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.
It’s 1849 and Karl Marx is living in London, having fled Prussia and been expelled from France following the 1848 revolutions. Poverty stricken, he is trying to complete his manuscript Capital, A critique of Political Economy while cramped in two rooms with his wife Jenny, housekeeper Helene Demuth, three children plus a fourth on the way. Marx, active in the Communist League, defends his revolutionary ideas to workers against anarchist detractors and conspiracy theorists.
During the student protests in France in 1968, students took over printmaking studios of art schools, including at the Sorbonne École des Beaux Arts where the poster production collective Ateliers Populaires was established.
Akala has already revealed to the world that the Wu-Tang Clan’s lyrics can rival Shakespeare’s. He has also helped restore the weight and significance of African contributions to human history in his Oxford Union speech and his freestyle sessions on the BBC.
In his first book, Natives, Akala now takes on the British Empire and tears down the myths of greatness that surround it. One of these myths, he tells us in chapter five, is that William Wilberforce ended slavery.
Any anthology of poetry that takes part of its title from the great revolutionary poet Shelley’s cry of anger and call to arms in response to the Peterloo Massacre, The Mask of Anarchy, and reprints the poem in full, is going to be worth reading.
Add to this the works of Milton, Blake, Brecht and Langston Hughes (to name but a few) and it becomes an even more attractive proposition.
Tariq Mehmood, author of this novel for young adults, was one of the Bradford 12. Arrested in 1981 when Asian youth took to the streets to confront the threat of organised racist attacks on their community, they were charged with making petrol bombs. All 12 were acquitted in a landmark 1982 trial on the grounds of the right to self-defence. “Self-Defence is No Offence” was the slogan of the campaign to free them.
The French Blanquist revolutionary, Emmanuel Barthelemy, was hanged for the Warren Street murders on 22 January 1855. He had been sentenced to death, even though the jury that found him guilty had recommended clemency. It was a public execution, watched by perhaps as many as 10,000 people, apparently a disappointing crowd for the time.
How had a dedicated and uncompromising French revolutionary, a veteran of the 1848 barricades, come to die on the scaffold in London?
The bicentenary of Karl Marx’s birth has been commemorated in various ways this year and this colossal new biography by Swedish academic Sven-Eric Liedman is the latest addition to the Marx bibliography.
At over 600 pages, Liedman’s book aims “to present Marx’s work in all its breadth”, giving equal weight to both his life and his work. Everything from Marx’s university thesis and love letters to Jenny Von Westphalen to unpublished responses intended for Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich are considered worthy of evaluation alongside The Communist Manifesto and Capital.
Mariana Mazzucato has emerged as a sharp critic of right wing efforts to “shrink the state” and reduce government spending on public services and welfare. She is a key voice for what is sometimes termed the “post-Keynesian” critique of neoliberalism.
How did identity politics go from being part of a wider radical movement for change to becoming a tool for establishment politicians to undermine the left? If identity politics doesn’t move us towards genuine liberation, what sort of politics do we need? These are the central questions that Asad Haider asks in this thoughtful and thought-provoking book about race, class and the limitations of identity-based politics.