What election?
Many casual observers’ reaction to Iran’s presidential elections would be “What election? Are there real elections in Iran?” The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has a notorious human rights record, which many international studies rank among the worst in the world. Amnesty International, for example, writes:
Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship and Farming since the Dust Bowl (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 297 pp., $30.
Samir Amin, The Reawakening of the Arab World: Challenges and Change in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 233 pp., $20.40.
A most interesting—and troubling—thing about Lenin in this centenary year of the 1917 “October” Revolution is that in the press and other circles he has become associated with Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief strategist and guru. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too,” Bannon is quoted as saying: “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.” The Guardian’s Victor Sebestyen proceeds to justify the connection, with V.
Victor Wallis’s powerful piece on “Capitalism Unhinged” provoked many reactions in those of us who read it. He has kindly invited me to write some brief comments, along with other members of the Socialism and Democracy editorial board. What follows is a series of thoughts provoked by Victor’s analysis. Specifically, I am trying to address the issue of how it is possible, in the light of such a fragmented political landscape, to envision a powerful social movement that could lead us out of the Trumpian darkness.
Michael Barker. Under the Mask of Philanthropy (Leicester, UK: Hextall Press, 2017), 556 pp. $20.
Michael Barker’s Under the Mask of Philanthropy is one of the very rare extensive critiques of the “nonprofit sector” from a left perspective. Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, derided “bourgeois socialists”:
The cross-continental region that was to become the United States possessed an incomparable bounty of arable land and natural resources of all types linked together by navigable river systems flowing into ice-free harbors. However, for the conquistadores, of every nationality, it was a profitless wasteland because not enough people were available for wage-labor, which, unlike chattel slavery, requires free movement of the laborers. The abundance of land allowed European settlers to escape being tethered to capitalist relations of production.
Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 768 pp., $25
Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson and Peter N. Funke, eds., The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 407 pp., $42.70.
Paul Le Blanc, Left Americana: The Radical Heart of U.S. History (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2017), 251 pp., $22