The hidden history of Jewish anti-Zionism and radicalism
Clare Fester reviews a new book that looks at the history of Jewish working class radicalism and struggle that Zionism has sought to hide.
Abortion access still faces barriers due to sexist system
Barbara Baird has written extensively on abortion law and politics. In this book, she examines the state of abortion provision in Australia in a history of reproductive health since 1990.
Whitlam’s three years show women can’t rely on Labor
What a state concedes, a state can take back. This book is an argument for a new women’s movement.
Truganini: the apocalypse hasn’t ended
Cassandra Pybus’s book, Truganini, highlights the damning treatment and decimation of First Nations in lutruwita—now known as Tasmania.
Lifting the lid on how ‘social security’ offers no security at all
It’s timely that Who Cares? has landed in our bookshops just as public hearings by the Robodebt Royal Commission wind up this month.
When the Wiradyuri fought colonial capitalist land theft
Stephen Gapps’ book Gudyarra is a compelling account of the opening phase of the genocidal invasion of Wiradyuri lands by British imperialism and the fierce anti-colonial insurgency waged by Wiradyuri people.
LA’s 1960s rebellion a guide to the fire next time
Contrary to the popular perception of Los Angeles as a youth paradise, with surfing and an “endless summer” of partying, LA in the 1960s was a hothouse of activism. The book Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by American Marxist Mike Davis and Jon Wiener is its history.
Funding public health the alternative to lockdowns
Chip Le Grand’s Lockdown is a fascinating look at the politics of COVID-19, focused on the experience of lockdown in Victoria.
Resisting the draft: lessons for anti-war activists
We can draw inspiration and a dose of realistic expectations from the early resisters and peace activists, writes Steven Kwon.
Lessons from the fight to save the Franklin
Franklin is a beautiful film about the seven-year campaign to save Tasmania’s World Heritage-listed Franklin River from the construction of a hydroelectric dam.
Refugees are still alive, still fighting a horror system
The NSW’s Premier’s Literary Awards 2022 Book of the Year, Still Alive: Notes from Australia’s Immigration Detention System, illustrates the horrors and depravity of Australia’s refugee detention system.
Barber authors give corporate universities a hair cut
In writing The Barber Who Read History, Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving provide an alternative radical philosophy and politics of writing history. Along the way, they provide a damning critique of the neoliberal university.
Can we teach an end to racism?
The ABC miniseries The School That Tried to End Racism documents a class of primary school students in Sydney in an experimental program designed to root out unconscious racial bias.
Australia’s refugee cruelty exposed by one man’s daring escape
Escape from Manus, by Jaivet Ealom, is an incredible story of determination, cunning and sheer luck that tears apart the Coalition’s lies about refugees. It is a book you can’t put down—sharp and clear on the politics of Australia’s refugee cruelty.
SOS: the women who helped derail war in Vietnam
Five members of Melbourne SOS were arrested during a second sit-in in 1971 at the Department of Labour and National Service. When these “mothers” spent 11 days over Easter at Fairlea women’s prison it was a public relations disaster for the government.
Pressure cooker valve: the AFL and the business of sport
All aspects of life have been disrupted by COVID-19, including entertainment—from live music, cinema and the arts to the deep-rooted popular football codes, Australian rules and rugby league.Simultaneously, the...
Alternative to the anti-China xenophobia and militarism
David Brophy’s book China Panic is a timely intervention into the growing nationalist hysteria about China.
Art: a window to a world of liberation
"Art constitutes an important part of what it means to be human and is intertwined with the struggle for human liberation." Melanie Lazarow reviews The Dialectics of Art.
Vida Goldstein: pioneer in the fight against sexism and poverty
Vida Goldstein was a leading Australian suffragette and campaigner for women’s rights in the late 19th and early 20th century who courageously challenged the prevailing sexism in society.
How the FBI murdered the ‘Black messiah’—revolutionary Fred Hampton
This new film narrates Black Panther Fred Hampton's attempts to build a multiracial working class revolutionary movement in the US, as well as how the FBI spied brutally assassinated him.
Attenborough’s ‘A life on our planet’ is no guide for climate action
Focusing on his extraordinary career documenting the natural world from 1954 to the present day, David Attenborough’s Netflix documentary A life on our planet is a plea for action...
Vere Gordon Childe: the Australian activist who explained what happened in history
Radical historian Terry Irving’s new biography of Vere Gordon Childe is an important contribution to understanding the Left in Australia. Irving uncovers Childe’s two careers, the first as a...
A window into the upsurge for Women’s Liberation
Brazen Hussies shines a light on the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s.
Blaming white workers for racism lets our rulers off the hook
White Fragility is feeding a market hungry for ideas about how to join the fight against racism since the recent Black Lives Matter protests rocked the world.
Legacy of Labor leaders Scullin and Curtin no model for today
This new book by Liam Byrne covers the making of Labor by following the careers of two men later to become Prime Minister—James Scullin and John Curtin.
Socialism and transgender liberation
Pan Karanikolas reviews a new book on transgender oppression that argues winning the working class to the fight against oppression is the key to dismantling it
A Green New Deal requires a frontal challenge to capitalism
Naomi Klein’s new book taps into a growing sentiment around the need for large-scale social transformation in response to the climate crisis.
The anti-austerity politics of Joker
Joker is a powerful indictment of austerity and its effects on those at the bottom of society.
