A relevant, approachable guide to socialism’s continued value as “largely a tool for understanding capitalism.”
Acerbic exegesis of Marx’s relevance as “capitalism’s constant shadow,” directed toward younger readers.
Australian journalist and radio presenter Razer takes the unapologetically Marxist perspective that capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies are fueling social chaos. “If you want to learn about a capitalist’s morals, follow his money,” writes the author. “If you want to learn about the inevitable decline of capitalism, and the morals that sustain it, read Marx.” Calling her book “a basic introduction to the revolutionary project of sorting shit out, begun in earnest by Marx,” Razer encourages young people to “become what you…call ‘woke,’ or what we old Marxists call ‘class conscious.’ ” By focusing on the interplay between material needs and the superstructures imposed by capitalist society, she forcefully argues for Marxism’s renewed relevance, and she uses this flexible, updated approach as a lens for subtopics including gender, intersectionality, labor, and automation. Razer delves into the language developed by Marx and related thinkers like Walter Benjamin, and she connects her discussion to such ugly crisis markers as the rise of Donald Trump and White nationalism. “Trump was not, regrettably, too stupid to intuit one basic tenet of Marxism: changed material conditions force a change in political opinion,” she writes. “If you listen to some of Trump’s campaign speeches, you’ll see that he echoed, albeit quite feebly, the anti–big bank sentiments of Bernie Sanders.” Razer constructs a bleak panorama of late-stage capitalism’s failings, ranging from Uber’s planned move toward driverless cars to Bill Gates’ self-interested philanthropy. The author finds cause for hope in Sanders’ movement, seeing “rallies and political parties full of kids united by one crucial understanding: capitalism cannot be trusted to determine our future.” Razer provides a reassuringly irascible presence, energetic, humorous, and cheerfully vulgar (“this is some heavy shit”), even if her colloquial overtures to young readers are sometimes forced.
A relevant, approachable guide to socialism’s continued value as “largely a tool for understanding capitalism.”Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4597-4773-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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