Magazine Issues

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Issue - 418

States of Exclusion

Phil Marfleet on why capitalism still relies on national borders

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In this issue

Reviews & Culture

Hag-Seed

Margaret Atwood’s new novel is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The main protagonist is Felix Phillips, former artistic director of the acclaimed Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, a kind of Canadian Stratford-upon-Avon. We get a sense of the productions that Felix has become famous for, by the description of The Tempest production he had been planning in...
31 October 2016
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Socialist Review Archive

Solidarity forever: ‘Undesirable citizens’

Part two of our series on the Wobblies looks at the bosses' attempt to have Bill Haywood framed and executed.
31 October 2016
Reviews & Culture

Another Day in the Death of America

Gary Younge is one of the few fearless journalists who regularly cut against the grain in the mainstream media. He has recently returned to Britain, the country of his birth, after living and writing for The Guardian in the United States for over a decade. Another Day in the Death of America is his parting...
31 October 2016
Reviews & Culture

Red Ellen

Laura Beers’ biography of Ellen Wilkinson, a prominent socialist in the early 20th century, is packed with detail. It is written in a lively style and gives a real sense of her as a person. Ellen was born into a working class family in Manchester in 1891. She joined the Independent Labour Party at the...
31 October 2016
Reviews & Culture

In Defense of Housing

David Madden and Peter Marcuse have successfully done three important things. First, as the title suggests, they’ve made a clear case for housing to be higher up the mainstream political agenda. Second, they relate housing to wider theoretical debates, including Marxist analyses of its place in capitalist society. Third — and unusually for a book...
31 October 2016
Reviews & Culture

Extinction: A Radical History

We are going through the sixth wave of mass extinction in the 3.8 billion year history of life on earth. Some 25 to 40 percent of all species are expected to disappear by 2050. And, like the more widely discussed global warming crisis, these extinctions are caused by human activity. Extinction: A Radical History is...
31 October 2016
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Reviews & Culture

The Long Depression

Why has there has been no real recovery in the world economy since the crash of 2007? After what is now almost a decade, still there has been no return to pre-crash levels of economic growth and profitability. Unable to explain this grim reality, mainstream economists and many so-called “financial experts” flounder and struggle to...
31 October 2016
Reviews & Culture

Selling Apartheid: South Africa’s Global Propaganda War

This book exposes the networks that exist between big business, media, politicians and the role of the black economic elite in collaboratively supporting and propping up apartheid. The book starts with the National Party coming to power in South Africa in May 1948. Throughout the election campaign they played to white dissatisfaction with domestic and...
31 October 2016
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Reviews & Culture

Naija Marxisms

Adam Mayer has rendered a great service to the workers’ movement in Nigeria and internationally. He shows that rather than being a foreign imposition, Marxism, a political guide to action, was very much part and parcel of the resistance to both colonial exploitation and to the predatory bourgeois classes that inherited power after independence. Nigeria...
31 October 2016
Socialist Review Archive

Jack London: Flawed revolutionist

American novelist, journalist and socialist Jack London died 100 years ago. Dave Gibson outlines his passionate activism for workers' rights and his political novels, as well as the contradictions in his work.
31 October 2016
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Reviews & Culture

The Levellers’ Revolution

The execution of Charles I in January 1649 terrified the kings and queens of Europe. Civil wars weren’t uncommon, but never before had one become quite so revolutionary. Particularly worrying was the central involvement of ordinary people in the process and their active participation at key moments. Present on the scaffold when Charles lost his...
31 October 2016
Reviews & Culture

The fierce humanity of Dario Fo

Lina Nicolli recalls a memorable preformance by Dario Fo, the radical Italian theatre maker and Nobel prize-winning playwright, who died last month. His excoriating farces, such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, satirised the corruption of the Italian state.
31 October 2016