Below we publish two book reviews, This is not a drill: an Extinction Rebellion handbook by Extinction Rebellion and Fully Automated Luxury Communism: a manifesto by Aaron Bastani. The reviews expose the reactionary petit-bourgeois perspective of both the publications and the opportunists that produced them.
The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
Jonathan Tepper with Denise Hearn
John Wiley & Sons (4 Dec. 2018), £14.99 (hardcover)
Tepper and Hearn have a thesis. Capitalism is defined by competition. The modern US economy, however, is dominated by monopolies. Therefore, US Americans live under ‘fake’ capitalism, a ‘grotesque deformed version of capitalism’ which is ‘as far away from the real thing as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean are from real pirates’ (p.xv). Tepper and Hearn have clearly identified one of the central issues in understanding modern capitalism: monopoly. In doing so, they have collected a wealth of useful material. Socialists should read this book, which is written in a very readable and enjoyable style, and use the information in it, but reject the reactionary politics that underlie it.
Markievicz – a most outrageous rebel – Lindie Naughton, Merrion Press 2016 and 2018
‘While Ireland is not free, I remain rebel, unconverted and unconvertible... I am pledged to the one thing – a free and independent Ireland... a state run by the Irish people for the people. That means a government that looks after the rights of the people before the rights of property ... My idea is the Workers’ Republic for which Connolly died’ – speech to the Dail [Irish Parliament], 3 January 1922.
The New Enclosure: the appropriation of public land in neoliberal Britain
Brett Christophers, Verso 2018, hbk 362pp, £20
Since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, almost 10% of the entire land mass of Britain has been transferred from public to private ownership. It has been the biggest privatisation in British history, swallowing up hospitals, airbases, forests, playing fields, leisure centres and town halls, as well as entire council housing estates.
In remembrance of Eva Tichauer, who died in December 2018, we publish below a letter from Colette Levy and republish a review from FRFI no. 158, December 2000/January 2001 of Eva's book, I was no. 20832 at Auschwitz.
Dr Eva Tichauer died on 15 December 2018. She would have been 101 on 26 January 2019. There was no funeral; she had donated her body for research.
Eva was born in Berlin but came to France with her parents and brother in 1933. She is for us, my twin sister and I, an unforgettable person. She marked our lives forever. We were inspired by her strength, her tragic past and her humanity.
She spent over three years in concentration camps, where she became a communist. Her book, written originally in French, I was number 20832 at Auschwitz bears witness to this time. In 2000 I worked with [FRFI writer and editor] Nicki Jameson to translate the text into English.
My sister and I had a great affinity with Eva as we had also known Nazism against us, with the deportation and murder of our father, who was deported to Auschwitz in November 1942. He must have known Eva in Drancy, a transit camp near Paris. We, the children, had been hidden in a village, which was nearly burned out in August 1944 in the same way that Oradour-sur-Glane had been razed two months earlier.
Eva will always be among us. She belongs to our lives. I had spent entire days with her, on several memorable holidays. We feel deeply the loss of her voice and her sound opinions.
Colette Levy
Activist against fascism
I was No. 20832 at Auschwitz
Eva Tichauer
Published by: Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2000 (1988), ISBN 08-53033-96-X
‘With their hooked canes, the SS on the left catch their victims by the neck…three-quarters of our workforce has disappeared…we see the trucks arrive, I count 17 of them…our comrades who we can hear screaming, know as well as we do that they are going to be gassed. They howl in the face of death. Have you ever heard human beings howling in the face of death?’ (Eva Tichauer)
Born in Berlin at the end of the second world war to Jewish socialists, Eva Tichauer emigrated to Paris in 1933 to escape the rise of Hitler and the German Nazis. In summer 1942, Eva and her mother were rounded up, detained for two months at Drancy and then herded into cattle wagons for a hard journey east to Birkenau, one of the Auschwitz concentration camps.
Split up from her mother, who was sent straight to the gas chamber, Eva recounts the horrors she endured for nearly three years until liberation by the Red Army. Several points are clear from Eva’s story. Firstly, the relentless brutality of the concentration camp system was designed to reduce human beings to beasts. As workers they were treated worse than slaves. Secondly, the German population, at least in some regions, was aware of what was happening in the concentration camps and that their inaction was tantamount to complicity.
