Posts in category: Reviews
Joshua Kurlantzick A Great Place to Have a War America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA

Book Review: Joshua Kurlantzick A Great Place to Have a War America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA New York, 2016 Loren Goldner by Loren Goldner Few people in America today know where the small (population 7 million) Asian country Laos is. Far fewer still knew in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, […]

 
David Bandurski Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance in Urbanizing China

Book Review David Bandurski Dragons in Diamond Village: Tales of Resistance in Urbanizing China (Melvile House 2016) Loren Goldner In 2030, one billion Chinese will live in cities, two-thirds of the total population, or one of every eight people on the planet. At the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, 80% of the 400 […]

 
Review: Factory Man. How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town.

Book Review: Beth Macy. Factory Man. How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town. Little, Brown 2014.   Should I hate people for the shade of their skin Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in. Should I hate ‘em for having our jobs today No I […]

Review: Chris Rhomberg, The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor

For an academic work, this is a quite good, fact-packed but flawed book about one militant strike in the U.S., the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995-2000, which took place during a generally bleak decade for class struggle.

 
Review: Nick Turse. Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

This book portrays more vividly than most the take-no-prisoners barbarism of which the American capitalist class and its military are capable.

 
Review: “How British Industry Gave Up the Ghost” by Nicholas Comfort, and “Chavs” by Owen Jones

Putting these two books back-to-back, we arrive at a rather thorough picture of British working-class history since World War II, and particularly since the coming of Margaret Thatcher and the “neo-liberal” era in 1979.

 
Review: Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and the Question of Unions in Contemporary Capitalism

The movement had “two souls”, one increasingly focused on Chavez’s strategy of boycotts and outside political influence, the other growing from the rank-and-file militancy of the farm workers themselves.

 
Review: “The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect” by John Marot

This is one of the few books published since 1991 on the “Russian question” that will compel people long wedded to different characterizations of the post-1917 or post-1929 Soviet regime to think through their commitments.

 
Review: Poder e Dinheiro, by Joao Bernardo

Joao Bernardo has to be one of the most prolific, and prodigious, radical theoreticians of the past 30 years, yet, because he writes in his native Portuguese and because very little of his work has been translated into English, he remains largely unknown in the world of Anglophone Marxism.

 
Review: Time, Labor and Social Domination, by Moishe Postone

Remaining in his lofty (but admittedly indispensable) realm of abstraction, seemingly oblivious to the concrete history of the “real movement that abolishes existing conditions” as the force which drives the evolution of its inverted form, capital, Postone only gets it half right

 
Review: “L’Histoire generale de ‘l’ultra-gauche'” by Christophe Bourseiller

Bourseiller’s book is the only one in existence, in any language, that attempts to treat the history of the ultra-left in its entirety.

 
[Francais] Revue: “Revolution in the Air” de Max Elbaum

Involontairement, Elbaum dans son livre “Revolution in the air” réussit à démontrer l’existence d’un progrès dans l’histoire humaine, qu’il verrait dans le déclin et la disparition de l’absurde “Tiers-Monde-marxiste-stalinien -maoïste” ,des groupes marxistes-léninistes et des idéologies qu’ils véhiculaient.

 
Review: “Revolution in the Air” by Max Elbaum

Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist- Maoist- ‘Third World Marxist” and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents.

Review: Labirintos do Fascismo, by Joao Bernardo

The Portuguese Marxist and prolific writer Joao Bernardo remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone world, a situation hopefully to be remedied soon by an English translation of his three-volume masterpiece on the Middle Ages, Poder e Dinheiro.

 
[Francais] Critique de livre: Joe Hill, by Franklin Rosemont

En ces jours de guerre sans fin au Moyen Orient et de Kerry contre Bush et de la politique visible aux Etats-Unis réduits apparemment à une droite et à une extrême droite, ce livre nous donne une grande envie de prendre la porte et d’organiser la lutte.

 
[Italiano] Review: Joe Hill, by Franklin Rosemont

In questi giorni contrassegnati da una guerra senza fine in Medio Oriente, dal duello Kerry-Bush, in cui negli USA gli uomini politici sembrano ridursi a quelli di un partito di destra o di estrema destra e il libro fa venirvoglia di correre fuori di casa e organizzarsi.

