Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism. Re-issued with new introductions (London: Merlin Press, 2013)
Cuddling, Huddling, and Muddling Through
Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri, eds., Literary Materialisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Crisis and Criticism
Nancy Stout, One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012)
Long overdue in the catalog of books on the Cuban Revolution, Nancy Stout’s One Day in December has made an important contribution to the study of the guerrilla insurrection and Fidel’s Cuba by presenting Celia Sánchez Manduley as one of the Revolution’s key players. Stout sheds light on and pays well-deserved homage to this valiant and fiercely strong-minded Cuban female revolutionary, who remains hardly known outside of Cuba.
Considering the grave dangers facing humanity today, it might appear that Intellectual Property (IP), though loudly controversial, is at best a tempest in a teapot, at worst a diversionary tactic designed to focus attention away from more serious issues. Compared to environmental disaster, deepening social inequality, rampant state surveillance and war without end, dispute over copyright, patent and trademark seems trivial.
Political economy is very relevant for a discussion of intellectual property, especially because so many people seem to regard intellectual property as the pinnacle of a modern market economy. In reality, intellectual property represents a dilemma that neither markets nor conventional economics can successfully resolve.
Economists teach that competition is what makes markets more efficient than planned economies. Competition sparks innovation and drives prices down toward marginal costs – the cost of producing one more unit of output.
I originally sought to do three things in Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. First, I argued that Lenin’s 1914-15 notes on Hegel and dialectics constituted a serious and original engagement with dialectics, one that went beyond that of his mechanistic earlier work, especially Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908).
The strategic value of international solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, refugees in the Diaspora, and Palestinians in Israel raises some fundamental questions. The most immediate and urgent are: what the nature of international solidarity should be, and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
In November 2011 the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens succumbed to cancer. The occasion provoked an outpouring of encomia on the part of the world’s mainstream press while weaker voices – mainly from smaller alternative organisations – endeavoured to effect a shift in focus, from the lachrymose lament for a writer who spent much of his life in the media spotlight, to the anonymous hundreds of thousands rendered still and cold by the wars in the Middle East the same writer so eloquently helped to prosecute.
Before beginning our investigation of Intellectual Property, some personal experience might shed light on certain perplexing questions that arise whenever the subject is broached. I am a musician, a composer and an author, a typical example of one whom the copyright system was purportedly created to serve. Indeed, I derive a small but significant portion of my annual income from royalties collected for songs I've written.
The role of the state and the social economy context