This book makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to a rapidly growing list of publications taking on the orthodoxies of mainstream economics. At its heart is the critical question: who controls money?
Since money doesn’t enter the economy naturally, the means by which it is created are contingent on political choices. To expose the ideology behind our financial system, Mellor meticulously debunks four myths about modern finance.
The first is the assumption that national governments cannot, or should not,…
Reviews
Dorothy Thompson, who died in 2011, was a leading historian of the Chartist movement - the popular working-class movement, active from the 1830s to the late 1850s, which agitated for universal male suffrage and parliamentary reforms such as a secret ballot, payment for MPs and equal-sized constituencies. In addition, both she and her husband, the labour historian EP Thompson, were leading members of the Communist Party until 1956, when they left in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. The Dignity of Chartism collects…
The most valuable contribution of this book is to remind us of the political significance of remembering and archiving. Although an academic contribution to memory studies, for nonviolent activists its strength is in its detail and convincing examples of how preserving information, stories and culture contributes to movements because of the way in which archives ‘shape collective memory of the past’.
The chapter on the Indian state vs the popular memory of Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930 is interesting in itself, but also because of…
Eileen Flanagan is a Quaker, spiritual writer and climate change activist.
This book tells the story of her journey from young and idealistic Peace Corps teacher in Botswana to 50-year- old mother handcuffing herself to the White House fence to defend the environment. This is a wonderful book full of nourishing wisdom, courage and humour. I found Flanagan’s style immediately engaging, with a good balance of information and anecdote, and the pace of a good novel. She combines stories of her own life and her Irish ancestry with…
There are some non-fiction writers who are always interesting and informative to read, whatever the topic, but the US writer and journalist Rebecca Solnit is this and something else.
A wonderfully lyrical writer, she is probably best known among activists as the author of the 2004 book Hope in the Dark, her brilliant meditation on why it’s ‘always too soon to go home... always too soon to calculate effect’. And, alongside activism and geography, hope is also a key theme of this book (which, despite its title, is…
The extraordinary life of Rosa Luxemburg – Marxist economist, cat-lover and legendary figure of the revolutionary left – is given a memorable graphic novel treatment in Kate Evans’ latest book.
A ‘fictional representation of factual events’, it takes us from her childhood in Poland (tasked by her school with writing a poem for the visit of the German kaiser, she produced one attacking ‘that creeping toad Bismarck’), through her pre-First World War revolutionary agitation in Poland and Germany (which led to her imprisonment in the…
A huge and diverse amount of vernacular music was recorded in the late 1920s, a wave of world music consumption which saw its peak before the Wall Street Crash swept this immense body of activity aside.
'Gramophone and phonograph companies fought with each other to capture the world’s vernacular musics through the new electrical microphones and to play them back through the new electrical loudspeakers'. Indonesian kroncong, Trinidadian calypso, Egyptian tarab and Brazilian samba were just a few of the many styles…
Taken out of context, some of the revelations drawn from the US diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks sound improbable and even a bit like a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, many of the issues highlighted in this book, – human rights abuses for instance – have already been widely reported on in the press.
So at first I was a bit doubtful about the value of this book. But in fact its purpose is not to publish secrets. Rather, it is to show what we can learn from these cables as citizens, and what they teach us about the workings…
In a sense this book picks up from where my last review left off. But whereas Kerry Ann Mendoza’s Austerity (PN 2586–2587) explores the history, politics and impact of the current cuts programme, Mason is interested mainly in the economy.
Section one outlines the failures of neo-liberalism, providing an excellent introduction to basic economics and explaining how the ‘atomisation’ of our…
A self-described ‘socialist-anarchist-feminist’, the US activist and writer Marge Piercy is the author of 17 novels, spanning a wide range of different genres including science fiction, as well as one of North America’s best-selling poets.
Nonetheless, this latest addition to PM’s excellent ‘Outspoken Authors’ series eschews fiction to focus on ‘essays, rants and railleries’. The latter cover a wide variety of topics, including abortion, homelessness, censorship, the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe, the role of politics in fiction, and…
We Kill Because We Can is a 300-page rant on drones by cultural critic Laurie Calhoun. Focusing on the use of drones for targeted killing, each chapter is an angry polemical essay, with titles like ‘Strike First, Suppress Questions Later’ and ‘The New Banality of Killing’.
Calhoun argues that ‘both the practise of and propensity towards institutional killing has been transformed by this new technology.’ I agree. However I also have to admit that the tone of this book – fuming mad most of the time – did grate on me after…
‘It’s good to read outside your comfort zone’, I told myself when I was asked to review this collection of short stories. I had no real idea what ‘speculative fiction’ was and, of the 29 authors, the only names which were at all familiar to me were Angela Carter, Ursula K Le Guin and the visual artist Leonora Carrington.
According to the cover, the editors are a literary power couple with awards for both editing and writing fantasy. Their two-page introduction, in which they explain that the stories have been arranged to…
From the first recorded strike in human history (by Egyptian artisans in 1170 BCE) to a successful sex strike by Colombian women in 2011 (‘No more sex. We want our road’), civil resistance – ‘collective action for political or social ends without any systematic recourse to violence’ – has had a long and varied history.
It also looks set to have a long and varied future. Indeed, according to the authors of these books, there has been a greater tendency in recent decades for popular campaigns to use the methods of nonviolent action…
In the next two decades, 47% to 80% of current jobs will be lost to automation. According to Srnicek and Williams, this is good news; and the contemporary left needs to embrace this future if it is to transform the status quo with a sustainable economic alternative.
An exciting manifesto, written by two prominent left-accelerationists (who believe that technological expansion can generate social change, beyond capitalism), it begins by recognising our current state of over-saturation. For Srnicek and Williams, today’s rapid…
Described by Cornel West as a ‘secular bible for a new social movement’, Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow argued that the US prison system – the destination for one-in-three Black US males during their lifetime, compared with one-in-17 of their white contemporaries – had become ‘a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control’, functioning in a manner ‘strikingly similar to Jim Crow’ – the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation that emerged in the US in the…