Mike Taber (ed)

BOOK REVIEW 

 

The Communist Movement at a Crossroads: Plenums of the Communist International’s Executive Committee, 1922-1923

tr. John Riddell, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2019. 796 pp., $50 pb

ISBN 9781642590128

Reviewed by Chris James Newlove

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books | April 01, 2021

The Communist Movement at a Crossroads documents discussion of the fundamental issues of revolutionary strategy and tactics, many of which are still relevant today including the question of the United Front, Workers Governments and the fight against fascism. The plenums documented in the book are meetings of an enlarged executive committee of the Communist International that were held between the main World Congresses, the first four of which (when V. I. Lenin was alive) have been documented in English in John Riddell’s series. The plenums described by Grigorri Zinoviev as ‘small world congresses’ are of equal interest to the main congresses predominantly organised by the Russian Communist Party, debating and taking important decisions that directly shaped the practice of Communist Parties (and other forces) around the world.

Can ‘ethical investing’ save the world?

BOOK REVIEW 

Mark Carney
VALUE(S): Building a Better World for All
Penguin Random House, 2021

reviewed by Michael Roberts

Climate and Capitalism | March 15, 2021

Canadian born Mark Carney was formerly the governor of the Bank of England – the best paid governor ever at £680,000 a year plus £250,000 housing expenses.  Carney recently commented that “You don’t get rich in public service”!

Before that Carney was governor of the Bank of Canada, becoming the youngest central bank governor in the G20 nations.  And before that he was 13 years at, guess where, Goldman Sachs, where he played a prominent role in advising the black majority government of South Africa on issuing international bonds and he was active for the company during the Russian debt crisis of 1998.  Goldman Sachs made billions from these activities as the South African and Russian economies dived.  And Carney made a fortune at Goldman Sachs.

Marcelo Hoffman

BOOK REVIEW 

Militant Acts: The Role of Investigations in Radical Political Struggles

SUNY Press, New York, 2019. 192 pp., £25 pb
ISBN 9781438472621

Reviewed by Guilel Treiber

The Letters Of Rosa Luxemburg

REMEMBERING ROSA

VERSO 2013

New Books Network | March 09, 2021

Rosa Luxemburg occupies a complex place in our history partly because there are several different Rosa’s one can find scattered across the world; the feminist activist, revolutionary Marxist, economist, journalist, essayist literary and critic all have been picked up in coopted by different movements at different times. While this speaks to her versatility as a thinker, writer and person, it also reflects the fragmented way in which her writing has been collected, edited, translated and published. A pamphlet here, an essay there, a book or 2 and several collections of letters but little effort has been made to present her in a thorough, well organized format. Luckily that is changing with the ongoing efforts to publish the entirety of her output in English translation, the vast majority of it being translated now for the first time by Verso.

WRITING SOCIAL – DEMOCRACY

BOOK REVIEW

Ian Bullock

The main title for my Drums of Armageddon came from an article in the Clarion by its editor Robert Blatchford soon after the start of the the 1914 war. In a way the book was a piece of opportunism. The Sussex University library had the three longest established socialist papers of the period – Justice. The Clarion, and Labour Leader -on microfilm at least up to the end of the fateful year when war broke out. So the book was to some extent just taking advantage of this for a relatively straightforward bit of research which unlike my ILP book did not involve any travelling – apart from to the university. That’s not to say that I don’t think the book is a useful addition to our knowledge of attitudes on the Left to the outbreak of the war. I certainly do.

I decided to begin by writing about the final peacetime month –July 1914 – to bring out the way the war was a disaster that set everything back – especially for those on the Left – and then the remaining months of the fateful year of 1914. I set out to examine attitudes and actions it in some detail through the prism of the three papers.

Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-Sheet

BOOK REVIEW 

Domenico Losurdo

Translated by Gregor Benton, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2020. 1054pp., £25.99 pb
ISBN 9781642593402

Reviewed by Matt Sharpe

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books | March 04, 2021

The extraordinary wealth and density of historical, philosophical, and political trees that thicken the 1000 pages of Domenico Losurdo’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel (hereafter Nietzsche) make the task of any reviewer of the book extremely difficult. The significance of this book as a systematic, copiously documented challenge to the postwar, post-Kaufmanian and post-Deleuzian receptions of Nietzsche as the playful, experimental, fragmentary, anti-foundationalist, aesthetic individualist or deconstructionist, apolitical (or liberal) critic of power and challenger of grand narratives can hardly be overstated. Losurdo’s big book on Nietzsche is the heftiest counterweight against selective, contentiously unpolitical readings of the German philosopher for undergraduate students to encounter, in any course on his thought. For Losurdo, Nietzsche is a philosopher totus politicus (28.1, hereafter as here, Losurdo’s book will be cited by chapter, then section number. With direct quotes, exact pagination is added in brackets). Nietzsche’s ability to discern “slave morality” in everything from the Socratic syllogism, via the Paris commune, to the universal laws of the natural sciences outbids even Marx, albeit from the reactionary Right. He is politically an aristocratic rebel, as Georges Brandes identified, horrified by the progress being made in his time by the feminist, abolitionist, and socialist movements, “whose opponent I am […] The great laments about human misery do not move me, they do not induce me to participate in that lament” (Nietzsche 1999a, 294; at 10.2 (330)). 

The Austrian Revolution

NEW BOOK

by Otto Bauer

Edited by Walter Baier and Eric Canepa

The definitive work on Eastern Europe’s revolutionary period and the unique working-class experiment of Red Vienna

Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings

BOOK REVIEW 

The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality

Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2020. 176 pp., £14.99 pb
ISBN 9781509543465

Reviewed by Sinéad Petrasek

In The Asset Economy, Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings evaluate the entrenchment of inequality in Anglo-capitalist societies through the mechanism of asset acquisition. Building on their various studies of political economy, neoliberalism and the family unit, the authors collaborate here to provide a fresh perspective on contemporary class stratification. They do so by examining the asset, the cornerstone from which their appraisal of the social totality is modelled, similar to Marx’s treatment of the commodity as the building block of capitalist society.

Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry

BOOK REVIEW 

Money, discipline and the surplus population

by Susanne Soederberg

Edition1st Edition

First Published2014

eBook Published25 September 2014

Pub. LocationLondon

ImprintRoutledge

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.4324/9781315761954

Pages302

eBook ISBN9781315761954

SubjectsEconomics, Finance, Business & Industry, Politics & International Relations

OA FunderKU Select

ABSTRACT

Under the rubric of ‘financial inclusion’, lending to the poor –in both the global North and global South –has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry since the 1990s. A key inquiry of this book is what is ‘the financial’ in which the poor are asked to join. Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natural, inevitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry suggests that the structural violence inherent to neoliberalism and credit-led accumulation have created and normalized a reality in which the working poor can no longer afford to live without expensive credit.

David Whyte

BOOK REVIEW

Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before it Kills Us

Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2020. 236 pp., £9.99 pb
ISBN 9781526146984

Reviewed by Scott Poynting

The title signals it succinctly: this book is an urgent exhortation to avert ‘the deliberate destruction of our natural environment’ (2). It pulls no punches, but is carefully argued, with abundant historical, political-economic and socio-legal evidence that the capitalist corporation is ‘killing the planet’. David Whyte makes his argument admirably accessible, in language leavened with sometimes dark and sometimes biting humour.