant (Virago) “There is currently a war between truth and fact, between the artist and the reporter. This war rages inside me too, as someone who has acted in both professions. ‘Are you going to tell the truth?’ I have been asked countless times by people I’ve interviewed”. So says Linda Grant. At a time when the futures of Israel and Palestine have reached a new juncture, when the legitimacy of the Israeli state is under positive debate in Palestine, and the Israeli state continues its murderously callous...

Francis Wheen - disappointing on Das Kapital

I’ve been reading Francis Wheen’s new book Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography, part of a series, “books that shook the world”. An extract was in Saturday’s Guardian

It's entertainingly written as you'd expect - like his biography of Marx - but weak on explaining the ideas of Capital.

Wheen argues...

Just a good yarn

Thomas Carolan reckons the reason that so many people like The Da Vinci Code (Solidarity 3/94) is because they believe (or want to believe) that it is true, and that this is a “mix of alienation from authority ... and bottomless ignorant incredulity”. Leaving aside the point that “alienation from authority” is in many ways a good thing, this article is far too narrow in its explanation of the book/film’s popularity, and shows a sort of pitying contempt, and a po-faced attitude to culture. The Da Vinci Code may be “an awful, wretched film”. I don’t know because I haven’t seen it yet, but it...

“We can bring about change”

Joan Trevor reviews “Iran Awakening” by Shirin Ebadi (Rider, 2006) Shirin Ebadi is a human rights lawyer in Iran and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. She takes up cases like that of the well-known political journalist Akbar Ganji, and of completely anonymous Iranians, like the dirt-poor family of Leila Fathi. Leila was raped and murdered by three men in 1996. One of her killers supposedly committed suicide, the other two were sentenced to death. Ebadi describes what happened next: “Under Islamic law, the family of a victim of homicide or manslaughter has the right to choose between legal...

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