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Recent history

France, together with Italy, is the only West European country in which a Communist party occupied the main political space on the left for several decades. Since the end of the 1970s, however, the French Communist Party [PCF] suffered a net decline, to the point of becoming a secondary or even marginal force by the early 1990s. The radical left Maoist and Trotskyist parties, which had tens of thousands of members in the 1970s, also declined.

James Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 448 pp., $28

Twenty Years Later

When Ken Saro-Wiwa and his nine Ogoni compatriots were hanged in November 1995, it both polarized and unified the fragile as well as volatile geographical entity known as Nigeria. However, this time, it wasn’t the ethnic and religious fissures that were most noticeable. Instead it was the naked fist of raw power versus the vociferous protestations of a disenfranchised minority writhing beneath the weight of a seemingly implacable military dictatorship.

After 1989, as a result of structural and political upheavals, and major economic transformations, a process of capitalist restoration had severe social repercussions on a global scale. In Europe, anti-capitalist forces found their influence being irresistibly squeezed: it became more and more difficult for them to organize and lead social struggles, and ideologically the left as a whole lost the hegemonic positions it had won after 1968 in key areas of many national cultures.

Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 585 pp., $29.95.

During the 1990s, Europe saw the emergence of electorally significant radical left parties, drawing from the communist and other left and progressive traditions to form qualitatively new political formations. These parties challenged the conventional wisdom that the left as a significant political current was dead, post-1989. They survived the existential crisis of that supposed ‘end of history’¹ moment and evolved into viable political forces which were able to occupy the space to the left of social democracy as it moved rapidly to the right, embracing neoliberalism.

Todd Wolfson, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2014), 248 pp., $30 paper/$90 cloth

Shalini Puri, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 358 pp., $75

Steve Martinot, The Need to Abolish the Prison System: An Ethical Indictment (Smashwords, 2014), 96 pp., ebook $2.00. Paper copies available @ $4 from the author at PO Box 11842, Berkeley, CA  94712.

In The Need to Abolish the Prison System: An Ethical Indictment, Martinot sets out to show that prisons equate to systematic violence and that the innermost logic of imprisonment – the revenge ethic – is fundamentally opposed to social order. In so doing, he attempts to make the abolition of prisons “thinkable.”