Magazine Issues

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Issue - 433

#TimesUp for unequal pay

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In this issue

Socialist Review Archive

How Marx discovered the working class

Workers need to free themselves. Joseph Choonara argues that as we celebrate the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, we should emphasise this hard won and most original contribution to radical politics.
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

Five things to do or see this month

Hope to Nope: Politics and Graphics 2008-2018Design Museum, London, 28 March to 12 August From the global financial crash and the Arab Spring, to ISIS, Brexit and Trump, this exhibition explores the numerous ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments. With over 160 objects and installations, relating to Occupy Wall Street,...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

Mark E Smith: proletarian individualist

Mark Brown appreciates the contribution of The Fall’s irascible lead singer, who died in January.
26 February 2018
Obituaries

Ursula K Le Guin, 1929–2018

In 2014 Ursula K Le Guin proclaimed that “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” Le Guin, who died in January, was a giant of 20th century literature. On her shoulders stand not just classics of genre fiction but everything from Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

Windrush: Movement of the People

Racist Tory politician Enoch Powell is well and truly nailed for his “politics of the gutter” in this triumphant celebration of Caribbean migration. It comes as we hear words from Powell’s vile “rivers of blood” speech made in 1968 which whipped up hatred up over immigration, predicting that black people will gain the “whiphand”. Ten...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

Jean-Luc Godard + Jean Pierre Gorin: Five Films, 1968-1971

In this age of multimedia saturation, the history of revolutionary cinema still has many secrets left to be unearthed. Among them are the series of films made by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Pierre Gorin under the collective name Dziga-Vertov Group. Greatly influenced by Maoist politics in the immediate aftermath of the May 1968 uprisings, Godard,...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

A Fantastic Woman

As the words “A Fantastic Woman” appear on the screen we are looking, somewhat jarringly, at a man’s body. For several minutes we follow middle aged Orlando as he goes about his business in Santiago, getting a massage, heading back to work, then out to meet his lover, Marina, who he is taking out for...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story

Bombshell tells the extraordinary story of the film actor and scientist Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood’s “most beautiful woman in the world”, who starred in films from the late 1930s to the 1950s opposite icons such as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Journalists have tended to focus on digging out details of her early nude appearance in...
26 February 2018
News Image
Reviews & Culture

Champions of Equality

This is a welcome account of the development of LGBT+ rights within trade unions in Britain in the last 50 years. But Champions of Equality also insists on the necessity of linking the workers movement, the left and the struggle against oppression as the key to winning real gains and reforms in society today. Peter...
26 February 2018
News Image
Reviews & Culture

Aftershock

US author John Feffer’s Aftershock is a howl of liberal outrage at the failures of liberalism in Eastern Europe. In 1989 mass demonstrations, which intensified manoeuvres at the top, brought down the Stalinist dictatorships of the Eastern Bloc. In the wake of their collapse, Feffer travelled to the region to set up an office for...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

America City

America City, set in the early 22nd century, is an example of the growing genre of climate fiction or cli-fi. It opens with a description of a devastating superstorm that hits Delaware, crushing even steel-reinforced homes. As climate change bites, Americans are fleeing the stormy east coast and going west. Others are escaping the parched...
26 February 2018
Reviews & Culture

Global Social Work in a political context

Unlike many academic books this is an easy and enjoyable read. In social work, too often books focus on the individual practice, with little about the context in which we intervene. Ferguson et al emphasise the political role of social work and the need to fight for radical approaches in a time ripe for radical...
26 February 2018