Category: Reviews /

Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?”

Gabriel Rockhill’s “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?”

August 31, 2026

The latest: Rockhill does not claim, as he was immediately accused of doing, that “Western Marxism” was an “invention” of the CIA. But he reconstructs how the integration of this theoretical output into the “intellectual world war” against socialism was organized and conceptually thought through. He shows how far this integration went in specific cases and why it was logically consistent in terms of content. It was precisely because the “Western Marxists” tended “to support imperialism, or at least to make it acceptable.” It is to Rockhill’s credit that, drawing on the framework of a Marxist history of ideas, a discipline that has largely died out in the German-speaking world, he undertook the attempt to develop a comprehensive conception of this “world war.”
New: Matthew Stanley’s “The Ragged Edge of Freedom”

New: Matthew Stanley’s “The Ragged Edge of Freedom”

August 13, 2026

The latest, from Paul Buhle: "Abolitionists and social reformers of all kinds, with a wide Yankee following augmented by many recent German immigrants, sought to take things beyond the uneasy accommodation of white populations to each other across existing political lines. In Wisconsin and in Chicago most notably, these would include “Abe’s Boys” enrolling in the army of the Union. Not so in the Southern Illinois, two hours’ drive from my hometown. The whites who immigrated northward from the near South, largely uneducated and lacking skills, came to be considered almost a species in themselves...."
John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”

John Bellamy Foster’s “Breaking the Bonds of Fate”

August 12, 2026

The latest: The title of John Bellamy Foster’s latest book "derives from Lucretius’s famed De Rerum Natura, usually translated as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius wrote: “Again, if all movement is always interconnected, the new arising from the old in a determinate order – if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will break the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect – what is the source of the free [will] … .” ([On the Nature of Things,] Book II, 251ff) This exact quotation, moreover, was one made by Karl Marx in his Epicurean Notebooks, compiled in preparation for his doctoral thesis: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature” of 1841. From this point of departure, Foster initiates the reappraisal of two thousand years of philosophical controversy...."
Ian Angus’ “Metabolic Rifts” (Stay tuned for September’s Ecosocialism 2026 gathering!)

Ian Angus’ “Metabolic Rifts” (Stay tuned for September’s Ecosocialism 2026 gathering!)

August 9, 2026

The latest: "Angus discusses the carbon cycle’s breakdown—which is driving climate change...and he describes how industrial agriculture is pumping nitrogen into Earth’s systems faster than any natural process through fertilizers, disrupting the nitrogen cycle. Angus proposes a radical reduction in the use of nitrogen and chemical fertilizers as a solution to environmental damage, and envisions a time when it will be possible to feed people without them..."
Andy Merrifield’s many books, from “Roses for Gramsci” to “Marx, Dead and Alive”

Andy Merrifield’s many books, from “Roses for Gramsci” to “Marx, Dead and Alive”

July 2, 2026

The latest: "....Is 'subaltern' a code for the working classes? Is 'hegemony' an economic force or a cultural power? Are 'organic intellectuals' inherently more progressive? The answers to such questions depend upon your choice of scholar—whether, say, you’re reading a Foucauldian literary critic or a Marxist sociologist, a subaltern historian or a posthuman anthropologist. Over the years, Gramsci’s writing has been polished by critics of such diverse persuasions that it has now become a mirror: One opens his books only to confirm one’s own beliefs....when the English writer Andy Merrifield arrived in Rome, feeling 'washed out intellectually,' Gramsci came to the rescue...."
“Silencing Fighting Bob: The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War”

“Silencing Fighting Bob: The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War”

July 1, 2026

The latest: ""....To keep track of the multitudinous political figures and organizations featured in the book, the author helpfully provides a glossary of detailed biographical and organizational profiles. It was an age prolific especially of government acronyms and of faceless bureaucrats charged with keeping Americans as misinformed as possible about the true state of the world. Eric Chester has written an ambitious book about momentous government initiatives to quell antiwar opposition...."

The Digital Mask of Class Power (Forthcoming: “Digitalization in India”)

March 31, 2026

The latest: "What has happened in the 15 years when digitalisation was expected to clean up systems, make governments more efficient, make services more inclusive, reduce poverty, and reduce dependence on the state and reduce inequality? Okay, that last was perhaps never said to have been on the agenda, but it should have been. The articles brought together by the Research Unit in Political Economy (RUPE) analyse, through field surveys and policy documents, the experience of those whom the system has so far failed to serve…."

In the public eye: Contributors to “A Land With A People”

March 30, 2026

The latest from Mohammed Mhawish: "We have to ask ourselves: Do we know Hind? Of course we’ve heard her voice, or maybe have seen the building someone renamed after her at Columbia in her honor — which matters, and which she would have deserved, and which is still not the same as knowing her. But do we know her laughter, the way she moved through a room, what she was afraid of, what she loved, the world she was building inside herself at six years old? We learn none of it from the film. We learn it, if we learn it at all, from the interviews her mother gave on the side, on other people’s platforms. The film that claims her voice does not make space for her life."

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