Thirdly, the solidarity between the women in the camps was vital to their survival and enabled some communication with comrades outside, including the French resistance movement. Eva was politicised during her experience and became a member of the underground Communist Party of Raisko camp in 1944.
‘Today I still believe that if it had not been for Hitler, exile, war and deportation, I would have retained the idealistic position of German social democracy, just like my parents…I left behind for ever the salons where the world is changed with words; I placed myself on the side of the oppressed, the exploited.’
Eva is now a member of the Federation Nationale des Deportes Internes, Resistants et Patriots, fighting for peace, disarmament and the development of the third world. In a letter to FRFI, No. 121, October/November 1994, she wrote: ‘After liberation of the camps, we pledged “Never Again” and promised to fight together for a world of justice, of peace and of solidarity between peoples, for liberty and rights for all mankind. Half a century later we need to take up that torch again, if we are to maintain hope.’
FRFI no. 158, December 2000/January 2001
Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Venezuela by Alison Bodine (Fire This Time)
178pp Battle of Ideas Press, 2018
US/CAN $10 or Europe €6.5
On 23 January 2019, a little-known Venezuelan MP, Juan Guaido, appointed himself as interim president of the country, in an attempt to replace the legitimate president Nicolas Maduro. Minutes later, the US government published a statement in support of Guaido. Soon after, a group of Latin American and European countries followed suit. The mainstream media corporations hailed him as a saviour for Venezuela. Britain, Germany, France and Spain declared that unless Venezuela held elections in eight days, they would recognise Guaido as president. What they all purposefully ignored, however, is that free and fair elections had taken place on 20 May 2018. Maduro won the most votes, and Juan Guaido’s party chose not to run. With this confusing sequence of events, it is necessary for us to understand Venezuela’s context, as reactionaries are hurriedly calling for a foreign 'humanitarian intervention', whatever that may be.
Review: Propaganda Blitz: How the corporate media distort reality by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Media Lens) 312pp Pluto Press 2018 £14.99
‘A generation ago, Venezuela’s capital was one of Latin America’s most thriving, glamorous cities; an oil-fuelled, tree-lined cauldron of culture that guidebooks hailed as a Mecca for foodies, night owls and art fans.’ Such was the opinion of Tom Phillips, The Guardian’s current Latin America correspondent on 18 December 2018. A generation is usually reckoned as 30 years. Just under 30 years ago, Caracas’s ‘foodies, night owls and art fans’, almost by definition privileged and wealthy, may have been further entertained by the violent suppression of the Caracazo in February 1989, when up to 2,000 people were massacred in Caracas as they protested against a devastating onslaught on their living conditions. The same political and social forces which lay behind the slaughter were behind the attempted coup against President Chavez in 2002, and, with the open support of US imperialism, are organising to overthrow President Maduro through a campaign of economic sabotage and political destabilisation. Gangs have targeted schools and hospitals, symbols of the achievement of the Bolivarian Revolution. But Phillips is not interested in this: he continually whitewashes the right-wing opposition as democrats, and uses them uncritically as sources. His articles on both Venezuela and Nicaragua are full of virulently reactionary nonsense, but because they appear in TheGuardian, they acquire an apparent intellectual cachet.
Economics for the Many
Edited John McDonnell
Verso 2018 229pp £12.99
Many books have already been published on Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour Party leadership. Several of them have addressed what has been labelled Corbynomics, a set of economic ideas which, it is claimed, would rebalance the British economy to meet the needs of the many, rather than the few, to use an oft-repeated Corbynist mantra. Economics for the Many pulls together the opinions of 16 contributors, including no fewer than six professors, as well as sundry lecturers and research fellows and directors. Its significance is that it is edited by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and that must give the ideas set out in the book some official status as far as the Labour leadership is concerned.
Vamos Cuba! Peacock Theatre, Portugal Street, Holborn, WC2A 2HT, London
24 October - 11 November 2017 Tickets from £15
Go and see Vamos Cuba! The dancing is enthralling, fluid, mind-blowing; the spectacle amazing, and the whole evening unmissable!
