The poisonous link between housing and racism in the US has received some welcome and overdue attention lately. Richard Rothstein’s book The Color of Law and George Clooney’s film Suburbicon each expose how black people have been deliberately excluded from “white areas”. City of Segregation shows how the legacy endures, 50 years after the US Fair Housing Act sought to end housing discrimination.
In seeking to be Democratic Party Presidential Candidate for 2016, Bernie Sanders attempted to inject “democratic socialism” into American politics. His campaign concentrated on the massive economic inequalities that riddle all areas of US society. This book, written by a researcher and organiser on his campaign, seeks to describe how his outsider radicalism crashed and nearly derailed the neoliberal, free market campaign of the Democrat establishment, epitomised by Hillary Clinton.
The popular image of an au pair is perhaps a young Swedish woman staying in a comfortable middle class home, helping out with a bit of child-minding and enjoying a cultural exchange over the capacious dinner table, practicing her English language skills on ten-year-old Tarquin and six-year-old Tilly.
Cox and Busch’s research uncovers a rather different picture. There may be up to 100,000 au pairs in Britain — an estimate as there is no regulation — and they are being employed to plug a huge gap in the provision of childcare for working parents.
The great bulk of this book is a reprint of the 1984 publication Orwell for Beginners. I must confess I never read it at the time and only now appreciate what a great book I missed out on. It was an outstanding introduction of George Orwell’s politics that has certainly stood the test of time, and the artwork is tremendous. The reprint is accompanied by a 60-plus page update entitled “Planet Orwell”.
This is an important and timely book. During the summer over 50 student activists were detained for supporting Shenzhen Jasic workers who had been dismissed for setting up an independent trade union.
Despite the lack of independent trade unions China has more strikes than any other country in the world. Fan Shigang uses oral histories of people involved in a 24 day strike in the Pearl Delta River (PDR) to show the determination of the workers and the tactics the bosses will use to win — from police harassment to mass arrests and hired thugs.
The legacy of James Connolly, Ireland’s pre-eminent Marxist revolutionary, has been appropriated and sanitised by every political tradition including the Irish state to such an extent that his historical role has often been obscured. Shaun Harkin’s selection of Connolly’s writing shines a penetrating light through this fog and allows him to speak for himself.
Paul Hanebrink’s tremendous book could not be more timely. As he points out, we are in the middle of a “surge in political activity on the far-right in Europe and North America”. At Charlottesville there were neo-Nazis shouting the slogan “The Jews Will Not Replace Us”.
These are dangerous times and we need to know as much about the history and politics of the far-right as we can. Hanebrink’s book is a challenging and important contribution helping to develop that understanding.
The Battle of Brick Lane 1978 by AK Azad Konor tells the story of how a community was galvanised by the murder of a young Bangladeshi textile worker, Altab Ali, in a Whitechapel park in east London.
Azad Konor, Rafique Ulah and others formed the Bangladeshi Youth Front (BYF) in response to the National Front (NF), who had moved its headquarters to the heart of the Bangladeshi community and were selling their papers on Brick Lane.
Rania Abouzeid represents that new generation of Arab, in this case Lebanese, journalists who in the years before the 2011 revolutions learned to view the region with a hard eye. They were unmoved by political rhetoric and unconvinced by fantastical conspiracy theories.
They learned to trust what they saw, the ordinary people they spoke to, and that sense that the truth is always concrete, even if it is not what you want to hear.
This book is written as a wake up call for the American ruling class. “If democracy cannot harness capitalism it runs the risk of subverting itself and giving way to neo-fascist regimes that will pretend to manage the market but more often ally themselves with corporations and substitute ultra-nationalist symbols and scapegoats for reforms.”
