CATHERINE STEEL relishes a compelling novel about Augustus’s right hand man, but misses the politics, the cultural shifts, and more detail about his restoration of Rome
People Get Ready! Preparing for a Corbyn government
by Christine Berry and Joe Guinan
(O/R Books, £12)
THE CENTRAL thesis of this partisan programme of political action for a Corbyn government is that responses to capitalist private ownership of the economy have traditionally divided along two main lines — state socialism with ownership and control of capital held by the state and social democracy, which leaves it largely in private hands but seeks to redistribute the returns through taxation and transfers.
The book’s authors Joe Guinan and Christine Berry are the kind of policy wonks that give this necessary activity a good name. Their dissection of neoliberalism, and of New Labour’s accommodation with it, is sharply worded and perceptive.
Renewed illusions in social democratic reformism are sprouting as a result of Andy Burnham’s rhetoric, but material conditions are already intruding into the debate, argues NICK WRIGHT
While Italy’s communist tradition remains fragmented and politically marginal, France’s party is attempting to re-establish itself as an independent force rooted in working-class organisation, says NICK WRIGHT
The social base of the old Tory Party has disappeared as surely as that of Labour, argues ANDREW MURRAY – today’s right are the debased offspring of a capitalism that speculates without investing and profits without producing
ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity



