Reviews

Written in the shadow of the worsening, potentially existential, climate crisis and accompanying government inaction, professor Dana R Fisher makes two central arguments in Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

First, while many people believe the shocking, disruptive civil disobedience carried out by groups such as Just Stop Oil (JSO) is detrimental to their cause and to the wider climate movement, Fisher argues that ‘the evidence to date does not support this perspective’.

A social scientist at American…

During the five years that Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, there was a constant stream of damaging accusations that he was allowing anti-semitism to take hold of the party.

Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada has put together a devastating exposé, documenting a co-ordinated smear campaign by the Israel lobby in the UK, in partnership with the Labour Right and the Israeli embassy.

The campaign was designed to halt criticism of the illegal Israeli occupation and to bring down Corbyn, a staunch Palestine solidarity…

What a great thing the Rebel City collective are doing! The London anarchist group are going into schools as part of ‘the national curriculum’ and talking to young people about a world without bosses, states, money or oppression.

They are opening a vista onto a possible future of mutual aid, co-operation and equality.

This book consists of questions asked by students with answers from Rebel City plus their friends and relations. This means that the book is written in plain language about common sense ideas.

It offers a…

This book sets out to consider all aspects of incarceration, its purpose and consequent harms.

Using an approach he calls ‘Afro-analytical Marxism’ – a combination of philosophical and political traditions – Shelby explores the values that emerge from a utopian vision of a society without prisons.

An important feature of the discussion is a comparison of the radical proposal of prison abolition with the alternative of prison reform – the latter being seen by some as not going far enough.

The work of activist and writer…

At its most basic, Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) refers to ‘civilians protecting themselves and other civilians, without the use or threat of violence,’ co-editor Ellen Furnari explains in her introduction.

Fellow co-editor Randy Janzen lists three broad categories of UCP: creating space for nonviolent activism (for example, North American activists accompanying human rights defenders in South and Central America in the 1980s); traditional peacekeeping; and protecting communities where violence is endemic.

‘The thought…

While nowhere near as famous as Martin Luther King Jr, James Lawson was one of the most important leaders of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, until his death in June, he was, without a doubt, one of the greatest living practitioners of radical nonviolence anywhere in the world.

As a young man, Michael Honey notes in his introduction, Lawson ‘didn’t expect to live to age forty.’

Committed to a ‘radical overturning of the systems that hurt and cripple people’, through ‘an aggressive engagement to…

Its text finalised in early December 2023, Deluge brings together expert analysis and commentary from journalists, academics and campaigners, its 13 contributions divided into three sections.

In the first (‘Contexts’), two stand-out essays dismantle the myth that Hamas is to blame for the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the facile notion that Gaza’s current plight is a consequence of its people’s failure to adopt nonviolence.

In reality, as academic Colter Louwerse explains, following its election in 2006…

This academic yet accessible book addresses the myth that revolutionary, liberatory social transformation is no longer possible under capitalism, and also the notion that the tension between individualist and collectivist anarchism somehow makes anarchism itself impossible.

Clark demonstrates that contemporary capitalism has created an environment where, as Frederic Jameson famously said, it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism’.

But, like the English anarchist Colin Ward, he uses real world…

At over 650 pages, White Malice may look daunting but is actually written in such an engrossing journalistic style that it sometimes reads like a spy thriller.

Dr Susan Williams, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, focuses on US covert intervention in the Congo and Ghana in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

In particular, she writes about the fate of two popular politicians – Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what was called the Republic of the Congo after…

The day before the local elections in England, the UK government announced that it had started rounding up asylum-seekers and would ‘detain’ them pending their deportation to Rwanda later this year.

The prime minister’s press secretary denied that this was a cynical move to increase Conservative votes in the elections, claiming that: ‘For our part, there really is not a day to lose when people are dying in the Channel.’

Crocodile tears and detention of asylum-seekers notwithstanding, the Conservatives crashed and burned in the…

Between 2010 and 2019, more people took part in protests than at any other point in human history. Across the world, movements formed that looked revolutionary. But, after the heady successes of the Arab Spring and elsewhere, in most of the countries rocked by the waves of democratic movements, things were soon no better, and may now be worse, than before the protests started. Vincent Bevins calls this ‘the missing revolution’.

The risings in the Arab world, in Brazil and Chile, Hong Kong, Turkey, Ukraine and elsewhere weren’t…

Why is it legal to advertise products that are driving us and the planet to destruction? Why should advertisers be able to tempt us to buy an SUV [an oversized car – ed] as if it were no more damaging to the environment than a bicycle? And what can we do about it?

All these questions and more are tackled in Badvertising. 

We are surrounded by advertising: online, on TV, in the street, on public transport, and – more insidiously – through sponsorship, whether it’s BP sponsoring the British Museum or British Airways…

Progressives need to talk and think much more about insecurity. Indeed, our failure to do so has been a ‘strategic mistake’.

So says author and activist Astra Taylor in this print version of her 2023 CBC Massey Lectures.

We all experience ‘existential insecurity’ as a core part of the human condition. We can all be wounded (physically and psychologically), we are all dependent upon others for our survival, and we will all die.

But, Taylor notes, we are all also ‘ensnared in systems that are structured to trigger…

Back in 2008, the 24-year old Plane Stupid campaigner Dan Glass was invited to Downing Street to receive an award and took the opportunity to superglue himself to the then-prime minister, Gordon Brown.

But Dan’s life as a campaigner neither began or ended with eco-activism.

Dan was a queer school kid who came out after Section 28 – which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities – became law in 1988.

Dan writes about how he would ‘slink out on the night bus to Soho and… wake up next to some guy…

This morning I got up very early, went outside in my pyjamas, and asked the man who had been idling his car right outside my bedroom window for 10 minutes if he could please turn his engine off.

He did, but, when he left a few minutes later, he slammed the car door hard several times before revving away. Just to show me.

Of course, most drivers aren’t like this but it illustrates the key problem with the car: private benefits, public disbenefits. And those of us who don’t own a car get the double whammy: all of the bad stuff…