Choreographer Nilda Guerra has set the piece in Havana Airport, where a flight to Miami is delayed (we speculated that this is due to Trump reversing Obama’s relaxations on travel between the US and Cuba) and all sorts of dramas are played out between the delayed passengers and airport staff. We watch the soured relationship between the captain and a stewardess and the incipient love affair between the airport janitor and a stranded passenger, plus lots of other leit motif pieces (such as the vicar who is a pickpocket) – in fact everywhere you look there is a story and you could probably watch this performance every night and find something different you’d not noticed before.
Shy Radicals is a ‘what if?’ book. What if everyone who suffers from anxiety, depression or agoraphobia, all those with diagnoses of autism or Aspergers’ syndrome, and everyone who is simply shy or socially awkward and has ever suffered for it, banded together and employed methods of political struggle to turn themselves into a liberation movement?
Contact Theatre, Manchester, 27 September 2017
In these times of capitalist commercialism, theatre is rarely accessible to working class and oppressed people. Even performances of plays written by socialists like Brecht or Oscar Wilde are co-opted by the market, pricing the poorest out of the action and forcing independent writers and performers to eke out a living in unfunded community locations. But every now and then the sugar-coated stylings of the West End are challenged in creative terms by realist visions exposing the horrors of the system. Being Sebastian, a solo play written and performed by the talented Mancunian Sean Cernow, is a display of the bitingly grim reality at the heart of the British prison regime.
Throughout Scandinavia, in France, the USA, Switzerland and in many other leading Capitalist nations, a vicious policy of 'eugenesia' has been promoted over the last 50 years. Its stated aim – nurturing the strong and cleansing the weak ('racial improvement') – is to ensure the health necessary to capitalistically exploitable labour whilst ridding society of its 'useless', 'burdensome' population. Deliberate inhumanity. With the development of 'genetic engineering' and with science held under lock and key by profiteering industry, the abuses perpetrated by capitalism on women, the poor and the sick can only become more insidious.
Racial 'purification' and 'cleansing' has always been a tool of the most reactionary and vicious regimes, but as the revelations in August 1997 of the forced sterilisation of at least 73,000 thousand women throughout Scandinavia (60,000 in Sweden, 11,000 in Denmark, over 1,000 in Finland and over 1,000 in Norway) from 1935 to 1976 show, such ideas are endemic in modern 'democratic', bourgeois societies.
Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932
Royal Academy of Arts, 11 February – 17 April, £16
(Gallery guide £2.50)
Designated ‘a thrilling, chilling show’ by the Financial Times, the gallery guide to Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 correctly notes:
‘The freedom and euphoria of the Revolution produced some of the most remarkable talents in art, theatre, music literature and architecture.’
The next sentence, however, is a clue to the politics of the exhibition:
Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt
Sarah Jaffe, Nation Books, New York, 2016, 352pp, ISBN 978-1-5685-8536-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-5685-8537-6 (ebook)
Sarah Jaffe’s Necessary Trouble provides the fullest account yet of the social movements that have arisen in the US since the financial crash of 2008. The author travelled widely across the states to speak to a huge variety of people in revolt, including members of Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, OUR Walmart (Organisation United for Respect at Walmart), Fight for $15 (minimum wage) and the victims of environmental degradation, toxic energy corporations and extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy. She even spoke to members of the Tea Party.
‘The first duty of a captured revolutionary is to escape; barring that, the second is to transform the prisons from instruments of repression into schools of liberation and revolution.’ (p205)
Lumpen is the autobiography of former US prisoner Ed Mead, who served 18 years for his part in a 1976 bank robbery committed by the George Jackson Brigade (GJB). GJB was an armed propaganda unit named after political prisoner George Jackson who was murdered by guards in San Quentin prison in 1971, which was active in Seattle in the mid-1970s.
The book takes us through Ed’s life in extensive detail, with the first 100 pages dedicated to his growing up in California, Washington State, Alaska and elsewhere in the US, as his poor white family moved to find work. His life was harsh and gritty but it was not this which politicised him as, despite some sympathy for the even poorer indigenous Alaskans, his horizons were limited to survival and the pursuit of accessible pleasures.
• Out of the Box by Leroy Smith, published 2016, ISBN 978-09955520-0-5
Short of assassinating the monarch, shooting a police officer is about the most risky crime to commit. Do so and every single law enforcement agent will be on your case. And the pursuit of such suspects will extend far beyond these shores. In 1993, Leroy Smith found out just how true this is. He shot and wounded two police officers in Brixton, south London and fled to the USA. Two years on he was arrested by a Swat Team in Connecticut and after a spell in Bridport Correctional Centre, a high security state jail, he was returned to England and sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.
