New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
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The right to live
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends an excellent starting point for unions and the wider movement for discussion of the housing crisis
landlords
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
A recognition that individually we are powerless both politically and socially is essential, writes GORDON PARSONS
Against landlords – how to solve the housing crisis
Nick Bano, Verso, £16.99
HOW can we solve the housing crisis? The government is set on relaxing planning restrictions in the hope that the private sector will step in and build the houses we need. Nick Bano disagrees.
In his book Against Landlords – how to solve the housing crisis he argues that there is no shortage of houses – it’s simply that the prices are too high and this is caused by the high level of rent that landlords can extract with impunity from renters.
He introduces his book with an apposite quote from Marx: “Poverty is a more fruitful source for house-rent than the [silver] mines of Potosi were for Spain... One section of society here demands a tribute from the other for the very rights to live on the earth.”
More from this author
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends a book that makes a critique of neoclassical economics and attempts to envision a sustainable global future
Powerful exposition of Marxist political economy
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JOE BESWICK of the London Renters Union talks to the Morning Star’s new Left on Record programme
The Welsh government is shying away from the obvious answer to a spiralling rental market and increased housing precarity – well-designed and implemented rent controls, writes LUKE FLETCHER