Exposing state secrets—and the danger of the US alliance
Journalist Brian Toohey has spent decades investigating the secrets of Australia “security state”, embarrassing ASIO, Defence officials and successive governments.
A dream betrayed by racism and exclusion
The Australian Dream is a powerful documentary on racism in Australia, but it misses an opportunity to also expose the racist nature of Australian nationalism.
Glorifying the butchery of the Vietnam War
There are a lot of books written about the Battle of Long Tan that try to portray the battle as a victory for the Australian military. Now there is a film, Danger Close.
The proud union history of defying the law—needed now more than ever
“Our movement’s most important achievements were won by breaking unjust laws, because it has nearly always been illegal to take strike action”, writes ACTU Secretary Sally McManus in her...
Calling out the dead end of ‘smug’ identity politics
Jeff Sparrow’s Trigger Warnings argues that the left’s abandonment of mass organising and its commitment to identity politics has allowed the right to gain ground in the US and Australia.
Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman film is a call to arms for anti-racists
BlacKkKlansman, the new Spike Lee film, couldn’t come at a better time. It is a powerful anti-racist roar to action against the rise of the far right.
Agriculture and the first states
The emergence of agriculture and the first states were among the most dramatic changes in human history. James C. Scott has produced an accessible and thought provoking account of how the first states arose and functioned.
Capitalism and the social source of mental distress
Iain Ferguson’s new book is a useful examination of the current worldwide mental health crisis, and a detailed history of the understanding of mental distress from Freud, to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s, to the psychiatrists’ handbook the DSM-5.
After the Apology—Aboriginal communities fight back against continuing Stolen Generations
Larissa Behrendt’s film, After the Apology, explores the consequences of intergenerational trauma caused by forced removal and the fightback from Grandmothers Against Removals—women campaigning to get their kids back from the child protection system.
New sinews of working class power
American socialist Kim Moody’s important new book on the restructuring of capital in the past four decades argues that the working class, far from disappearing, has renewed potential power, writes Mark L Thomas.
Dangerous, hackneyed rubbish: don’t watch Romper Stomper
There is a lot wrong with the new adaptation of Romper Stomper, but the worst part is its fanciful and dangerous representation of anti-fascists, and Muslim and African youths.
The hidden history of the disability rights movement
Defiant Lives, a documentary by Australian filmmaker Sarah Barton, charts the history of a relatively unknown struggle against oppression: the disability rights movement.
Dissecting the moral panic over Safe Schools
Benjamin Law’s Quarterly Essay “Moral Panic 101” is a timely dissection of the 2016 backlash against the Safe Schools program, the non-compulsory set of resources that schools could use to progress toward eliminating LGBTI school bullying.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down
The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian TV with great timing. A story of women’s oppression and state violence, it presents as a powerful warning—and a call to arms—against political complacency in the Trump era.
Temporary migration in Australia under the microscope
Peter Mares’ book, published mid-last year, argues there has been a significant shift towards temporary visas away from permanent migration in Australia. He sets out to uncover the impact on temporary migrants, who can go years living in uncertainty without the rights held by other workers.
Fossil fuelled capitalism pushing Earth system into unknown
Ian Angus’ new book Facing the Anthropocene will aid anyone who wants to fight governments that put profit before planet. It will serve as an introduction for many activists to the scientific concept of the Anthropocene—a new geological era that has no analogue in the Earth’s history.
Imperialism in the Pacific: Does the US want war on china?
John Pilger’s new film exposes the ruthless US military buildup against China, but also refuses to let the Chinese government off the hook, writes Mark Gillespie
SBS documents racism in Australia that isn’t fading away
Journalist Ray Martin’s documentary, part of SBS’s “Face up to Racism” week, exposes the racism of everyday life in Australia. But it fails to target the source of racism in Australia in government and major institutions, and show how we can fight it.
Moonlight, a black gay film in hiding from itself
Ffor all the accolades and praise it has received so far, there really isn’t that much to Moonlight. One Guardian review proclaims “Moonlight portrays black gay life in its joy, sadness and complexity”. It’s hard to agree.
Murder at Myall Creek—whitewashing the real history of the massacre
Because there were two trials of the men responsible for the Myall Creek massacre, it is perhaps the most well documented atrocity in the long, genocidal war against Aboriginal people that stretched into the 20th century.
Ford exposes a sexist society, but how do we fight it?
Feminist and media personality Clementine Ford’s first book Fight Like a Girl has gained enormous attention since its publication in October.
Instrument of power: How Mitchell’s Australian shaped a ruling class agenda
It’s often said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. But when a book is by a very senior Murdoch journalist, you have to wonder whose history...
‘Poofter bashing’ was a sport, and police were in the game
A swathe of murders rocked the LGBT community in Sydney in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. So it was encouraging when SBS announced a series, Deep Water, focusing on the killings. The drama, however, is extremely disappointing.
The Boer War—Australian atrocities for empire
The hellholes on Manus Island and Nauru can trace their lineage from Australia’s participation in the world’s first concentration camps—more than 100 years ago on the South African veldt.
Lessons from women’s liberation in the US
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, originally released in 2014, has played to dozens of sold out screenings in Australia, and is now streaming on Netflix.
Only traces on show of Rivera and Kahlo’s revolutionary art
Anyone who has heard of Diego Rivera’s stunning and controversial murals, or of Frida Kahlo’s intense explorations of oppression and sexuality will want to see the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition featuring the two Mexican artists.
