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Reviews
A Review Essay: In Search of Economic Justice
Title: Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to CooperationBy: Robin Hahnel
New York: Routledge, 2005
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Reviewed by Stephen R. Shalom
Robin Hahnel has written an important book that will be of real value to all libertarian socialists (a term he uses very broadly to cover anyone who wants to replace capitalism with a system characterized by the direct control of workers and consumers over their own economic activities).
| Winter 2006 | Vol:X-4 | Whole #: 40 |
Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neo-Con
Title: Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and DemocracyBy: Richard D. Kahlenberg
N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2007, 524 pp, $29.95
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Reviewed by Vera Pavone and Norman Scott
WITH PUBLIC EDUCATION, teacher unions and classroom teachers under one of the most severe attacks in history by corporate funded think tanks, education profiteers, self-proclaimed pundits, and politicians from both parties, along comes a hagiography of Albert Shanker by Richard Kahlenberg, to add to the drumbeat.
| Summer 2008 | Vol:XII-1 | Whole #: 45 |
Anarchism and Socialism
Title: The Abolition of the StateBy: Wayne Price
Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2007, 196 pp., $14.49
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Reviewed by Marvin Mandell
WAYNE PRICE’S THE ABOLITION OF THE STATE is a well considered, well researched, and well written book. I shall try to summarize his major points in the first several chapters. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal with the failure of revolutions in Russia and Spain and the success of the counter-revolution in Germany, and I shall discuss them as well.
- Both anarchists and Marxists believe in a revolution from below by the working class.
| Summer 2009 | Vol:XII-3 | Whole #: 47 |
Birds and Cages: Reading Sex and the State in Janet Afary's Sexual Politics in Modern Iran
Title: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran By: Janet Afary
Cambridge University Press, 2009
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Reviewed by Amy Littlefield
Janet Afary is hopeful about the future of women's rights in Iran. And she identifies many reasons to be so, from secret individual acts of resistance by women against husbands, fathers, and dictators to collective feminist struggle and today's One Million Signatures Campaign for equal rights. But Sexual Politics in Modern Iran also reveals the full force of the cultural and political systems that the Iranian movement for gender equality confronts.
| Winter 2010 | Vol:XII-4 | Whole #: 48 |
Blind Faith
Title: Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century LifeBy: Eric Hobsbawm
New York: Pantheon Books, 2003, 464 pp. $30
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Reviewed by Robin Ganev
Among the great British Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm is the only one to remain in the Communist Party until the late 1980s. His decision to do so has never fully been explained. Thus the publication of his autobiography, Interesting Times, is an exciting event, as it has the potential of addressing this question. How did Hobsbawm manage to reconcile himself, for example, to 1956? Did he not at least feel disillusioned when he learned about Stalinist atrocities?
| Winter 2004 | Vol:IX-4 | Whole #: 36 |
Family Policies in Post-Communist Nations
Title: SOCIAL POLITICSBy:
International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2007
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Reviewed by Betty Reid Mandell
THE COUNTRIES THAT CLAIMED TO BE Communist also claimed to meet the needs of their families. What happened to those claims when the countries became capitalist? The fall 2007 issue of Social Politics seeks to answer that question. It analyzes family policies of Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia.
| Summer 2008 | Vol:XII-1 | Whole #: 45 |
Hoax and Reality
Title: Beyond the HoaxBy: Alan Sokal
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 448 pp., $39.95
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Reviewed by Jerold Touger
IN 1996, THE ACADEMIC JOURNAL Social Text, self-described as “a daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies,” published an article by physicist Alan Sokal in which Sokal argued that in quantum gravity, “the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized.”
| Winter 2009 | Vol:XII-2 | Whole #: 46 |
Inside the House of Labor
Title: Rebels, Reformers and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor MovementBy: Herman Benson
New York: Association for Union Democracy, 2004, 216 pp. $17.50
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Reviewed by Gene Carroll
While the labor movement in the United States is a beacon for democracy, too often it fails as a beacon of democracy. Herman Benson makes this clear in his remarkable personal memoir, Rebels, Reformers and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Movement.
| Winter 2005 | Vol:X-2 | Whole #: 38 |
Marx's Mixed Legacy: Anti-Semitism and Socialism
Title: On Anti-Semitism and SocialismBy: Mario Kessler
Berlin: Trafo, 2005<br> 208 pp, 21.80 eur
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Reviewed by Sherry Gorelick
HOW HAVE MARXIST THEORISTS and activists, Socialist parties and Communist States understood Anti-Semitism? How did they confront the rise of fascism in Germany?
| Summer 2007 | Vol:XI-3 | Whole #: 43 |
Migration, Domestic Work, and Repression
Title: Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New EconomyBy: Edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild
New York: Holt, 2002, 336 pp. $15
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Reviewed by Julia Wrigley
In their edited collection, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild write that Third World women are on the move as never before, filling jobs in the "homes, nurseries, and brothels of the First World" (2002). The rushed and materialistic societies of the First World leave working parents little time to look after their children or their own parents. Women migrating from poor countries fill the gap.
| Summer 2005 | Vol:X-3 | Whole #: 39 |
Multiculturalism and Science
Title: Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science -- From the Babylonians to the MayansBy: Dick Teresi
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002, 464 pp. $15
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Reviewed by Mel Bienenfeld
Multiculturalism has become mainstream. Across North America and Europe, school curricula are checked for accurate representation of non-Western and non-white cultures. Research examining the culturally conditioned character of all aspects of knowledge has not only gained a hearing in academic journals, but has sometimes been integrated into popular textbooks from kindergarten on up.
