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A Review Essay: In Search of Economic Justice
Title: Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to CooperationBy: Robin Hahnel
New York: Routledge, 2005
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Reviewed by Stephen R. Shalom
Robin Hahnel has written an important book that will be of real value to all libertarian socialists (a term he uses very broadly to cover anyone who wants to replace capitalism with a system characterized by the direct control of workers and consumers over their own economic activities).
| Winter 2006 | Vol:X-4 | Whole #: 40 |
Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neo-Con
Title: Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and DemocracyBy: Richard D. Kahlenberg
N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2007, 524 pp, $29.95
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Reviewed by Vera Pavone and Norman Scott
WITH PUBLIC EDUCATION, teacher unions and classroom teachers under one of the most severe attacks in history by corporate funded think tanks, education profiteers, self-proclaimed pundits, and politicians from both parties, along comes a hagiography of Albert Shanker by Richard Kahlenberg, to add to the drumbeat.
| Summer 2008 | Vol:XII-1 | Whole #: 45 |
Anarchism and Socialism
Title: The Abolition of the StateBy: Wayne Price
Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2007, 196 pp., $14.49
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Reviewed by Marvin Mandell
WAYNE PRICE’S THE ABOLITION OF THE STATE is a well considered, well researched, and well written book. I shall try to summarize his major points in the first several chapters. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal with the failure of revolutions in Russia and Spain and the success of the counter-revolution in Germany, and I shall discuss them as well.
- Both anarchists and Marxists believe in a revolution from below by the working class.
| Summer 2009 | Vol:XII-3 | Whole #: 47 |
Birds and Cages: Reading Sex and the State in Janet Afary's Sexual Politics in Modern Iran
Title: Sexual Politics in Modern Iran By: Janet Afary
Cambridge University Press, 2009
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Reviewed by Amy Littlefield
Janet Afary is hopeful about the future of women's rights in Iran. And she identifies many reasons to be so, from secret individual acts of resistance by women against husbands, fathers, and dictators to collective feminist struggle and today's One Million Signatures Campaign for equal rights. But Sexual Politics in Modern Iran also reveals the full force of the cultural and political systems that the Iranian movement for gender equality confronts.
| Winter 2010 | Vol:XII-4 | Whole #: 48 |
Family Policies in Post-Communist Nations
Title: SOCIAL POLITICSBy:
International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2007
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Reviewed by Betty Reid Mandell
THE COUNTRIES THAT CLAIMED TO BE Communist also claimed to meet the needs of their families. What happened to those claims when the countries became capitalist? The fall 2007 issue of Social Politics seeks to answer that question. It analyzes family policies of Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia.
| Summer 2008 | Vol:XII-1 | Whole #: 45 |
Hoax and Reality
Title: Beyond the HoaxBy: Alan Sokal
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 448 pp., $39.95
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Reviewed by Jerold Touger
IN 1996, THE ACADEMIC JOURNAL Social Text, self-described as “a daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies,” published an article by physicist Alan Sokal in which Sokal argued that in quantum gravity, “the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized.”
| Winter 2009 | Vol:XII-2 | Whole #: 46 |
Marx's Mixed Legacy: Anti-Semitism and Socialism
Title: On Anti-Semitism and SocialismBy: Mario Kessler
Berlin: Trafo, 2005<br> 208 pp, 21.80 eur
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Reviewed by Sherry Gorelick
HOW HAVE MARXIST THEORISTS and activists, Socialist parties and Communist States understood Anti-Semitism? How did they confront the rise of fascism in Germany?
| Summer 2007 | Vol:XI-3 | Whole #: 43 |
On Affirmative Action
Title: When Affirmative Action Was WhiteBy: Ira Katznelson
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005
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Reviewed by Reginald Wilson
The first thing that strikes me about this book is the irony of the title: When was affirmative action not white? As Mark Nathan Cohen states in his book, Culture of Intolerence (Yale University Press, 1998), "Affluent white males themselves have always received the most affirmative action, some by law, some by custom and practice, and some by factors so subtle and so deeply ingrained in our cultural training that we generally don't consciously recognize them." He goes on to say, "Critics tend to find affirmative action repreh
| Summer 2006 | Vol:XI-1 | Whole #: 41 |
Requiem for a Nation
Title: An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a PresidentBy: Randall Robinson
New York: Basic Books, 2007, 280 pp., $26
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Reviewed by Reginald Wilson
RANDALL ROBINSON HAS WRITTEN a searing, unforgiving expose of the forcible abduction, in February, 2004, of the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the consequent deepening wretchedness of its citizens. But he does more than that.
| Summer 2008 | Vol:XII-1 | Whole #: 45 |
Returning Political Theory to Politics
Title: The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented AmericaBy: JOSEPH SCHWARTZ
N.Y.:Routledge, 2008, 225 pp., hardcover, $125, paper, $32.95
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Reviewed by Michael Hirsch
The odd disconnect between theorists of ‘difference’ and struggles for social solidarity
IT’S TRAINED ELEPHANTS linked tail to snout contending with accursed builders of The Tower of Babel. That's pretty much how defenders of discourse on class and identity caricature their opposite theoretical numbers. Not so Joseph Schwartz, who shows why such binary thinking is dangerous. Schwartz instead places economic inequality and politics back into discussions of identity and difference. It’s about time.
| Summer 2009 | Vol:XII-3 | Whole #: 47 |
Social Capital: The Science of Obfuscation
Title: Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston BarrioBy: Mario Luis Small
University of Chicago Press, 2004 226 pp. $20
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Reviewed by Stephen Steinberg
VILLA VICTORIA—a great title. As with other legendary ethnographies—Street Corner Society, Urban Villagers, Tally's Corner, All Our Kin, and Sidewalk, Villa Victoria projects images of Gemeinschaft, of that quintessential social bond that survives even in the city that notoriously eviscerates the social bond.
| Winter 2008 | Vol:XI-4 | Whole #: 44 |
The New Class Struggle
Title: Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st CenturyBy: CHRIS SPANNOS, ed.
AK Press, 2008, 416 pp., $21.95
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Reviewed by Milan Rai
REAL UTOPIA IS A WIDE-RANGING BOOK that can deliver for the open-minded reader. It relates ideas and actions that develop naturally out of commonly held values, but that can still bring surprise, the shock of revelation, the rearrangement of familiar territory, and a different framework for us to see ourselves within.
Who is the “us”? People who subscribe to the cry of the World Social Forum: “Another World Is Possible!”
| Winter 2009 | Vol:XII-2 | Whole #: 46 |
Women and American Labor
Title: Sex of Class: Women Transforming American LaborBy: ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble
Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press 2007, 327 pp. $65
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Reviewed by Amy Littlefield
WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES it will be led by women in aprons, women with their rubber-gloved hands on their hips. Or so the cover of Dorothy Sue Cobble's new anthology, The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor might suggest.
| Winter 2008 | Vol:XI-4 | Whole #: 44 |