Exposing a racist history but conflicted on solutions for today
Stan Grant’s book is a memoir, a conflicted memoir that sometimes reads like he is talking to himself, as much as he is talking to his country.
Must see insight into the reality of offshore detention
Chasing Asylum provides a powerful and emotional look at the human impact of Australia’s cruelty to refugees.
Spotlight: powerful expose of elite’s collusion in Church abuse
The film Spotlight is a true story about the Boston Globe newspaper’s investigative reporting team and its campaign in 2001 to uncover widespread, systemic child abuse by Catholic priests in Massachusetts.
Inside the banking scam that produced a global crash
The Big Short blows the whistle on the catastrophe and madness of a system run by bankers and profiteers.
There’s no Cowspiracy—fossil fuels are the main climate threat
Al Gore has gone vegan and actor Leonardo Di Caprio has thrown his name behind a new film, Cowspiracy, which suggests that all we have to do to stop climate change is stop eating meat. Is that really all there is to it?
Foreclosed futures: the brutality of US crisis in 99 Homes
In her book A Dream Foreclosed, Laura Gottesdiener calls the foreclosures and evictions of millions of American households since the start of the financial crisis “one of the longest...
Klein film foregrounds fight for the climate, but skirts what we’re up against
This Changes Everything was screened around the world in the lead up to December’s climate summit in Paris to promote the People’s Climate March. The focus of the film is the front-line struggles around the world against fossil fuel expansion and exploitation.
Understanding the rise and fall of Syriza
Through all the twists and turns of the last six months, Kevin Ovenden has been a key source of English-language updates on the Syriza government and events taking place in Greece. Now he has produced one of the first detailed accounts of the events that made the radical left’s rise to government possible, and Syriza’s rapid capitulation to EU-imposed austerity.
Holding the Man: Life beyond homophobia
Though Holding the Man is a tragic tale, it’s also a story of hope and pride. The film is based on the play adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s 1994 memoir of the same name.
Gayby Baby: The kids are alright
The furore over schools screening Gayby Baby has made one thing clear. If it were up to the vast majority of us, we would shake off the idiocy of homophobia and move right along.
More blood won’t solve the Middle East crisis
Former Australian army officer David Kilcullen has become a widely cited establishment expert on counter-terrorism. A hired gun for western imperialism, Kilcullen likes to present himself as the thinking person’s warmonger.
Boundless Plains—but not for sharing
Ian Rintoul looks at Across the Seas, a new book on the history of Australia’s response to asylum seekers and finds a disturbing continuity with the racism of today
More than a Score—Lessons from a teacher rebellion
Lucy Honan looks at a new book on the growing rebellion against standardised testing and the cuts to public education in the US
Hell-Bent on slaughter for empire: Australia in WWI
On the eve of the outbreak of World War I, the British Cabinet was deeply divided. While PM Herbert Asquith was for war against Germany, a large proportion of the Cabinet members were opposed.
Selma a reminder of the justice still to be won
In official US history, the civil rights movement has been emptied it of its radical content.Martin Luther King now gets a national holiday and is celebrated for non-violence...
Workers and Egypt’s unfinished counter-revolution
If you want to understand the social processes and economic contradictions which led to the Egyptian revolution in 2011, read this book. It also explains why the military is back in charge and waging a counter-revolution, but never suggests this was the inevitable outcome.
Sickening piece of propaganda for US power
It was incredibly hard to watch American Sniper. The prospect of a two-hour long justification—or, more accurately, glorification—of the Iraq war was not particularly exciting.
‘The people who help asylum seekers the most are people smugglers’
Confessions of a People-Smuggler is a confronting, and revealing book. Dawood Amiri, a Hazara, tells his story of fleeing from the Taliban’s targeted killings in Quetta in Pakistan, to getting involved in people smuggling in Indonesia to fund his own trip to Australia by boat.
Backing bloodshed a long Labor tradition
Bill Shorten’s uncritical support for Tony Abbott’s renewed war in Iraq has handed the Liberals the political initiative and horrified many Labor voters. But his unquestioning approval of the rush to war has deep precedents in the ALP tradition.
Climate action requires challenging capitalism
Naomi Klein’s new book is a welcome intervention into climate politics. There is a hunger for serious responses to climate change. Over 2000 people turned up to Klein’s book launch in London.
Not a Class Act: McKew joins the education wars
Maxine McKew’s Class Act is sub-headed “Ending the Education Wars”. But it’s actually another shot in the war against teachers and poor, working class public school kids. There’s nothing...
Inspiring story shows how solidarity breaks down divisions
Pride is the brilliant and true story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, a solidarity group set up to raise money for British miners during their historic strike of 1984-1985.
Exposing the phoney ‘deaths at sea’ argument
There is a strong sense of déjà vu for refugee rights activists. Many of the battles waged against the Howard government, like opposing long-term detention and Temporary Protection Visas,...
An outsider in his own country
Charlie’s country is a beautifully shot and brutally honest portrayal of life under apartheid in the Northern Territory.
Files that give a glimpse of what ASIO was up to
Meredith Burgmann’s new book Dirty Secrets brings together chapters from left activists and other well known Australians written after accessing their own files.
Racism—just a laughing matter in Jonah from Tonga
Award-winning comedian Chris Lilley is back with six-part “mockumentary”, Jonah From Tonga, following the life of Year 9 student Jonah Takalua. But Jonah from Tonga is a racist travesty.
