As against nearly a century of debates over Stalinism, the international left has never come to terms with Maoism, especially its global impact.
Issue section: Reviews
Reviews
review
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.
review
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.
review
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 . . .
review
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 . . .
review
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 . . .
review
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. . . .
review
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
review
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 . . .
review
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 . . .
review
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 . . .
review
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.
review
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.
review
An Economist’s Case for Socialism
It is all too rare that an economist makes the case: socialism or barbarism. Or, in Alan Nasser’s more piquant alternatives, socialism or fascism. Economics is a hedging profession of carefully detailed countervailing forces and measured equivocation. Even the seemingly . . .
review
What I Saw at the (Political) Revolution
This memoir of sorts by Fordham University sociology professor Heather Gautney, who became a policy fellow in Bernie Sanders’ Washington DC office and a volunteer researcher and organizer for his unexpectedly popular 2016 presidential campaign, has a very specific focus: to “offer insights from up-close work with Bernie, mixed in with historical and sociological analysis, to perform an autopsy of the 2016 election” (2). Given the sheer number of insightless (to put it mildly) autopsies that have been proffered across the political spectrum—perhaps none more useless than Hillary Clinton’s own What Happened (Simon & Schuster, 2017)—Gautney’s book is more than welcome and even slightly overdue.
review
Radical America
Why the United States has not developed a permanent socialist movement has perplexed activists and theorists for more than a century. Paul Le Blanc takes up that query as an activist who wants to see an anti-capitalism mass movement take shape in twenty-first century America. To that end, he investigates some of the moments when the possibility of a significant left presence in the United States seemed at hand. He focuses on what made those movements viable and what thwarted their long-term success. The volume’s fourteen essays were written over a period of thirty years, from 1986 to 2015.
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