First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2010)
Book Review from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek. Verso, 2009. Has Slavoj Žižek (the superstar Slovenian “theorist”) signed a piece-work contract with Verso Books? One can’t help wondering because this slim volume brings his tally with that publisher alone to around 21 titles. This Stakhanovite output […]
An American Marxist (1990)
Book Review from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard Daniel De Leon. By Stephen Coleman. Manchester University Press. £25. The contribution to socialist thought of Daniel De Leon has been neglected over the years. Most labour historians have mentioned him only in passing, usually in scorn and often inaccurately. Stephen Coleman’s book, in Manchester University […]
Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1964)
Book Review from the March 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard The Other America. Michael Harrington, Penguin, 3s. 6d. There is a pretty little myth that America is the land of milk and honey and the place where everyone, but everyone has his own car and lives in ease and comfort. It is difficult to escape the […]
The Life and Letters of Isaac Rab (2011)
Book Review from issue 22 of the World Socialist Review Role Modeling Socialist Behavior: The Life and Letters of Isaac Rab, by Karla Doris Rab. 504 pages. Lulu Press. $23.16. For most of the twentieth century, Isaac Rab (1893 – 1986) was well known in the Boston area as a socialist soap-box orator, lecturer, and teacher. […]
Bogdanov, Technocracy and Socialism (2007)
From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard The terms “Bolshevism” and “Leninism” are usually treated as synonyms. In view of Lenin’s enormous influence over the Bolshevik party, that might seem fair enough. But in fact Lenin did have political and intellectual rivals inside his own party. The most important of these non-Leninist Bolsheviks was Alexander Bogdanov (1873—1928). […]
Build It Now? (2007)
Book Review from Issue 21 of the World Socialist Review Build It Now: Socialism For The Twenty-First Century by Michael A. Lebowitz Marx wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by them- selves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from […]
Lenin . . . Reviewed (1976)
Book Review from the Fall 1976 issue of the Western Socialist Lenin as Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek, Merlin Press, 11 Fitzroy Square, London, W.l. The Russian State proclaims as its official ideology “dialectical materialism.” Their views, however, have nothing in common with those of the man who first used the term, Joseph Dietzgen. The basic text of Russian […]
The God That Failed (1950)
Book Review from the June-July 1950 issue of The Western Socialist The God That Failed edited by Richard Crossman [Harper & Brother] Six (presumably) wise men, tending their intellects, looked to the East, and saw a “new star in Bethlehem.” Four of these savants actually journeyed to the Soviet Bethlehem, but instead of a new […]
Council Communist
Book Review from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard ‘Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick‘, by Gary Roth. Chicago. Haymarket Books, 2015 This biography will be of special interest to many readers of the Socialist Standard. While Paul Mattick (1904–1981) never joined the World Socialist Movement (WSM), his views […]
The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (1968)
Book Review from the 1968 – number 3 issue ofThe Western Socialist The Theoretical System of Karl Marx by Louis B. Boudin, Monthly Review Press, $7.50 The reprint of this book, sans introduction and hence free of possible reader misdirection, should be warmly received by all students of Marxism not having the good fortune […]