Witness to the torture on Nauru
Mark Isaacs spent almost a year as a Salvation Army worker on Nauru. The Undesirables is his compelling firsthand account of the horror, injustice and disaster of offshore detention.
Hitchens on trial: Islam, religion and the left
Richard Seymour’s latest book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens exposes one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of the last 30 years.
Full savagery of black slavery captured on film
Based on the life of Solomon Northup, published as a book in 1853, Twelve Years a Slave is a serious attempt to deal with the substance of slavery.
Mary and Mohammad both in the same boat
Heather Kirkpatrick's documentary, Mary Meets Mohammad, captures two worlds colliding in “Australia’s least multicultural town” of Pontville, where Tasmania’s first refugee detention centre was opened in mid-2011.
One of 20th century’s greatest crimes: Inside Indonesia’s anti-Communist purge
The Act of Killing, Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
Inside the world of the corporate vultures
Antony Loewenstein’s latest book explores the corrupt and destructive alliances between governments and multi-national corporations. Loewenstein labels this vulture capitalism, where unaccountable corporations are more powerful than states and...
Undesirable alien: Zuzenko and the early days of the Communist Party of Australia
Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the workers of Australia and the world
Kevin Windle, Australian Scholarly Press
$39.95 RRPAlexander Zuzenko arrived in Brisbane in 1911, exiled after taking part in the 1905...
Night Games: An apology for football rape
Night Games
Anna Krien
Penguin, $29.95Anna Krien has achieved something quite remarkable with her terrible new book, Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport.She set out to write a “balanced and fearless...
Latin America’s new left governments—on the road to socialism?
Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions
By Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes
Zed Books $34.95The new millennium has seen the rise of new left governments across Latin America, from the more...
An apology for American wars and racism
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Directed by Mira Nair
Coming to DVDMira Nair’s film The Reluctant Fundamentalist is particularly outrageous viewing in light of the racist backlash to the Woolwich murder. Nair’s protagonist...
Weather Underground: dead end strategy for fighting US power
The Company You Keep
Directed by Robert Redford
In cinemas nowThe political commotion of the late 1960s and early ‘70s gave rise to many radical organisations, including America’s Weathermen, whose ex-members...
Marx’s theory of alienation: A world where workers have no control
Alienation: an introduction to Marx’s theory
by Dan Swain BookmarksThis useful little book provides a very good introduction to Marx’s theory of alienation.For Marxists, the term alienation has a special...
Dead Wrong: Latham’s recipe for killing what’s left of Labor
“Not dead yet: Labor’s post-left future” Quarterly Essay 49
By Mark Latham, Black Inc $19.99Former leader of the Labor Party, Mark Latham, has made a name for himself as a...
Understanding the economic crisis: putting profit rates at the centre
The Failure of Capitalist Production
By Andrew Kliman, Pluto Press $39.95Since 2007 the world economy has faced its most serious crisis since the 1930s. Its ongoing failure to recover suggests...
World War II—people’s war or class war?
A People’s History of the Second World War
By Donny Gluckstein
Pluto Press
$35 from SolidarityDonny Gluckstein’s A People’s History of the Second World War illuminates a crucial distinction that has long...
Fighting the market in schools: lessons from US teachers
The Future of Our Schools
Lois Weiner
Haymarket Books $24The nauseating consensus between Gillard and the Liberal premiers over education policy, where they all agree that teachers are to blame for...
Debating a one state solution for Palestine
After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine
Edited by Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor
Saqi BooksIn their collection of essays After Zionism editors Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor rightly argue,...
Mythologising Lincoln’s opposition to slavery
Lincoln
Directed by Steven Spielberg
In cinemas nowSteven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a fantastically rendered account of the passage of the 13th Constitutional Amendment which outlawed slavery once and for all. It...
The myths behind Zionism’s claim to Palestine
The Invention of the Jewish People
By Shlomo Sand
Verso, $25“Zionism is the Jewish national movement of rebirth and renewal in the land of Israel—the historical birthplace of the Jewish people....
Argo: flawlessly reproducing US propaganda on Iran
Argo, Ben Affleck’s gripping, highly entertaining and commercially successful thriller, depicts a little-known episode within the infamous 444-day hostage crisis that followed the Iranian Revolution. Without ...
Chomsky’s “Occupy” reflects the good and the bad
Occupy
By Noam Chomsky
$9.95, PenguinOccupy by Noam Chomsky is the first of the Zuccotti Park Press/Occupied Media Pamphlet Series produced by the US Occupy movement. The short book is a...
Sexual liberation and the politics of pornography
Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship
By Jeff Sparrow
$29.95, ScribeThe left is tangled up in knots over the politics of pornography. Left-wing academics like Clive Hamilton are trying...
The Casual Vacancy exposes middle class prejudice
The Casual Vacancy
J.K Rowling
Little Brown and Company
$39.95 (Hardback)It may not be as “socialist” as Britain’s Daily Mail thinks, but JK Rowling’s new novel lays bare the class divide in...
Go Back shows (again) that we can challenge ideas
Go Back To Where You Came From season two was filmed in early 2012, but the timing of its showing, two weeks after federal parliament endorsed the Pacific Solution,...
The Sapphires: radical history shines strong amidst the glitz and glamour
The Sapphires
Directed by Wayne Blair
In cinemas now“Soul music is about loss. And they haven’t given up. So every note that passes through your lips should have the tone of...
1835—False hopes in fair governments won’t win Aboriginal rights
1835: The founding of Melbourne and the conquest of Australia
By James Boyce
$44.95, Black Inc1835 was the year that Tasmanian pastoralists, hungry to expand their wealth through seizure of new...