 
[Deutsch] Buchbesprechung: Joe Hill, by Franklin Rosemont

Gerade in einer Zeit wie heute, da im Nahen Osten Krieg geführt wird und die »Politik« in den USA auf eine rechte und eine extrem rechte Partei beschränkt scheint, versetzt mich das Buch in eine Stimmung, daß ich aus der Tür rennen könnte und anfangen zu organisieren.

 
Review: Joe Hill, by Franklin Rosemont

In these days of war without end in the Middle East, and Kerry vs. Bush, and visible “politics” in the U.S. seemingly reduced to a right-wing party and a far-right party, the book gives me a high that makes me wants to run out the door and organize.

 
[Cestina] “ČELEM K REALITĚ” PO 45 LETECH: Kritický dialog s Jamesem/Leem/Chaulieuem

Na Čelem k realitě neshledávám nejzajímavější ani tak odpovědi, které nabízí, jako otázky, které klade. Tyto otázky se točí kolem dnešní úlohy revoluční marxistické strany.

 
Facing Reality 45 Years Later: Critical Dialogue with James/Lee/Chaulieu

What I find most interesting in Facing Realityis not so much the answers it offers as the questions it asks. Those questions revolve around the role of the revolutionary Marxist party today.

 
Review: “Poder e Dinheiro” by Joao Bernardo

Joao Bernardo has to be one of the most prolific, and prodigious, radical theoreticians of the past 30 years, yet, because he writes in his native Portuguese and because very little of his work has been translated into English, he remains largely unknown in the world of Anglophone Marxism.

 
Review: “Dreamer of the Day” by Kevin Coogan

Coogan’s excellent book, starting from an obscure American fascist figure who has little currency in the far-right of his own country, takes us into the whole world of the international fascist revival since 1945.

 
“A Thousand Triumphant Ubus” by Alain Tizon and François Lonchampt

The following is a translation of Chapter One of Alain Tizon and François Longchampt’s Votre Révolution nest pas la mienne.

 
Review: Loft Living, by Sharon Zukin

Zukin may have written the first book connecting post-modernism to de-industrialization and economic austerity.

 
Review: An Injury to All, by Kim Moody

Review: A Critique of Kim Moody’s An Injury to All by Loren Goldner (The following originally appeared as a book review in ‘z’ magazine, 1989) Kim Moody has written an important book, which should, and will, be read and discussed by anyone interested in the past, present and future of the modern American working class. […]

 
Review: Trotsky, by Pierre Broue

An imposing biography of the “organizer of victory” of the October Revolution.

 
Review: The Aesthetic State, Josef Chytry

Twenty years ago, the problematic at the core of Josef Chytry’s The Aesthetic State occupied center stage.

 
Review: French Modern, by Paul Rabinow

At its most basic level, a history and analysis of the battle between two concepts of modern urbanism, which Rabinow characterizes as “tech no-cosmopolitanism” and “middling modernism.”

 
Review: Génération, by Hamon and Rotman

At the approach of the 20th anniversary of the longest wildcat general strike in history, the press, publishers, and the media in France have geared up for the ultimate in “la mode retro.”

 
Review: Restructuring the World Economy by Joyce Kolko

Kolko’s book is not so much “economics” as contemporary economic history, an attempt to explain the new realities that have emerged out of the present crisis.

 
Review: Mutter Erde, Magie und Politik, by Gugenberger and Schweidlenka

There is a disconcerting link between certain currents of ecological politics in Germany, the “New Age” ideologies these currents espouse, and their explicit or implicit connection to the politics of the extreme right.

 
Review: Nietzsche, by Peter Bergmann

An effort to show the very real historical and political conjuncture in which Nietzsche became Nietzsche, a context all but forgotten and dismissed as trivial in most of the contemporary discussion.

 
Review: The Principle of Hope, by Ernst Bloch

The translation of Ernst Bloch’s major work Principle of Hope into English constitutes an event in its own right in the consolidation of a serious Marxist current in the English speaking world.

 
Review: Modernism as the Vanguard of a Consumer Aesthetic: Two Views

Part of a growing body of serious social histories of culture that address the issues raised by theory in the only terrain where they can be settled: the social, economic, political, and cultural totalities that throw them up in the first place.