My friends gave me lots of books on the recent occasion of my fortieth birthday. Cheers, guys (in its non-gender-specific meaning). There was polemic, poetry and non-fiction a-plenty. But I kicked off with three works of fiction.
The notable thing was that all three of them are novels/memoirs told...
A new left-wing consensus is emerging, a “common sense” that takes Latin America as its point of departure and which combines many of the worst features of previous versions of “socialism from above”.
The new orthodoxy is articulated by talking heads such as Tariq Ali and Richard Gott as well as...
Review of Tariq Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean, Pluto 2006
Tariq Ali is a prominent man of the left who long ago gave up on the working class movement and on socialism. As he expresses it in this book, it is no longer possible to be “a man of 1917” (p.3)
His “street fighting years” far behind him...
Steve Cohen reviews Girl in Movement, a memoir by Eva Kollisch I’ve always thought of revolutionary politics as a generational phenomenon. My own private joke is that there is an area of struggle where one day Trotskyists will supplant the remaining Stalinists without any struggle at all. This will be the pensioners movement. Where the Stalinists will simply die out before us. Approaching the required age myself I have noticed an unpredicted development. Being of the class of 1968 I always had assumed that revolutionary organisation would be enthused by Dylan’s “forever young” – those who in...
Paul Hampton reviews Imperialism and Resistance by John Rees (SWP pamphlet, 2006) John Rees is the new pope of the SWP, establishing himself since Tony Cliff’s death as the main driver of its politics. Yet his new book is remarkably thin: light on the substance of imperialism today, poor on arguments between socialists with absolutely monstrous political conclusions. Rees calls the world order that has arisen since the end of the Cold War “the new imperialism”. He argues that it is highly unstable. He believes that military rivalry between the great powers — the kind last seen between 1914 and...
The Fidel Castro Handbook by George Galloway is a hagiography about one of the last grand Stalinist autocrats by one of its most loquacious apologists.
It is the modern equivalent of the biography of Josef Stalin by Albanian tankie Enver Hoxha.
The book has the overtones of an extended obituary...
Prêcheurs de Haine (Preachers of Hatred), by Pierre-André Taguieff, is a large scale, French-language study of “left-wing” “judeophobia”. Its publication in 2004 was an event of major importance. Taguieff is not himself a leftist, but his observations and analysis of the left are not necessarily invalidated by that. Much that he says about the mainstream “revolutionary left” and its attitude to Israel and to Jews who support Israel has long been said in this country by Solidarity, Workers’ Liberty and our predecessor Socialist Organiser. (See for example, the pamphlet Two Nations, Two States...
Janine "tagged" me with these questions:
1. One book that changed your life.
The Communist Manifesto. After reading it, I knew what I was, would be, am.
2. One book that you've read more than once.
Lenin’s Moscow by Alfred Rosmer. It’s so well written, I tend to read it when I’m sick. It...
Martin Thomas reviews In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, by Nir Rosen. Right from summer 2003, according to Nir Rosen’s new book, politics in post-invasion Iraq was dominated by Islamists who defined their enemy, more or less interchangeably, as America, “the Jews”, secularism, Israel, “the Masons”, or “Zionism”. In Iraq, with a long-subdued Shia Muslim majority and a long-dominant Sunni Muslim Arab minority, political Islam could hardly avoid also being sectarian, a matter of Islamist fighting Islamist as well as Islamist fighting infidel. Rosen’s book shows...
Bruce Robinson reviews Circular Breathing: The cultural politics of Jazz in Britain by George McKay. As it has spread from its American roots, jazz has been assimilated by many national cultures round the world. Circular Breathing deals with two aspects of the way this happened in Britain. The first is the importance of British jazz’s relationship to the left and a range of political movements such as CND and the anti-racist and women’s movements. So, for example, the adoption by CND of New Orleans-style marching bands in the Aldermaston marches of the late ’50s helped spark the “trad boom”...
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