Telling the story of socialist refugees who resisted Hitler
All That I Am
By Anna Funder
Penguin, $29.95All That I Am is a dizzying (and compulsory) read for the left-wing activist. Anna Funder’s novel reaches past the common myths about...
Australian racism explored, but not explained
Dumb, Drunk and Racist
A Cordell Jigsaw Production
ABC 2, Wednesdays at 9.30pm“All they want to do is deny it on TV—‘we have no racism’—hello! Come hang out with me!” So...
Freud and Jung’s debates take centre stage
A Dangerous Method
Directed by David Cronenberg
Available on DVD soonDangerous Method is a provocative film that depicts the intellectual birth, personal dilemmas and much speculated-upon falling out of the founders...
Can’t pay, won’t pay: debating solutions to Europe’s debt
Crisis in the Eurozone
Edited by Costas Lapvitsas
Verso Books
$29.95The debt crisis in the eurozone has become the most glaring problem facing global capitalism.Across the world many states face high levels...
Clicking off everywhere? Social media and social movements
Why it’s kicking off everywhere: the new global revolutions
By Paul Mason
Verso Books
RRP $27.952011 was a phenomenal year of protest and resistance. From the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia to...
Tweetin’ about a revolution
Revolution 2.0: The power of the people is greater than the people in power
By Wael Ghonim
Fourth Estate
RRP $29.95Wael Ghonim is a Google marketing manager who became one of the...
Debating ideas to grow the left’s influence on politics
Left Turn: Political Essays for the New Left
Edited by Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow
Melbourne University Publishing
$27.99Left Turn, according to editors Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow, aims to, “argue for...
Alex Mitchell: Trotskyist with some stories to tell
Come the Revolution: A memoirBy Alex Mitchell, NewSouth Publishing $39.95Alex Mitchell’s media career spanned the British Sunday Times, work under a young Rupert Murdoch at Sydney’s Daily Mirror and...
Resisting Capitol in The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games
Directed by Gary Ross
In cinemas nowThe Hunger Games is the latest addition to a string of political Hollywood films produced over the last few years. But unlike films...
The Mad Square: Revolution and reaction in Weimar Germany
Mad Square
Modernity in German Art 1910-1937, formerly at Melbourne NGV“A dissolution of the social order was expected by the hour” said the German Minister of Finance in 1923, reflecting...
Rebuilding fighting unions: Lessons from the US
The Civil wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?
By Steve Early, Haymarket Books, $24.95The “organising model” developed by unions in...
Weekend: Honest depiction of homophobia in everyday life
Weekend
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Out now, selected releaseWEEKEND IS a beautiful and sad film about same-sex love. The most impressive and unique thing about this movie is how true to...
Thatcher’s real legacy: rule for the rich
The Iron Lady
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
In cinemas now
Margaret Thatcher was a ruling class warrior whose policies created record unemployment and misery in Britain. Thatcher’s destructive legacy is obscured in...
The need for an anatomy of the trade union bureaucracy
Review: We Built This Country
By Humphrey McQueen, Ginninderra Press, $30I found Humphrey McQueen’s second instalment of his trilogy on the building industry disappointing. And it shouldn’t be, because We...
Marxism and anarchism
Anarchist and autonomist ideas have influenced many recent movements, including Occupy. Lachlan Marshall takes a look at a new booklet that weighs up their merits.
Review: Anarchism: A Marxist Criticism,...
Dissecting Murdoch’s hold on the news
Review: Quarterly Essay 43 “Bad News”, by Robert Manne, Black Inc, $19.95Academic Robert Manne believes that Rupert Murdoch’s Australian media empire should be broken up, with the mogul’s control of...
Tony Cliff: a revolutionary thinker
Tony Cliff
A Marxist For His Time
Bookmarks, $30, available from SolidarityTONY CLIFF was born in 1917, five months before the October revolution in Russia that toppled the provisional government and...
The unknown Mozart
Mozart’s Sister
Directed by Rene Feret
In cinemas now
Mozart’s Sister is a French film that tells the overlooked story of Maria Anna Walburga Ignatius Mozart, or Nannerl, as she is referred...
Telling glimpse into Tamil Tigers’ doomed route to national liberation
Tamil Tigress
By Niromi de Soyza
Allen & Unwin, $32.99Tamil Tigress is the memoir of Niromi de Soyza, who in 1987, at the age of 17, left her middle-class family to...
Nationalist myths of Australia’s war in the Pacific
Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth
By Tom O’Lincoln, Interventions $20.00As Tom O’Lincoln’s new book points out, WWII is held up as a “good war”, when Australia fought alongside...
Nagasaki bombing: a war crime to boost US power
Nagasaki: the massacre of the innocent and unknowing, by Craig Collie, Allen and Unwin, $32.99Hiroshima Day, August 4, is an established part of the activist’s political calendar. Anti-war and...
Sexism, psychology and pseudo-science
Review: Delusions of Gender By Cordelia Fine, Allen and Unwin, $29.99In Delusions of Gender, neuro-scientist Cordelia Fine takes an axe to the drivel of biological determinism that self-help books...
Smoke bombs, sit-ins and sixties’ student radicalism at Monash
Review: All Along the Watchtower, by Michael Hyde, The Vulgar Press, $32.95.With this memoir, Michael Hyde opens us up to the world of 1960s revolutionary activists and gives a...
