Reviews

Prescient, judicious, and deeply humane essays from Deutscher, the "Non-Jewish Jew," who placed his internationalism, atheism, and Marxism within the tradition of other heretical Jewish figures in history—Spinoza, Marx, Luxemburg, and others. What binds these figures together is not a racial essence, but their shared location at the interstices of thought and culture, which gives them a critical vantage for interpreting and changing history. The deeply rooted themes of justice and human solidarity in their experience led them away from the narrow strictures of nationalism and religious obscurantism and toward the gleaming light of socialism.

The essays in the this book, movingly introduced and edited by Deutscher's wife Tamara, range from reflections on European anti-Semitism to remembrances of revolutionary Yiddishkeit_ _to analyses (from the 1950s and 60s) of the nascent and already state problematic of Israel. The totality is a critical and visionary testimony of a discerning thinker that is still hugely relevant at the cross section of left-wing politics and Jewish experience.

This short book is Fisher at his best, critically thinking through (and helping to define) the distinct literary/textual genres of the weird and the eerie. The weird, says Fisher, is concerned primarily with “that which does not belong,” while the eerie asks, “why is there something here when there should be nothing?” (or vice versa). 

From these two starting points, Fisher leads an entrancing tour through the genres’ trailblazers, touching on figures like H.P. Lovecraft (naturally), David Lynch, Daphne du Maurier, Stanley Kubrick, and many more (the book is worth it for the bibliography of books, music, and films to further explore).

As always, Fisher is at home discussing both Christopher Nolan and Lacan, punk rock and Deleuze, and this versatility is one of the reasons he is a delight to read. In these investigations, he also probes how art which pushes up against the boundaries of both genre and intelligibility can show us something true about the mysteries of existence.

A revelation, something like Twin Peaks: The Return meets Tarkovsky, but as an absolutely crushing parable of betrayed hope and the brutal, blind idiocy of the will to power.

A solid biography that is more a birds-eye survey of Marx’s writings and correspondence than it is an in-depth overview of his life and times, although there are some particularly illuminating sections on Marx’s political involvement in the First International. Liedman goes a little too hard on Marxism after Marx, whose faults he speciously blames solely on Engels. But it’s worth a read to get a sense of how Marx was not a “systems builder,” but a dynamic, critical thinker constantly in search of new ways to understand and unfold the totality of capitalist social relations.

Probably the best single-volume introduction to Ulysses and Joyce in general, at least that I’ve read. Kenner’s critical insight into the novel as a novel, not simply as an encyclopedic text of references and allusions, is one that completely transformed my reading of Ulysses.

Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò offers a persuasive analysis that reframes reparations for colonialism and slavery as a global “worldmaking” project. In contrast to a discourse marked by cultural and historical amnesia, this worldmaking project takes a long view of the present system, focusing on its historical birth and development into a global empire of inequality. The fissures of this system are particularly visible now at the intersection of racial and climate justice.

Importantly, Táíwò conceives reparations not as a one-time act that magically settles a one-time score, but as a comprehensive transformation of our received reality. This worldmaking transformation uses a constructive approach to set about actually building the world we wish to see.

At the end of the book, Táíwò leaves the reader with reflections on how to fight the fires of what he calls Global Racial Empire, while resisting the amnesia that allows this system to continue unchecked. One such tactic that carries deeply spiritual implications is that of “acting like an ancestor.” Cultivating this attitude links us across time and space with those who have come before us and those that will come after us, to whom we now bear responsibility. 

Against accelerationism and apocalypticism, acting like an ancestor requires a “revolutionary patience” that accepts the challenge of making small changes for a just world that may reverberate long after we are gone. There are no final, immediate solutions, and the world will not be remade only upon the condition of obliteration. We can only take up the tools we have now and start building.

This is an important book which leads the way for an explicitly Marxist, eco-socialist critical theory of the connected crises of capitalism and climate change, both of which, of course, have only worsened since this was published. For those who can persevere to the end, this book offers a wealth of insights on the dynamic connections, or “metabolism,” between nature and the social relations of production, and the “metabolic rift” between society and nature which capitalism drives. Although it is heavy on theory, it does have a few suggestions for a practical/political way forward—if an ecological revolution can effectively challenge the “juggernaut of capital” in time to save the planet.

