Books

Laura Beers’ biography of Ellen Wilkinson, a prominent socialist in the early 20th century, is packed with detail. It is written in a lively style and gives a real sense of her as a person.

Ellen was born into a working class family in Manchester in 1891. She joined the Independent Labour Party at the age of 16. She was excited and inspired by the Russian Revolution and later had dual membership of the Labour Party and the Communist Party (which was permitted under Labour Party rules of the time).

David Madden and Peter Marcuse have successfully done three important things.

First, as the title suggests, they’ve made a clear case for housing to be higher up the mainstream political agenda. Second, they relate housing to wider theoretical debates, including Marxist analyses of its place in capitalist society. Third — and unusually for a book written by academics — they have given space to the many campaigns and activists challenging the neoliberal dominance of housing policy. As one housing campaigner said to me, “We needed this book”.

This book exposes the networks that exist between big business, media, politicians and the role of the black economic elite in collaboratively supporting and propping up apartheid.

The book starts with the National Party coming to power in South Africa in May 1948. Throughout the election campaign they played to white dissatisfaction with domestic and economic problems South Africa faced following the Second World War.

We are going through the sixth wave of mass extinction in the 3.8 billion year history of life on earth. Some 25 to 40 percent of all species are expected to disappear by 2050. And, like the more widely discussed global warming crisis, these extinctions are caused by human activity.

Extinction: A Radical History is a short, useful and welcome introduction to the subject for non-specialists.

Nothing demonstrates the importance of Ian Cobain’s new book better than the secrecy that surrounds British involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen today. Not only will we never be told the truth by our masters but the records that could have exposed the truth to the light of day will almost certainly be destroyed to prevent any such eventuality. And this, as Cobain shows, is as it has always been.

This biography of Karl Marx represents an enormous undertaking. “My aim in this book is like that of a restorer,” Stedman Jones writes, “to remove the later retouching and its alteration contained in a seemingly familiar painting, and restore it to its original state.”

The social and political turmoil of the Thatcher/Major era and the cultural responses to these challenges lie at the heart of this oral history of three interlocking periods of recent British history.

Walls Come Tumbling Down is essentially three books in one. The first deals with the extraordinary rise of Rock Against Racism in the late 1970s, forged from a music fan’s outrage at racist remarks uttered by guitarist Eric Clapton into a national movement that enabled thousands of people to find their political voice and express their creativity for the first time.

W E B Du Bois was a pioneer of the civil rights movement in the US and helped to found the National Association for the Advancement Colored People. He was the author of many works on the real experience of black people in the US, most notably his seminal Marxist-influenced work, Black Reconstruction in America.

The Spirit of Marikana is about strikes in three platinum mines across South Africa from 2012 to 2014, including the massacre of 34 striking black mineworkers at Marikana in August 2012. It is an important book and an engrossing read, even when describing the shock and horror of the killings.

It has become fashionable in academia recently to see the Russian Revolution as only one part of a “continuum of crises” that engulfed the Tsarist Empire and the early years of the Soviet Union. This new history follows suit, rejecting the dominant view that the Civil War lasted from the summer of 1918 to 1921 in favour of ten years from 1916 to 1926.

Why 1916? Because that year saw a revolt in Turkestan against conscription to the Tsarist war machine fighting in the First World War.