Exploring Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas on science and evolution
The Science and Humanism of Stephen Jay Gould
By Richard York and Brett Clark, Monthly Review Press $16.95Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most important evolutionary theorists since Charles Darwin....
A proud history of Aboriginal struggle on display
From Little Things Big Things Grow
Exhibtion developed by National Museum of Australia, touring nationally see website for details From Little Things Big Things Grow gives a useful and engaging overview...
Immigration Nation: Probing Australia’s racist roots
Mark Goudkamp takes a look at the SBS series Immigration Nation and its history of the White Australia policySBS’s Immigration Nation is an informative and timely three-part documentary that...
Percy Brookfield: MP who used parliament to agitate and organise
The Best Hated Man in Australia: The Life and Death of Percy Brookfield 1875-1921
By Paul Robert Adams, Puncher and Wattmann, $34In a country where heroism is commonly deemed present...
Asking why Labor stands for nothing
Review article: Power Crisis, by Rodney Cavalier, Cambridge University Press, $34.99 and
All That’s Left: What Labor Should Stand For, Edited by Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane UNSW Press, $29.95Labor’s...
Competition, sexism and rich kids rule in Facebook film
Review: The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher, in cinemas nowThe Social Network traces the origin of the online social networking website Facebook from its genesis amongst Harvard University’s elite...
The Pacific Solution: never again!
Review: The Pacific Solution
By Susan Metcalfe, Australian Scholarly Publishing, $24.95The recent decision by the High Court in favour of two Tamil asylum seekers (see article here) has again focused...
Understanding redneck America
Rainbow Pie: a redneck memoir
By Joe Bageant
Scribe, $35All too often the word “redneck” brings up connotations of slack-jawed yokels, wilfully uneducated in everything other than in how to aim...
Exposing raunch culture and the new sexism
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism
By Natasha Walter
Virago, $35Living Dolls is a compelling must-read for all those interested in understanding sexism today. Through interviews and research, author Natasha Walter...
Equal love, equal rights: rediscovering the red in the rainbow
Amy Thomas reviews Hannah Dee’s The Red in the Rainbow, an essential look at why fighting homophobia means fighting the systemSince the federal election Julia Gillard has continued to...
Dispelling the modern ‘Malthus myth’
Review: Peoplequake by Fred Pearce
Random House, $32.95The resurgence in overpopulation fears—the idea that excessive population is the cause of ecological destruction and that we must cut population levels to...
Working class heroes were made in Dagenham
Review: Made in Dagenham, directed by Nigel Cole
In cinemas October 28It's 1968 and 187 female machinists at the huge Ford Dagenham car plant in east London vote for a...
Spying eyes: ASIO and the Communist Party
Writing a four-generation history of a family intimately linked with the history of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) is not an easy task, especially if you are a...
James Hardie: The Killer Company exposed
Review: Killer Company
By Matt Peacock, ABC Books, $35.00In 1898 Britian’s Chief Inspector of Factories reported to Parliament about the “evil effects of asbestos dust”. The first deaths from asbestos...
Goodbye to all that?
Review: Goodbye to all that: The failure of neoliberalism and the urgency of change
Edited by David McKnight and Robert Manne, Black Inc, $32.95You can ask the right question at the...
Anzac—a new front in the history wars
Review: What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History
Edited byMarilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, University of New South Wales Press, $29.95As our stomachs recover from the gut wrenching...
Refugee policy is the real crime
Review: Border Crimes
By Michael Grewcock, The Federation Press, $49.95With the defeat of the Howard Government in 2007 many assumed the dark days of the mandatory detention of asylum seekers...
Glorifying life as a US solider in occupied Iraq
Review: The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, In cinemas nowThe Hurt Locker is a violent, politically shallow and confusing film. The film makers claim to be apolitical but in...
Defending Stalin does socialism no favours
Review: The Idea of Communism
By Tariq Ali, University of Chicago Press, $22.95More like a long pamphlet than a book, The Idea of Communism, the first of a series edited by...
Challenging portrayal of life at the bottom
Precious
Directed by Lee Daniels, In cinemas nowWatching Precious is a harrowing experience. Director Lee Daniels milks every dramatic movement of Sapphire’s novel Push in bringing Clarieece “Precious” Jones to...
Invaluable guide to climate science, but not solutions
Review: Storms of my grandchildren
By James Hansen, Bloomsbury, $35Last year James Hansen, one of the world’s best-known climate scientists, was arrested during a protest against the coal industry in...
Pearson’s Radical Hope: Assimilation
Conservative Indigenous leader Noel Pearson uses his new essay Radical Hope to argue for a neo-liberal agenda in Aboriginal education, argues Ernest PriceNoel Pearson, the Howard government’s go-to conservative...
Hollywood fights imperialism in 3D
Review: Avatar
Directed by James Cameron, in cinemas nowAVATAR MIGHT not be the subtlest movie around but its central message is reaching millions: if ordinary people unite, we can win...
Bases of the US Empire
Review: The bases of Empire
Edited by Catherine Lutz, Pluto Press $58An empire cannot function without bases. Just as Britain created bases all the way to India—Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Aden,...
Guidebook for understanding the system
Unravelling Capitalism
By Joseph Choonara, Bookmarks, $20Joseph Choonara’s new book, Unravelling Capitalism is a short but comprehensive guide to Marxist economic theory and its continued relevance to understanding the dynamics...
