The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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Winning hearts and minds
JONATHAN WHITE recommends a key study that shows how language is vital to the mobilisation of the class and the development of consciousness
foster
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
Languages of Class Struggle: Communication and Mass Mobilisation in Britain and Ireland 1842-1972
John Foster (Praxis Press, £25)
IN 1847, Karl Marx wrote that in the process of struggle the working class is transformed from being a class against capital into a class “for itself,” consciously struggling to change the social order.
Throughout his career, from his ground-breaking book Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution onwards, John Foster’s work can be seen as a dialogue with this idea.
What are the concrete conditions in which class consciousness can develop? Exactly how do classes mobilise and reach the point where they start to pose a challenge to state power? How does consciousness change in the process of struggle and what role do leaders play in this process? What is left over when mobilisations end?
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