| Summer 2004 | Vol:X-1 | Whole #: 37 |
On Affirmative Action
Title: When Affirmative Action Was WhiteBy: Ira Katznelson
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005
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Reviewed by Reginald Wilson
The first thing that strikes me about this book is the irony of the title: When was affirmative action not white? As Mark Nathan Cohen states in his book, Culture of Intolerence (Yale University Press, 1998), "Affluent white males themselves have always received the most affirmative action, some by law, some by custom and practice, and some by factors so subtle and so deeply ingrained in our cultural training that we generally don't consciously recognize them." He goes on to say, "Critics tend to find affirmative action repreh
| Summer 2006 | Vol:XI-1 | Whole #: 41 |
Poverty and the American Dream
Title: American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End WelfareBy: Jason DeParle
New York: Viking, 2004, 422 pp. $25.95
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Reviewed by Betty Reid Mandell
I have seen the welfare system first hand as a volunteer outreach worker at a Boston welfare office (Department of Transitional Assistance). The other day I walked into the office to see a distraught woman sobbing disconsolately on the floor. She had unknowingly parked in the parking lot of the Burger King next door. She moaned, "I begged him not to tow me. I told him that I am homeless and don't have any money to feed my children, but he didn't listen.
| Summer 2005 | Vol:X-3 | Whole #: 39 |
Relevant, Irrelevant, or Both?
Title: The Socialist Feminist Project: A Contemporary Reader in Theory and PoliticsBy: Edited by Nancy Holmstrom
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002, 400 pp. $26
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Reviewed by Lynn Chancer
While I was in the process of reviewing this volume, I took it to a party in Brooklyn attended by varied-and-sundry aging baby boomers, early 40s through 50-something types who are generally progressive, educated and (in tripartite terms of classification) middle-to-upper-middle class.
| Summer 2005 | Vol:X-3 | Whole #: 39 |
Requiem for a Nation
Title: An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a PresidentBy: Randall Robinson
New York: Basic Books, 2007, 280 pp., $26
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Reviewed by Reginald Wilson
RANDALL ROBINSON HAS WRITTEN a searing, unforgiving expose of the forcible abduction, in February, 2004, of the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the consequent deepening wretchedness of its citizens. But he does more than that.
| Summer 2008 | Vol:XII-1 | Whole #: 45 |
Returning Political Theory to Politics
Title: The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented AmericaBy: JOSEPH SCHWARTZ
N.Y.:Routledge, 2008, 225 pp., hardcover, $125, paper, $32.95
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Reviewed by Michael Hirsch
The odd disconnect between theorists of ‘difference’ and struggles for social solidarity
IT’S TRAINED ELEPHANTS linked tail to snout contending with accursed builders of The Tower of Babel. That's pretty much how defenders of discourse on class and identity caricature their opposite theoretical numbers. Not so Joseph Schwartz, who shows why such binary thinking is dangerous. Schwartz instead places economic inequality and politics back into discussions of identity and difference. It’s about time.
| Summer 2009 | Vol:XII-3 | Whole #: 47 |
Social Capital: The Science of Obfuscation
Title: Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston BarrioBy: Mario Luis Small
University of Chicago Press, 2004 226 pp. $20
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Reviewed by Stephen Steinberg
VILLA VICTORIA—a great title. As with other legendary ethnographies—Street Corner Society, Urban Villagers, Tally's Corner, All Our Kin, and Sidewalk, Villa Victoria projects images of Gemeinschaft, of that quintessential social bond that survives even in the city that notoriously eviscerates the social bond.
| Winter 2008 | Vol:XI-4 | Whole #: 44 |
The New Class Struggle
Title: Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st CenturyBy: CHRIS SPANNOS, ed.
AK Press, 2008, 416 pp., $21.95
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Reviewed by Milan Rai
REAL UTOPIA IS A WIDE-RANGING BOOK that can deliver for the open-minded reader. It relates ideas and actions that develop naturally out of commonly held values, but that can still bring surprise, the shock of revelation, the rearrangement of familiar territory, and a different framework for us to see ourselves within.
Who is the “us”? People who subscribe to the cry of the World Social Forum: “Another World Is Possible!”
| Winter 2009 | Vol:XII-2 | Whole #: 46 |
The Unliquidated Crisis of Capitalism
Title: Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of MarxBy: Chris Harmon
London: Bookmarks Publications, 2009 400pp., $24.95
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Reviewed by Barry Finger
This recent work by the late Chris Harman is an application of the “permanent arms economy” theory, a hallmark of the British Socialist Workers Party, to the current economic crisis. This analysis is borrowed in part from the American writer T.N. Vance who argued in the presses of the Independent Socialist League of the early 1950s that the much anticipated reversion to the “unliquidated” crisis conditions of the 1930s was averted at the close of World War II through an application of military Keynesianism.
| Summer 2010 | Vol:XIII-1 | Whole #: 49 |
What Happened to Brown? A Review Essay
Title: Three books on school integrationBy: Clotfelter; Cashin; and Ogletree Jr.
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Reviewed by Reginald Wilson
Books reviewed in this essay
After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation
Charles Clotfelter
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004
216 pp. $24.95
The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream
Sheryll Cashin
New York: Public Affairs, 2004
320 pp. $26
| Winter 2005 | Vol:X-2 | Whole #: 38 |
Women and American Labor
Title: Sex of Class: Women Transforming American LaborBy: ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble
Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press 2007, 327 pp. $65
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Reviewed by Amy Littlefield
WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES it will be led by women in aprons, women with their rubber-gloved hands on their hips. Or so the cover of Dorothy Sue Cobble's new anthology, The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor might suggest.
| Winter 2008 | Vol:XI-4 | Whole #: 44 |