Reviews

Climate change will force mass migration

“When temperature rise exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius (which could occur by 2026), some three billion will be living in places that regularly experience conditions beyond the human habitable range...[and] we are extremely unlikely to keep below 1.5 degrees C.” Gaia Vince in her book Nomad Century lays out the science in stark terms: we “face a very hostile world, characterised by a belt of uninhabitability swathed across most of today’s most populated regions... This is a completely new situation for our species, one in which our expanding population must deal with an ever-shrinking zone of...

A new world food system

In the second half of his new book Regenesis , George Monbiot explores alternatives to the Global Standard Farm. (See previous articles on the book in Solidarity 647 and 648 .) Monbiot rejects the commonplace green advocacy of low-tech, small-scale localist food production. “The systems we should favour are those that deliver high yields with low environmental impacts”. He argues for moving away from our unsustainable dependence on livestock farming and liberating grazing land for ecological restoration, while finding low-impact ways to replace the protein currently provided by domesticated...

From US strikes to politics

Kim Moody’s new book Breaking the Impasse brings together an argument that the US left needs to look at the recent labour upsurges (Amazon, teachers’ strikes, nurses) as the way forward in breaking from the broken two-party model of American politics. He criticises the “New Social Democratic Nostalgia” which exists in wings of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for a rose-tinted view of how major reforms from the New Deal and Civil Rights era were won, supposedly by coalition politics. In short the book is a rejection of both the Communist Party popular front and the “realignment”...

How capitalist farming destroys our world environment

The literary tradition of pastoral promotes a common misconception that the countryside is a land of vitality and plenty, a place of easy leisure unsullied by the filth and corruption of the city. It’s a myth that has been progated since the time of the Greek rhapsodes. It’s central to the Christian tradition with its imagery of god as good shepherd. Nowadays we find versions of it in the friendly farmyard animals that populate children’s picture books and scenes of bucolic rural whimsy that dominate Sunday afternoon TV. For George Monbiot, in his new book Regenesis , the myth is so ancient...

Last Times where “nothing has ended”

Drawing on the author’s first-hand experience of the fall of Paris and the early French Resistance, Victor Serge’s novel Last Times (New York Review of Books, 2022) offers a bleak, immersive view of France under the German occupation and the Vichy government. Written in the early 1940s, the novel covers a period of just over a year in 1940-41. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists have an overarching goal that leads them to join the columns of refugees making the arduous journey to Marseilles and — they hope — to a ship that will carry them to the Americas, but one should not read Last Times...

"The People Immortal"

Above: Grossman (on left) in Berlin, 1945 Many readers will no doubt already be acquainted with Vasily Grossman’s much-praised epic novel, Life and Fate which centres on the battle for Stalingrad during the winter months of 1942-43. This new translation of The People Immortal (Maclehose Press, 2022), an earlier novel of his, takes us to the very first months of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, commenced 22 June, 1941), when the Soviet army was in retreat in both Ukraine and Belarus. Grossman was a reporter attached to the Red Army and popular among the troops for...

Organising for worker power

While industrial unionism is the central tenet of this collection – and what this review will focus on - there is a great deal else that readers will find relevant to contemporary matters of left organisation.

Connolly on the dynamic and durable

Workers’ Liberty is to be congratulated for putting together a selection of writings by Scots-born Irish revolutionary James Connolly, on labour unionism. The timing could not be more appropriate as we continue to face a cost-of-living crisis which is only set to get worse and may be added to by a recession. This might be the spur to help a wide circulation of the short book containing his writings. It is possible that the public unveiling of James Connolly as the political inspiration of RMT union leader, Mick Lynch, will help give the republication of these writings a further, welcome boost...

Getting Russia wrong: Beevor’s history

Sir Antony Beevor is court historian for the nervous haute bourgeoisie. His commanding prose will no doubt comfort those who fear the wrath of the rabble. For the more discerning, Beevor writes history to warn today’s hapless rulers against repeating their predecessors’ mistakes. Beevor is apparently the best-selling historian of our time, hailed for weighty tomes about the Second World War. His new book, Russia: Revolution and Civil War , 1917-1921 , is perhaps the most miserable account of the Russian revolution published in recent times. It is history-from-above at its worst — the unstated...

Connolly and a history relevant now

A review of our new pamphlet, a collection of writings by James Connolly on effective trade unionism. Click here to order now James Connolly, who was executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, is, along with James Larkin, Ireland’s most famous socialist and union leader. This pamphlet, Effective Trade Unionism , contains his writings on industrial unionism, in both Ireland and the USA, and his account of the 1913 Lockout in Dublin. Connolly is a clear and concise writer and you don’t need to know any of the historical background to be able to understand the pamphlet. But read up on the historical...

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