Magazine Issues

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Issue - 434

Ripples of Resistance

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In this issue

Reviews & Culture

Martin Luther King

Fifty years ago on 4 April 1968, Atlanta-born King was murdered. To commemorate this massive loss to anti-racists and revolutionaries Yuri Prasad correctly argues that it is essential to rescue King from the hagiographers. Even Donald Trump cites King as an inspiration, but the new generation of activists who stand on King’s shoulders in the...
26 March 2018
Reviews & Culture

Five things to do or see this month

Roxanne RoxanneOn Netflix nowA biopic about the early life of Roxanne Shanté, rap’s first female star. This film portrays the rapper’s life in the housing projects of Queens, New York, in the early 1980s. She must deal with a depressed, alcoholic mum and help raise her siblings. All the while she is developing an interest...
26 March 2018
Socialist Review Archive

John Sulston, 1942-2018

John Sulston, who died on 6 March, was a pioneering biologist and a passionate life-long advocate for socialism. Sulston spent his formative years working at the famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize factory” because of the number of its scientists who achieved that award. Indeed Sulston himself was awarded...
26 March 2018
Reviews & Culture

Age of Terror: Art since 9/11

This exhibition of artists’ responses to conflict since the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 ranges from sculpture to video installations. It includes well known pieces such as Ai Weiwei’s marble surveillance camera on a plinth, Ivan Navarro’s “inverted columns” effect created with mirrors, as well as the vase Grayson Perry was...
26 March 2018
Reviews & Culture

Beast

Film thrillers have stiff competition these days. When you can watch really great box sets with ten or 15 episodes on All 4 or Netflix, trying to cram a convincing story into an hour and a half is a tough commission. It’s a bit like that advert on TV where a couple meet, get married,...
26 March 2018
Reviews & Culture

Another Kind of Life

Another Kind of Life is a large and ambitious exhibition. There are works by 20 photographers, covering a period from the 1960s to the present. The people depicted cover a huge range of very different experiences, from the desperate homeless to neo-Nazis in the American wilderness, and many trans people across different societies surviving in...
26 March 2018
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Reviews & Culture

The Balfour Declaration

Bernard Regan has produced a timely and well researched analysis of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. The declaration stated unequivocally the British government’s support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The qualification that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing...
26 March 2018
Reviews & Culture

If the Symptoms Persist

Francis Combes lays out his ideological stall in the first poem, which stands alone, outside of the four sections that follow. In “No, the Earth is Not Round” he writes, “And the world goes haywire/ Because the earth isn’t round/ At least/ Not yet”. Combes, who is based in France, is excoriating in his criticisms...
26 March 2018
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Reviews & Culture

A Party With Socialists in it

With the Labour Party’s swelling membership amid continuing tensions between the Labour’s left and right wings, a book that addresses the fortunes of socialists in the party could not be more timely. Simon Hannah has provided a good summary of their rises and falls, going back to the creation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP)...
26 March 2018
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Reviews & Culture

Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism

This fascinating book builds on the work of Marxists such as John Bellamy Foster to argue that Karl Marx’s thought is central to understanding that humanity’s destruction of the planet is due to the capitalist mode of production. It is a further blow against the perception that Marx was a naive Promethean — someone who...
26 March 2018
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Reviews & Culture

A More Beautiful and Terrible History

“Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.” Rap mogul Jay Z’s words reflected not just the “Yes we can!” optimism of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, but also the orthodox view of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). Most...
26 March 2018
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Reviews & Culture

Brit(ish) On Race, Identity and Belonging

Racism, as we know, is a long-contested debate, issue and argument that has morphed throughout the centuries in Britain. Hirsch, who is of mix-race heritage, uses this as a starting point to open up dialogue around the subject of identity, exploring themes of origins, bodies and class which are some of the main chapters in...
26 March 2018