Socialism and Ecology: Book Review

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

John Bellamy Foster Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2020 Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s…

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The Hirak: Algerian Uprisings of 2019 – Essential reading

Saturday, December 19, 2020

Muriam Haleh Davis, Thomas Serres, and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) This collection of texts in English, Arabic and French is a first attempt to gather…

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Blips on the Screen: the drone as a weapon of war

Thursday, December 17, 2020

Andrew Cockburn The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace by Michael Boyle. Oxford, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium by Thomas Stubblefield. California, The Kill Chain: Defending America…

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With love and fury: the Syrian writers proving there’s more than one war story: Book Review

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Robin Yassin-Kassab “Syrians. I hated the deceptive simplicity of that word. We were twenty-three million people. Soldiers and fighters. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. The torturer and the victim. How…

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Sweatshops and monopsony power – a review

Friday, July 17, 2020

Michael Roberts ME4Change has posted this article because the condition of garment workers in the UK city of Leicester is replicated throughout the Middle East and to underline…

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Victim of Zionist colonisation: Book Review

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Moshé Machover Rashid Khalidi ‘The hundred-years war on Palestine: a history of settler-colonial conquest and resistance’ Profile Books, 2020, pp336, £17.99 As part of their professional training, historians…

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Book Review: The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Greg Burris, The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).* *Book two in the Insubordinate Spaces series edited by George Lipsitz. Jadaliyya (J): What made you…

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Engels was right, class society and women’s oppression aren’t inevitable or irreversible

Monday, May 25, 2020

Elaine Graham-Leigh 200th anniversary of his birth, Elaine Graham-Leigh looks at Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State All page references are to the…

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How Economic Misery Helped Fuel the Syrian War: Book review

Friday, May 15, 2020

Louis Proyect Ever since the civil war began in Syria in early 2011, the left has largely ignored the social and economic circumstances that led to a conflict…

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Essential Books: Environment and Politics in the Middle East

Thursday, April 30, 2020

While scholars of the Middle East have long been attentive to problems of land and property, resource extraction and accumulation, and the political nature of knowledge production, it…

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Understanding Socialism by Richard Wolff: Book Review

Saturday, December 7, 2019

Michael Roberts The New York Times magazine has described Richard Wolff as “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist”.  And that is probably not an exaggeration as a description of this emeritus Professor of…

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We Are Conquerors: Book Review

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Adam Shatz A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion by Tom Segev Head of Zeus, 804 pp, £30.00, August, ISBN 978 1 78954 462 6 David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the…

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A Bold Reconceptualization of the Compulsory 1923 Greco-Turkish Exchange of Populations

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Elektra Kostopoulou. Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. by Aslı Iğsız. Stanford University Press 2018. At the start of 2019, almost eighty million people…

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Required Reading: Noura Erakat on Palestine and Law

Friday, July 19, 2019

Richard Falk. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. By Noura Erakat. Stanford University Press, 2019. I make no claim to approach this book with an…

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Four Futures: Life After Capitalism review – will robots bring utopia or terror?

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Book Review by Ben Tarnoff. The idea that computers will soon steal our jobs is an article of faith among many of the world’s most powerful people. The…

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Manifest Destinies: The tangled history of American and Israeli exceptionalism.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Book Review: Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. By Amy Kaplan Rashid Khalidi. The American publishing industry does not skimp when it comes to Israel….

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Only People Make Their Own History: Writings on Capitalism, Imperialism, and Revolution: Book Review

Friday, March 29, 2019

Semir Amin. Radical political economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) left behind a cherished oeuvre of Marxist writings. Amin’s intellectual range—from economics to culture—was admirable, and his lessons remain essential….

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Book Review: Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Charles R Larson. Syria’s gut-wrenching civil war serves as the background to Khaled Khalifa’s award-winning new novel, Death Is Hard Work, though incidents in the story often appear…

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We Crossed A Bridge and it Trembled: Book Review

Friday, March 1, 2019

Wendy Pearlman: We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, Custom House, 2017. Everyone talks about Syrians, but very few are actually talk to them. Perhaps that’s…

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Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Book Review

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy 308 pp, $29 pbk, ISBN 9781583676400 By Kohei Saito. Reviewed by Kaan Kangal for Science &…

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Globalised Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco – Book Review

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Koenraad Bogaert, Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).  Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Koenraad Bogaert (KB):…

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“Can the Working Class Change the World?”: Book Review

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Eve Ottenberg. “Can the Working Class Change the World?”, Michael D. Yates Monthly Review Press. If the working class doesn’t save our vastly unequal and dying world, it’s…

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Books on Middle East 2018 – tales of repression, ruse and resistance

Thursday, November 29, 2018

 Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East. David Kirkpatrick, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. From 2011 to 2015, David Kirkpatrick was the…

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Engaging Books Series: Pluto Press Selections on Radical Politics

Friday, November 23, 2018

ENGAGING BOOKS SERIES Pluto Press Selections On Radical Politics Engaging Books is a new series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an…

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The Crash That Failed: Book Review

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Robert Kuttner. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze, Viking. The historian G.M. Trevelyan said that the democratic revolutions of 1848, all…

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Book Review: Women in crossfire, Diaries of the Syrian Revolution

Friday, October 12, 2018

Robin Yassin-Kassab. ‘A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution’ by novelist Samar Yazbek is part journalism, part personal memoir, and all literature. It’s literature of…

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The Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage: Revolutionary Theories and Anticapitalist Dreams of Subcomandante Marcos

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Benjamin Dangle. Book Review: The Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage: Final Public Speeches of Subcommander Marcos. By Subcommander Marcos. Introduction by Nick Henck. Translation by Henry Gales. (AK Press, 2018)….

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The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu: Book Review

Friday, September 7, 2018

Adam Shatz. Posted on London Review of Books vol 40 no 16, August 30 2018. Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer, Hurst, 423 pp,…

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Can Freedom and Capitalism Co-Exist?: Book review

Friday, August 10, 2018

Chris Wright. Posted on Counterpunch August 7, 2018. Being run by business, American culture suffers from an overwhelming preponderance of stupidity. When a set of institutions as reactionary…

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Spirit of the Orchard: A Palestinian Story

Monday, May 14, 2018

Ramzy Baroud. Posted on Toward Freedom May 10, 2018. Spanning decades and encompassing war, mass exodus, epic migrations and the search for individual and collective identity, The Last…

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