Reviews

Michael D Yates, author of Why Unions Matter (1998), dedicated most of his academic and professional career to studying labour and social movements in the US. Through his latest work, Yates contends that the working class must change the world or humanity will succumb to the barbarity of capitalism. His warning must be taken seriously because we live in a world prone to wars and global economic crises, among other evils.

This book was first published in 2010 by John Hopkins University Press. Presumably the decision by Verso to bring out a paperback edition this year was prompted at least in part by the resurgence of the far right in the US, much of Europe, in Brazil and elsewhere. How useful is it?

Leta Hong Fincher begins with how the Chinese feminist conscience and mass call out against sexual harassment started a few years earlier than the #MeToo movement. In 2015 on the eve of International Women’s Day, the Chinese government arrested five women. Their “crime” was that they planned to hand out stickers against sexual harassment on subways and buses. The government charged them with picking quarrels, which could have led to five year prison sentences. They were released after 37 days due to the national and international #FreetheFive campaign.

It’s hard to believe that something as stringent and unyielding as the English Reformation could lay the foundations of liberalism and the Enlightenment, but this is what James Simpson argues in his substantial and challenging new book.

The phrase “permanent revolution” is most commonly associated with Leon Trotsky owing to his book of the same name (The Permanent Revolution, 1929).