It seems like an eternity has passed since the chants of “we shall overcome” to “I can’t breathe” and “hands up, don’t shoot.” In fact, a millennium seems to have gone by since that night in Grant Park on November 4th, 2008 when some Americans thought we were on the point of entering a post-racial era, only to find in the last six months the streets of Ferguson, and New York turning into scenes of volatile protests against police brutality and racism. Read More…

Of late, the tendency of media pundits and so-called Middle East experts has been to explain developments in Iraq as being due to factors intrinsic to that country and the region as a whole. They are viewed as being rooted in history, either of recent vintage—that is, as a consequence of the artificial borders set down by the European powers at the end of the First World War—or of more ancient stock, as resulting from the split of the Muslim community into Sunnis and Shi’is during the early days of Islam. Sometimes the two explanations are combined, the argument being that Iraq is essentially an artificial country, one founded on a flimsily constructed secular nationalism unable to overcome centuries of Sunni-Shi’i sectarianism. Presented this way, Iraq never stood and chance, and its present unraveling was unavoidable. Read More…

The Brecht Industry rolls on: doctoral dissertations, journals, blogs, websites, YouTube, and memoirs comprising millions of pages, much to the consternation of the boys at the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who must be musing on how it is that an ardent anti-capitalist has entranced the cognoscenti and, much like Che, taken the moral high-ground despite the ubiquitous mercantilist hard sell at Fox News. Is there a credible pro-capitalist playwright, or are we still drifting with the platitudes and prose of an Ayn Rand as counter example? Read More…

At a time when ‘shining’ India seemingly stands poised to become a global economic powerhouse steered by new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, selected by an increasingly impatient and disgruntled electorate, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen’s book, An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, serves as a timely critical eye-opener for anyone interested in understanding the challenges facing this nation, the third largest economy in the world and the second largest in Asia. Read More…

The Invisible Bridge, the book jacket informs us, “is the story of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Thus are we introduced to the third volume of Rick Perlstein’s exploration of the birth and growth of contemporary American conservatism, centering on the rise of Ronald Reagan. (He has produced other books centering on Goldwater and Nixon.) Whether or not the United States was on the verge of a breakdown, either by design or because it is his natural style, Perlstein, who wears with pride his designation as “the hyper-caffeinated Herodotus of the American Century,” conveys the sense that it was. And by constructing, as it were, a memory of 1973-76 for those who did not live through those years, and by reconstructing memory for those who were there, he persuades us to imagine we are experiencing something of that period. The recovery of memories is, however, a risky enterprise, so Perlstein’s methods must be scrutinized. But first a bit more about his style. Read More…

Books reviewed: Read More…

[dc]A[/dc]fter almost half a century it’s time for a serious reassessment of the place of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in radical and revolutionary thought. We should therefore be grateful to Ken Knabb for his excellent new edition of this work in English translation.[1] His translation is very competent and readable, and the extensive notes he added are very helpful to the reader. In the original edition, Debord quoted or alluded to numerous sources without attribution, and Knabb has conscientiously tracked these down, and not only cited the sources, but often added useful information on their significance. Read More…

[dc]I[/dc]n the late twentieth century, a theoretical discourse of intersectionality became almost hegemonic in many sectors of radical intellectual life. In this discourse, which concerned social issues and movements around race, gender, class, sexuality, and other forms of oppression, it was often said we should avoid any kind of class reductionism or essentialism in which gender and race are subsumed under the category of class. Read More…

[dc]M[/dc]ore than fifty years have passed since the publication of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (ODM) in 1964. That work shaped the first generation of critical theorists in the United States and, while no longer as popular as it once was, it continues to inspire young left intellectuals. Many of an earlier time first encountered the “Frankfurt School” through Marcuse’s citations of works by his friends and colleagues from the 1930s. Erich Fromm may have had enormous popular success but few knew of his early connection with the Institute for Social Research. As for the writings of now iconic figures like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, they only began appearing in English translation during the 1970s. Read More…

[dc]E[/dc]very year the university library at Cortland distributes lists of journals that it proposes to dispense with due to budget constraints and the department of sociology/anthropology advocates for their preservation. The titles they wish to eradicate run the gamut from ASA ‘flagship’ publications down to niche periodicals. This is the same library that, when I arrived in 2005, was in the process of discarding thousands of books and the same library that, when I submitted a book requisition form, rejected it on the basis that the budget for books in 2008 was exactly nil. The book disposal project is especially noteworthy in hindsight. Read More…