This article will be released in full online April 29, 2023.
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. | more…
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. | more…
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. | more…
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.” | more…
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. | more…
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.” | more…
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. | more…
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. | more…
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reviews Bloodbath Nation, a poignant exploration of the painful, studiously ignored truths about gun culture in the U.S. To grapple with the epidemic of gun violence, she writes, requires confronting deeper truths about white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and the U.S. history of enslavement. | more…
Toby Terrar reviews I Was a Red Priest, the memoir of Marxist clergy member and activist Father Jean Boulier, finding lessons for today’s antiwar Christians. | more…
Tomás Mac Sheoin reviews Road to Repeal, which documents the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland, from its constitutional prohibition to the ban’s repeal in 2018. | more…
Mariko Frame reviews The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to the World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso, 2022) and its explorations of the policies, vision, and strategies for social change required for the burgeoning movement. | more…
Recent scholarship suggests that the widespread perception of Soviet states as uniquely ecologically disastrous is, at best, exaggerated, and that these environmental legacies must be re-examined. | more…
