Reviews

The Buddhist Detective

Dan Katz reviews Bangkok 8 and the recently published Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett Just at the point when I become sick to death of standardised, dull US detective stories and their badly-written British counterparts something comes along to cheer me up: Sonchai Jitleecheep, a Thai detective who is also a flawed and extremely ambivalent character The important thing about noir crime is to put a person who already has lots of problems into a situation where they have little room for manoeuvre. Squeeze them and see what happens. Sonchai has a lot to contend with. For a start he is a Buddhist...

The most political Potter

Amina Saddiq reviews "Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince" Those who haven’t read the last few Harry Potter books will probably laugh when I say that the latest instalment is not only the most interesting, but the most political of the series. I’ll try and explain. Each book starts with a new academic year at Harry’s school, Hogwarts: when the series began Harry was ten but he is now almost seventeen, and Rowling has changed both the tone and subject matter accordingly. There is still some of the earlier over-the-top jolliness, but the tone is now much darker. This is a book for older...

The complexities of Islamism

The liberal left, from the Guardian op-ed writers to the Socialist Workers Party, has tended to see modern political Islam as an automatic response of the oppressed and dispossessed of “the Muslim world” to “imperialism”, “the West”, and global inequality. It’s a simplistic view which is not much endorsed by any of the detailed studies of Islamism which have been published in the past few years. Clive Bradley surveys the literature. Tariq Ali is one of the most forthright advocates of the “left liberal” consensus arguing that the heavily Islamist-influenced “resistance” in Iraq should be...

Two views of neo-liberalism

There is sharp disagreement about the nature and meaning of imperialism on the left, with two broad schools of thought emerging. Two recent books sum up the differences very clearly. Paul Hampton reviews 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) A view about neoliberalism which is largely a fable is expressed lucidly by Immanuel Wallerstein in Pox Americana. He argues that after 1945 the United States was dominant economically, militarily and...

Neither Washington nor London, but... er... anywhere? Why the SWP's anti-imperialism is sterile (2005)

The 1950s movie The Wild One is about a motorcycle “rebel” gang, led by Marlon Brando, invading a small American town and frightening the natives. Someone asks the Brando character: “And what are you rebelling against?” Famously, he replies: “What’ve you got?” The film was, for decades, banned in Britain. That may have been to protect impressionable British Marxists, especially the SWP, from mistaking the Brando character’s philosophy — whatever it is, I’m against it — for a serviceable political programme. It is now the core and only approach of the SWP. Look at Chris Harman’s review of the...

A tale of class struggle

Dan Katz read Q by Luther Blissett alongside Frederick Engels’ The Peasant Wars in Germany Thomas Munzer: “The masters are to blame that the poor man becomes their enemy.” It’s time to take down that copy of Engels’ Peasant Wars that you always intended to read, but never got round to. And here’s a nice way to do it – reading Engels alongside the novel, Q. Engels’ book, written in 1850, shortly after the defeat of the German revolutionary movement of 1848-9, looks for parallels with the peasant and plebeian rebellion of the early 16th century. Engels is concerned to note how the middle strata...

Arguments against G8

Review of Hubbard and Miller, Arguments against G8, Pluto, 264 pages, paperback, £11.99 By Paul Hampton This is a disappointing book on a vital matter. The G8 - the club of world powers - is under the spotlight, with its summit in July expected to be met by counter-demonstrations, meetings and direct action involving hundreds of thousands. The book is advertised as a “one-stop guide for anyone who wants to know more about the G8, what it is, and why it's a problem” and as “a great tool for activists”. The editors Gill Hubbard and David Miller are leading members of the G8 Alternatives...

Catholic Action: A rift in the Iron Curtain, by James P Cannon

Trotskyist literature that deals head-on with organised religion is something of a rarity. Not so in the USA in the 1940s and 50s. The American "Orthodox Trotskyists" of the Socialist Workers Party published a stream of articles and a pamphlet denouncing the Cardinals, bishops and priests of the Catholic Church for their reactionary role in politics and American society. This article, by James Patrick Cannon, was one such attack. Reviewing a novel, Moon Gaffney, by Harry Sylvester, Cannon followed Sylvester in portraying the social and mental world of Catholic Irish-America. It is taken from...

From one-party to one-man rule

The former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan is standing against Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn. He was sacked after making complaints about the UK goverment using information obtained under torture by the Uzbekistan government. Stan Crooke reviews a new book by Shahram Akbarzadeh, Uzbekistan and the United States - Authoritarianism, Islamism and Washington's Security Agenda (Zed books). It won't he says, answer all your questions about this former Soviet republic. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Uzbekistan has regressed from one-party rule to one-man rule - that of President Islam...

Demagogues and Critics: The True Story of "Stop the War Coalition"

“What is demagogy? It is a deliberate play with sham values in politics, the dissemination of false promises and the solace of non-existent blessings.” Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) The history of the movement against the war in Iraq has yet to be written. No doubt an enterprising student somewhere is already busy reconstructing the story of how it happened and why. Such an account would be extremely valuable, given the numbers that have been involved and the movement’s continuing impact on national and international politics. This book will add little to such an...

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