Some of the best chapters are those which offer trenchant rebuttals to the “ecological modernization” arguments of mainstream economists and social scientists, those who seek to solve the climate crisis by “attempting to bend nature even more to our will, to make it conform to the necessities of our production.” These “solutions”—whether in the form of “discounting” future liveability, advocating “green” or “sustainable” consumption, or staking everything on a technological miracle fix, do nothing to address the destructive logic and limitless accumulation inherent to capitalism itself. A radical ecology, by contrast, “involves an analysis that examines the social drivers of ecological degradation, illuminating the contradictions of the social order,” and highlights the necessity of a socialist system which would establish “a new relation to the earth.”

With this focus on metabolism and natural limits, the authors have developed a really interesting positive theoretical framework for eco-socialism, one that revitalizes Marx and Engels’ writings to show the necessity of overcoming social-productive and environmental alienation under capitalism. Despite its Marxist roots, this outlook overlaps with many non-Marxist approaches (some bits reminded me specifically of Wendell Berry) and thus it has the potential for a broad appeal. A non-alienated society, in which social metabolism is brought in line with natural metabolism, would be oriented toward the qualitative improvement of human activity by restoring the wealth of labor and nature to all; or to use Evo Morales’ formulation, society would be ordered for the goal of “not living better, but living well.”

The primary difficulty of this book, as others have noted, is its poor assemblage and occasional recourse to esoteric debates in the field of environmental sociology (90% of the chapters were previously published as academic articles, which explains these shortcomings). This gives rise to the absurd situation of encountering concepts and arguments repeatedly as if they were new, despite having been introduced to them in multiple chapters.

Nevertheless, there is a lot here to think about, especially for those adventurous enough to delve into some of the philosophical and sociological debates on the nature of ecological science itself. While some of it is abstruse, I found the section on “dialectical ecology” to be illuminating, especially in its exposition of a robust materialism which fuses a Marxist historical critique with evolutionary science. This "revolutionary materialist dialectics" aims to create “not simply a new social praxis, but a revived natural praxis—a reappropriation and emancipation of the human senses and human sensuousness in relation to nature.”

A People’s Guide to Capitalism is a solid introduction to Marx's economic theory that is both succinct and accessible to those who aren't familiar with the concepts. The book follows Marx's argument in Capital (mostly volumes 1 and 3), and so could be read as a summary of Capital or concurrently with it. It's particularly good at connecting Marx's insights to contemporary subjects like bitcoin, theories of mainstream economics, the housing crisis, financial capital, and Covid-19—thus proving Marx's ongoing relevance. For me, it falls short in just a few places: not relating Marx's economic concepts back to his crucial dialectical method (something David Harvey does well in A Companion to Marx's Capital), and overlooking Marx's ultimate communist horizon. The last point, coupled with a handful of denigrating comments on the economies of socialist states, makes Marx feel oddly disconnected from the last century of political struggle. All in all, the book is a great guide to the complex and technical details of Marx's economic writings, which show that we need not just a robust moral critique of capitalism but a scientific theory of how it works and how to challenge its dominance. I wrote a more in-depth review of this book here.

This is an explosive little book that admirably conveys the profound impact of the October Revolution and its continued influence for communist movements in the Third World – with a focus here on Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

What Prashad lacks in focus and depth of analysis (this is a very short introduction, with the pros and cons of a bird's-eye view), he makes up for in the strength of his associative vignettes of revolutionaries, artists, poets, peasants, workers, and religious figures who found their grounding in the events of 1917. (The book is worth it just for the bits of revolutionary poetry, pulled from a multitude of nationalities and languages, which appear throughout.)

Nothing could be the same in the world after 1917, for "what should never have been became real" – a society where the oppressed masses had overthrown the oppressing class.

Prashad's narrative is a compelling alternative to both a unilaterally triumphalist or defamatory assessment of the Soviet legacy. Rather, we are given brief but well-defined glimpses of honest, hard-won expressions of "polycentric communism" beyond Russia, which took the Soviet experience as inspiration but which forged unique paths. True to Lenin's form, these are movements born out of "concrete analyses of concrete conditions," and they are worthy of study in their own right as part of the legacy of twentieth-century communism.

What is clear from this book is that pessimistic appraisals of the Left and its decline over the last 50 years are largely a Western phenomenon. For the places where the memory of the October Revolution remains present, the red flag is as vibrant as ever. I highly recommend this book as a short, accessible introduction to the immense contribution of communism and the lasting revolutionary influence of events that dared to remake the world.