Issue section: Reviews

Reviews

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Making Black Neighborhoods Matter

Lawrence Brown’s book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America looks at the long history of intentional harm and damage done to Black communities caused by white supremacist practices, policies, and budgets.

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A Story from a Defeated Struggle

Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war.

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China’s Workers Battle Apple and Foxconn

Foxconn promises the world but delivers hell, as the authors lay bare.

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Looking Back at Maoism and the Global Left

As against nearly a century of debates over Stalinism, the international left has never come to terms with Maoism, especially its global impact.

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Capitalism, Romanticism, and Nature

Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature is an extremely interesting book—enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating.

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Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste

The Occlusion of Political Economy

Wilkerson’s adroit storytelling jumps off the page, but the glaring omission in her book is political economy.

Dark Satanic Mills

A review of Josh Freeman’s history of factories.

The Farm Equipment Workers

A History of Radical Labor

A review of Toni Gilpin’s history of labor struggles in the American heartland.

Theory in Revolutionary Times

The Socialist Register Since the 1960s

A review of a collection of articles from the early years of The Socialist Register.

Analyzing the Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto never seems to go out of style for very long.

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The Democratic Quest: Marxism Versus Liberalism

In a recent interview for the Minneapolis Interview Project, August Nimtz asserted that “to exercise political power, we must impose our will through collective action.”* In his new work, Nimtz says much the same when he writes, “If . . .

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The Case for Socialism

From a Management Scholar

Various books have been published in the last few years that make a case for a transition to socialism. This one has a special “edge”: it’s written by the Harold Quinton chair of business policy, and professor of . . .

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Questions for the International Left

In anxious anticipation of the Brexit referendum, then U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron summed up the philosophy of politics that drives him and so many who occupy the command posts of power: “I divide the world into team . . .

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The AFL-CIO’s Cold War

The Cold War was the period in the twentieth century, approximately between 1946 and 1991, where world politics were dominated by the confrontation between two blocs of states, led respectively by the United States and the Soviet Union. . . .

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A Radical New Politics of Surrogacy?

Sophie Lewis’ new book Full Surrogacy Now, published by Verso, has gotten a lot of attention in left media circles. Lewis was interviewed on Jacobin Radio’s The Dig Read more ›

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Learning from the “Red State” Walkouts

Red State Revolt is based on Eric Blanc’s “on the ground” reporting for Jacobin on the 2018 walkouts of education workers in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona. He aims to tell the stories of the walkouts . . .

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Socialist Meaning in Feminist Mobilizations

Feminism for the 99% calls attention to women’s mobilizations that are sweeping the world and argues for their revolutionary, anti-capitalist potential. At the same time, this compelling homage to the Communist Manifesto flips the focus from a classic notion of . . .

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Why We Need Socialist Disability Theory and Critical Disability Socialism

The modern concept of disability—indeed, the conception of disability itself, as there was no identical concept before modern times—is a by-product of capitalism. Capitalism spawns disability both as the primary producer of impairment (through industrial workplace accidents, the physical and . . .

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Anarchists of Connecticut

The complex history of working-class anarchism and syndicalism in the United States has been understudied. A good part of the problem is language. German, Spanish, Finnish, and Yiddish sources have been utilized by a handful of scholars, but mostly decades . . .

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Remembering the English Revolution

In 1649, a pamphlet titled Tyranipocrit Discovered was published in Rotterdam. Fusing the terms “tyrant” and “hypocrite,” the anonymous author called for an end to economic, religious, and political oppression in England.

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From Marx to Ecosocialism

There is a growing body of ecomarxist and ecosocialist literature in the English-speaking world, which signals the beginning of a significant turn in radical thinking.

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