November 1, 2024
In this review of Bit Tyrants by Rob Larson, Mateo Crossa finds and expands on how the powerful actors of Silicon Valley have fashioned themselves into the new, unapologetic robber barons, operating in the shadows of political lobbying to maintain their monopolistic practices in the Global North while shamelessly engaging in the naked exploitation of the workers in the Global South. Crossa echoes Larson's call for liberation from these tyrants, bringing attention to the necessity of socialism—both on- and offline—to agitate for democratic control over the technology and Internet platforms that increasingly penetrate our daily lives.
September 1, 2024
Reviewing Smitha Radhakrishnan's Making Women Pay, Jingyi Zhang elucidates the exploitative practices of the much-vaunted microfinance industry, particularly as they apply to—and exacerbate—existing tensions within communities of women in India.
April 1, 2024
In this review of Immanuel Ness's Migration as Economic Imperialism, Torkil Lauesen illuminates the links between the migration of labor to theories of equal exchange, which have traditionally focused on international trade. These connections, Lauesen writes, relate to transfer of labor power from the periphery to the core, and the concomitant exploitation of vulnerable workers from the Global South.
February 1, 2024
As Pietro Daniel Omodeo observes in this review, "environmental politics cannot be separated from political decision-making." Using the example of the Senegal delta, as explored in Maura Benegiamo's La terra dentro il capitale, Omodeo shows that the neocolonial "Great Expropriation of the global commons" is underway in the Global South, with grim ecological and social consequences for those living in the delta.
February 1, 2024
Mauricio Betancourt reviews Marcello Musto's The Last Years of Karl Marx. In the book, Betancourt finds a detailed portrait of Marx's rarely examined later years, revealing a man who, despite personal tragedy and failing health, remained a vigorous intellectual and scholar through the end of his life.
January 1, 2024
In this review of Linda Dittmar's Tracing Homelands, Paul Buhle writes, "History may yet hold hope when hope is otherwise lacking when we reject the stalemate that only leads to despair."
January 1, 2024
Oscar Feo Istúriz reviews Social Medicine and the Coming Transformation, an extensive work that explores the concept of collective health, from its early basis in classical Marxism to its contemporary implementation in Latin America (and lack thereof in the United States). This model of social medicine-collective health has the potential to not only replace the dysfunctional model of public health under capitalism, but open up new pathways toward profound social transformation.
December 1, 2023
David Michael Smith reviews journalist Norman Solomon's War Made Invisible, an eloquent moral call to end the bloody state of perpetual war that the United States has engaged in since the advent of the "war on terror."
December 1, 2023
What lessons can be drawn from the struggle against fascism in the previous century? One answer, Jacques LaPere writes, can be found the new English translation of Portuguese antifascist Manuel Tiago's Until Tomorrow, Comrades.
November 1, 2023
Michael Yates reviews Ballad of an American, a newly released graphic biography of Black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson. The book gives an uncompromising look at a complicated, passionate man, wholly dedicated to the cause of liberation.
