Reviews

Chris Bambery’s Marxism lies a-mouldering in the grave

Sacha Ismail on the Socialist Workers Party pamphlet Iraq: why the troops must get out now by Chris Bambery (From Solidarity 3/62, November 2004) SWP-watchers will be aware that leading cadre Chris Bambery has recently taken time out from his busy schedule of leather trouser-shopping and goatee-trimming to assume the editorship of Socialist Worker. Here he maintains the high standards he has established at that publication by producing fifty pages of populist, non-socialist, anti-American (“anti-imperialist”) babble. Despite providing clear evidence of the SWP’s deepening political...

The story of Guido Baracchi

Jeff Sparrow’s biography of Australian communist Guido Baracchi - "Communism, a love story", published by Melbourne University Press - is an allegory for twentieth century radicals and anti authoritarians. Australia has produced a number of prominent communists and radicals over the pass hundred years, including journalist and author Frank Hardy, author Katherine Susannah Pritchard and feminist writer Germaine Greer. So Sparrow’s choice of subject is an interesting one, Baracchi is little known outside of the small Australian Trotskyist circles but his story is an interesting one, engagingly...

Is Cuba Socialist?

This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP). It is also, I guess, an attempt to check the recent rash of Castro-worship in the Scottish Socialist Party, with whom Taaffe maintains a strained relationship. The DSP, following the lead of the American SWP, rejects Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, preferring Lenin’s blurred and outmoded formula of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as the programme for revolutions in countries of less...

The greatest proletarian novel?

Steve Cohen’s series on great socialist novels continues with “Living” by Henry Green Living was written in 1929. Christopher Isherwood described it as “the best proletarian novel ever written”. Typically Green – honest, ironic, deprecating – is reported to have replied “the workers in my factory thought it rotten. It was my very good friend Christopher Isherwood used that phrase … and I don’t know that he ever worked in a factory.” When Green talked about the “factory” he was referring to the Birmingham engineering firm of H. Pontifex and Sons Ltd. The factory manufactured plumbing supplies...

Marxists and the green challenge

Paul Hampton reviews 2006, Marxism and Ecological Economics by Paul Burkett (Amsterdam: Brill) The conventional wisdom among Greens is that, so far as environmental struggles go, the organised labour movement is only occasionally an ally and often an opponent. Most ecologists dismiss Marxism as having little to offer today’s environmental concerns such as climate change. Paul Burkett is probably the foremost Marxist writing on the environment in recent years who, together with John Bellamy Foster, puts Marxism at the centre of ecological discussions. Burkett’s chief merit is to have nailed a...

Debate: what went wrong in the '70s

Martin Thomas replies to Sheila Cohen For Tom Unterrainer, click here For Martin Thomas, click here For Sheila Cohen, click here In Solidarity 3/111, Sheila Cohen defines the key fault of the left in the high days of industrial struggle as “failure to build a network out of the militancy and activism of the upsurge period that could have consciously worked out strategies based on two simple but crucial principles — class independence and rank and file membership involvement”. Incongruously, she then repeats the praise given in her book Ramparts Of Resistance to the Liaison Committee for the...

Workers go global, second time round

Paul Hampton reviews Live working or die fighting: How the working class went global, by Paul Mason, (Harvill Secker £12.99) THIS book is an ambitious attempt to bring some of the great events from working class history to a new generation of youth. Paul Mason argues that as the working class in the “global south” has expanded, so new workers’ movements are emerging with strong similarities to those that arose during the first wave of globalisation, which began in the 1870s. Each chapter of the book takes a current episode or struggle and juxtaposes it to an earlier class battle. For instance...

Rising like lions after slumber

Review of: Live working or die fighting: How the working class went global, Paul Mason, Harvill Secker £12.99

This book is an ambitious attempt to bring some of the great events from working class history to a new generation of youth. Paul Mason argues that as the working class in the “global...

Marxism and ecology: clearing the air

Review of Paul Burkett, 2006, Marxism and Ecological Economics, Amsterdam: Brill

The conventional wisdom among Greens is that, so far as environmental struggles go, the organised labour movement is only occasionally an ally and often an opponent. Most ecologists dismiss Marxism as having little to...

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