When Hurricane Katrina brought the war home
Review: Zeitoun
By Dave Eggers, Penguin $32.95Zeitoun is the true story of one man, his family and the tragedy which besets them in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Many are familiar...
Academic gloss for the new assimilation
Review: The Politics of Suffering
By Peter Sutton, Melbourne University Press, $34.95Peter Sutton has a substantial pedigree in anthropology. He is the author of 40 academic papers, has lived at...
Moore’s condemnation of capitalism falls flat
Review: Capitalism: A love story
Directed by Michael Moore, In cinemas nowRevolutionaries steeped in Marxist theory and the history of class struggle play an important part in fomenting revolution. But...
The Brisbane Bolshevik and the Russian Revolution
Review: The People’s Train
By Tom Keneally, Vintage Books, $32.95TOM KENEALLY’S The People’s Train is an exhilarating story of early 20th century radicalism, friendship and love that traverses three continents,...
Film points finger at Australian complicity over deaths in Balibo
Balibo
Directed by Robert Connolly, In cinemas nowBalibo, the film about six Australian-based journalists murdered by Indonesian troops as they invaded East Timor in October 1975, has been canned by...
Bosses build their profits on toll of workers’ lives
Review: Framework of Flesh
By Humphrey McQueen, Ginninderra Press, $30Noted Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen’s book on the builders’ labourers battle for health and safety, Framework of Flesh, was recommended to...
A frock-coated communist: rediscovering Friedrich Engels
Review: The frock-coated communist By Tristram Hunt
Allen Lane $59.95As establishment economists struggle to explain capitalism’s crisis, the ideas of Karl Marx are enjoying a renewed legitimacy.
The sight of French...
Guide for climate campaigners reflects movement’s weak points
Review:Climate action By Mark Diesendorf
UNSW Press, $34.95Mark Diesendorf will be well know to many climate activists from his regular speeches for local activist groups and his long-time advocacy for...
Confronting the myths used to justify dispossession
Review: Possession
By Bain Atwood, Melbourne University Press, $54.99The introduction to Possession argues, “the principle challenge to the Australian nation’s sense of itself as morally good has lain in the...
Bruno: A homophobic and tedious failure of a film
Review: Bruno
Directed by Larry Charles, in cinemas nowDressed up as irony, this caricature of “gayness” is a boost for the bigots.
Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comic persona, is an...
The bloody history Stalin tried to hide
Review: Katyn,
Directed by Andrzej WadjaThe revolutionary Victor Serge called the period of Hitler and Stalin “midnight of the century”. Hope for a better future, for peace and democracy...
The Red Army Faction—flawed product of 1960s radicalism
Review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex Directed by Uli Edel
In selected cinemas nowWhen the state uses violence to repress dissent, is it permissible to use violence in reply? When a mass...
Cannes winner an indictment of Australian racism
Review: Samson and Delilah, Directed by Warwick Thornton
In selected cinemas nowSAMSON AND Delilah, written, directed and shot by Aboriginal film maker Warwick Thornton, tells the story of two young...
Illzilla’s political hip hop a flower in the wasteland
Review: Wasteland
Illzilla, Out now through Shock
From its inception in the late 1970s, hip hop has had strong roots in the politics of rebellion. Hip hop acts from Public Enemy...
Excusing responsibility for the Holocaust?
Review: The Reader
Directed by Stephen Daldry, In cinemas now
The Reader is a story of illicit love, of betrayal and guilt, and of redemption. Kate Winslet won the Oscar for...
Raw challenge to the realities of racism
Review: The Combination
Directed by David Field, In cinemas nowTHE COMBINATION is the story of a contemporary Lebanese family in urban Australia. Shot on location mainly in Guildford, western Sydney,...
Former insider exposes carbon lobby deception
Review: Quarterly Essay “Quarry Vision: coal, climate change and the end of the resource boom”
By Guy Pearse, Black Inc, $16.95
AS DEBATE hots up over the Rudd government’s CPRS, the...
Milk
I was born in 1970 in small town New Zealand. I grew up in the 80s in country NSW. I was in a closet inside a closet. I came out...
Labor goes missing in The Howard Years
We survived the Howard years, and now you want us to watch it on Monday night prime time! That’s the sentiment of lots of people who are not tuning...
1949 coal strike: How Chifley lost Labor’s supporters
For decades, only the Left has talked about the 1949 coal miners’ strike, using it as an example of how low a Labor government can stoop—to the point of using soldiers to scab. So it should have been welcome news that the ABC had put resources into an hour-long dramatisation, Infamous Victory: Ben Chifley’s Battle For Coal. Unfortunately, the ABC has given us little to cheer about.
Solutions to global warming but no way to get there
Review: “Now or never”, Quarterly Essay 31
By Tim Flannery
Black Inc, $15.95
WHILE THE great financial melt-down has dominated the headlines for the past month, there is no good news...
How ordinary people paid for the boom
Review: The Land of Plenty
By Mark Davis
Melbourne University Publishing, $36.95
NOW THAT the Australian economy is slowing, ordinary Australians will be expected to take a hit in their living...
The politics of Rudd’s ‘family values’
Review: The Henson Case
By David Marr
Text Publishing, $24.95
WHEN, IN May this year, the right-wing forces of Miranda Devine and 2GB radio came together to declare offence taken to...
Jonathan Neale’s Stop Global Warming: Change The World
Review
Bookmarks, 2008, $30.00 from SolidarityAs one of the most sun-drenched continents on the planet, Australia should be a leading solar industry supplier. Instead we are the world's largest exporter...
