A radical textbook for budding socialists, uncompromising in its attention to race in the story of global capitalism.
A cheeky introduction to anti-capitalist theory with a focus on race.
This takedown of capitalism is equal parts explanation, rejoinder, and manifesto. Jabali, a senior news and politics editor at Essence, employs the overarching metaphor of a toxic romance to illustrate how capitalism works to keep its subjects from imagining a better, healthier world. Ultimately, capitalism is “your average gaslighter.” The author’s vibrant language works together with memes and emoji-esque graphics to make this book a breeze to read, but her brazen, sometimes cringey tone draws on a deep well of theory and historical analysis. The book’s most compelling feature is Jabali’s focus on nonwhite and non-Western socialist theorists and leaders, which makes it a valuable resource for a wide audience. Entry-level readers will learn the basics of capitalism, socialism, and colonialism. Regarding the latter, the author writes, “today, capitalism compels the ownership class to continually amass more capital with less input and cheaper labor in order to remain competitive, just as the colonial powers of the past competed internationally for resources and workers to plunder. So what if it meant millions of people would come to be considered an inferior race, with lasting, devastating effects for a few centuries?” Readers who may have never connected with socialism may find satisfaction in encountering a diverse set of socialists who have built on Marxist orthodoxy. Such scholars, writes Jabali, “realized the OG communist theories weren’t one-size-fits-all, especially given how integral racism was in creating and maintaining capitalism in other parts of the world.” Full-page, bright infographics and abundant sidebars demonstrate historical events and deploy statistics to argue how capitalism is inextricable from racism and that “rare case[s] of racial solidarity” are invaluable building blocks of working-class power. Other chapters examine current affairs such as health care, housing, debt, the climate crisis, and campaign finance.
A radical textbook for budding socialists, uncompromising in its attention to race in the story of global capitalism.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781643752648
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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