Reviews

Author Julia Lovell provides an overview of Maoism in China and all the countries in which it had or still has influence. The book includes a lot of detail on various Maoist movements around the world but offers only a superficial explanation for Mao Zedong’s rise and the spread of his ideas. It includes many entertaining anecdotes but it does not provide sufficient historical context.

This book starts well with a glib and intriguing introduction. We are invited to imagine a trip across the Argentinian Pampas, a journey that starts dreamily with visions of verdant fields of soya but ends jarringly with the realisation that this product: Intacta RR2 Pro is one of a new selection of transgenic seeds incurring violence and disruption to indigenous humans and plants by Monsanto.

Kristen Ghodsee documents the lost history of activism of women from Eastern bloc countries, specifically focussing on Bulgaria, within the United Nations Decade of Women 1975-1985. The links made by Eastern European activists with newly independent African nations challenged the hegemony of a Western or neoliberal capitalist vision of women’s emancipation. By sketching out this lost history Ghodsee attempts to draw conclusions about the legacy of “state socialism”, feminism and clash of ideologies during the Cold War.

This is an ambitious attempt to narrate some of the major battles of British working class history in a way which is accessible and entertaining to a new generation. It is an attempt which largely succeeds, even if it does leave some important questions unanswered.