Before abortion rights were won
Review: The Racket
By Gideon Haigh, Melbourne University Publishing, $34.95WHILE NEW legislation to decriminalise abortion is debated in the Victorian parliament, influential priests and some politicians continue their crusade to...
A graphic and haunting soldier’s tale
Review: Waltz With Bashir
Directed by Ari Folman, Limited cinema release
ARI FOLMAN was only 19 when he was conscripted as part of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which installed...
A fresh look at America’s urban decay
Review: The WireWHEN US presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked his favourite TV show and character, his answers were The Wire and Omar Little (more on him later).Don’t be...
Australian atrocities at war
Review: Australians At War: A Pictorial History
By A. K. MacDougall, The Five Mile Press, RRP $39.95, 2008 editionTony MacDougall's revised edition of his book, Australians at War, is worth...
Greer’s rage no answer to the NT intervention
Review: On Rage
By Germaine Greer, Melbourne University Press, $19.95
RIGHT-WING SUPPORTERS of the NT intervention will find comfort in the pages of Germaine Greer’s recent short essay On Rage,...
Persepolis: Iran through a rebel’s eyes
Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, Now showingWITH US-LED military threats against Iran showing no signs of abating, the release of Persepolis on the big screen couldn’t have...
Inside Kevin 07: Danger signs right from the start
By Christine Jackman, Melbourne University Press, $34.95THE BEST thing about this book is that we know how the story ends—Howard loses. However, a big question mark hangs over what...
The Dark Knight: Fighting terror with terror
Directed by Chris NolanTHE DARK KNIGHT, sequel to Batman Begins, is the latest recreation of the 70 year old modern myth that is The Batman. These two movies by...
A history that’s on our side
Review: A People's History of the World
By Chris Harman, Palgrave Macmillan $39.95READING CHRIS Harman's epic A People's History of the World, republished by Verso, was a delight.
At 620 pages,...
Greenpeace Energy [r]evolution report
AUSTRALIA’S ENERGY evolution is a useful tool for the climate movement. Greenpeace researchers have drawn together the best science and technology to build a concrete and achievable vision of...
The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
By Chloe Hooper, Hamish Hamilton, $32.95CHLOE HOOPER, a novelist whose first book won international praise, recently released The Tall Man, a book on the Palm Island inquest into the...
Inside the Al Sadr movement
Review: Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn, Allen and Unwin $29.95BY A strange coincidence the place where the first US soldier was killed by a roadside...
Military mayhem
Review: A Military History of Australia
Jeffrey Grey, Cambridge University Press, RRP $39.95
With the “War on Terror” the watchword of the Howard era, there have been a plethora of books...
Salute – “I’m not talking about the 200 metres, I’m talking about the human race.”
Who is Australia’s fastest sprinter ever? At which Olympic Games did he win the silver medal? Why is he a hero for many US track athletes? Don’t know, don’t...
Last Drinks: Toohey’s racist diatribe
THE WIDESPREAD acclaim for The Australian journalist Paul Toohey’s Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention (Quarterly Essay 30, June 2008), demonstrates just how deeply racist attitudes...
Let them in, but never mind the neo-liberalism
Review of Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
Jason L. Riley, Penguin USA
ON May 1, there were mass protests in cities across the United States for the...
Deported to danger
Review of A Well Founded Fear
Directed by Bentley Dean and Anne Delaney
Screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival, A Well Founded Fear investigates the fate of a number...
Shopping, sex and the city
Review of Sex and the City, directed by Michael Patrick King
Coming to DVD
SEX AND the City (SATC), the film based on the television series of the same name, has...
Superhero fights for the US war machine
Iron ManDirected by Jon FavreauIn cinemas nowAndrea: "Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero."Galileo: "No, Andrea: unhappy is the land that needs a hero."-Life of Galileo by Bertolt...
Entertaining series fails to probe crime’s roots
UnderbellyProduced by Greg Haddrick and Brenda PamOut now on DVDUNDERBELLY, THE TV series that dramatised the long-running drug wars in Melbourne, has been a huge hit for Channel Nine.Despite...
Missed chance to map out agenda for change
Dear Mr RuddEdited by Robert ManneBlack Inc, $29.95With Howard finally gone, the time would seem right for a book that lays out how the new government can go about...
Hollywood’s faith shaking tale of war
In the Valley of ElahWritten and directed by Paul HaggisIn cinemas nowSpeaking of the reality of military service, Iraq War veteran Matt Howard last year said: "You will never...
‘The torture word’
IN LATE February Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.The film is about the torture and murder of Dilawar, a young...
Fear and fantasy in the ‘war on terror’
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 AmericaSusan FaludiScribe Publications, $35COULD SEPTEMBER 11 really be blamed on the women's movement? Why did the US respond to the...
Artists tackle anti-Muslim racism
Fear of a Brown PlanetAamer Rahman and Nazeem HussainTHIS BRILLIANT stand-up comedy show was part of both the Melbourne Comedy Festival and the Sydney Cracker Comedy Festival.In an extremely...
1968–the year the world revolted
Of all the articles, features, memoirs and books devoted to 1968, "The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After", by Chris Harman, the editor of International Socialism journal, is still,...
Oil–an American obsession
ONE HUNDRED years ago the United States was the biggest oil producer in the world. California alone accounted for 22 per cent of global output.The development of the US...