New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, John Luther Adams
Finding the cracks in globalisation
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends an outstanding analysis of global elites that punctures the illusion of their international immutability
PEAS IN A POD: El Salvador president Nayib Bukele, of Palestinian extraction, with, at the time, US national security advisor John Bolton ‘eager to identify new opportunities for foreign investment, improve security, counter Chinese predatory practices and increase support for Interim Venezuelan president Guaido,’ March 2019
[Office of US National Security Advisor/CC]
Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
Rooted Globalism: Arab-Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries
Kevin Funk, Indiana University Press, £27
WHY do we care so much about the poor? Why do we obsess about inequality from our privileged, superior positions of scholarship and journalism by wallowing in their misery?
It is of course a form of absolution, penance if you will, from within a liberal caste that has clearly lost its grip on the bedrock of sociology, namely: an analysis based on class struggle.
As author Kevin Funk notes, postmodern and postcolonial approaches with their focus on subaltern agency have largely displaced Marxist-inspired analysis as the standard-bearer for “radical” critique in the social sciences.
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ISAAC SANEY points to the global stakes involved in defending the Cuban revolution against imperialism and calls for resistance
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes, and recommends a a candid, evidence-based record of Britain’s role in the slaughter visited by Israel upon the Palestinians
From summit to summit, imperialist companies and governments cut, delay or water down their commitments, warn the Communist Parties of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain and the Workers Party of Belgium in a joint statement on Cop30