Smith spent the whole of his prison sentence on Category A in the high security prison estate. Now free, he has written Out of the Box, a brutally honest story of the making of a criminal, in which he pulls no punches, nor makes excuses. He says that he is putting his story out in the hope that other underprivileged young black men will not follow the path he did.
Like many serving time in an unjust system, where black, ethnic minority and poor prisoners are massively over represented and where racism regularly displays its ugly face, Smith became politicised in prison. He educated himself by conversing with political prisoners, supplemented by ‘ten years of watching Newsnight every night, and lots of other news stations…as well as reading non-mainstream newspapers like Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!’
Ken Loach’s new film, I, Daniel Blake, paints an intimate picture of the brutality of Britain’s sanction-driven benefits system. The plot hinges upon the human consequences of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) ‘fit for work’ judgements, and Jobseeker’s sanctions. By focusing upon a small cast of characters, Loach succeeds in portraying the sheer barbarity of poverty in Britain. I, Daniel Blake is a powerful argument for human dignity; depicting Newcastle’s jobcentres, food banks and run-down industrial estates as theatres of cruelty.
Between January and June 2016, a total of 165,013 Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimants were referred for a sanction. 81,195 (49.2%) of these referrals resulted in sanctions. Over the same period 7,034 ESA claimants were sanctioned and deprived of their income. An October 2016 study published by Oxford University – ‘The impact of benefit sanctioning on food insecurity’ – clearly demonstrates the relationship between benefit sanctions and the use of food banks. It demonstrates that after the application of one million benefit sanctions in 2013, reliance upon food banks tripled. Trussell Trust statistics reveal that 21% of all referrals to their food banks are due to benefit sanctions.
• Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, directed by Stanley Nelson, 2015, 1 hour 55 minutes
The Black Panther Party for Self Defence has been interpreted in vastly different ways – from a racist hate group, as it is typically portrayed in the liberal media, to an indispensable blueprint for revolutionary organisation in an imperialist country. The Panthers were formed in Oakland, California, in 1966, to defend the African American community from constant attacks by the US state. They recognised that US imperialism was at the core of the destruction of their community. They saw the need for anti-imperialism and revolutionary socialism in order to fight for real change. The party was highly organised, armed for self-defence against the police and dedicated to class struggle. Working class unity is dangerous for the ruling class and the Panthers’ demonstration that they could provide for the poor, in a way that capitalism could not, meant they had to be destroyed. In 1968 they were described by FBI director J Edgar Hoover as ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’. In the end, after an orchestrated campaign of state aggression, the organisation was destroyed.
In November, at the Bussey Building in Peckham, south-east London, the play United We Stand by Neil Gore was produced, directed by Louise Townsend. The cast of writer Neil Gore and William Fox take on multiple roles, but primarily they portray the Shrewsbury pickets Ricky Tomlinson and Des Warren during the 1972 builders strike. It is performed on a set of scaffolding bars which is adorned by strike posters. A projector shows footage of Tory prime minister Edward Heath, the 1972 Miners' strike, and working class resistance against the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. Heath's term in office was a fiasco for the capitalist class; a seven-week Miners' strike in January-February 1972 was a victory for the NUM, and in July 1972 the Pentonville 5 were imprisoned for defying the Industrial Relations Act which was followed by a near-general strike.
In the early 1970s building workers faced dangerous working conditions, and poor wages. Warren says 'life and limb are cheap on the building sites'. Between 1970-73 there were 242,000 registered industrial injuries but the highest fine paid by an employer was £300 for two deaths. In 1972 'casualisation' was rife in the building industry, where it was known as 'the Lump.' The Lump Labour Scheme institutionalised casual cash-paid daily labour without any employment rights. Building workers were a dispersed force, little unified because of the diverse and transitory nature of their trades, unionisation was weak, and thus they were a section of the working class generally ignored by the labour aristocracy who controlled the trade union movement.
• Life in Strangeways: from riot to redemption, my 32 years behind bars,
Alan Lord with Anita Armstrong, £7.99, John Blake Publishing, 2015
In 1981, aged 20, Alan Lord was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, following a bungled robbery. Following his release in 2013, Alan has written this autobiography, chronicling his life before prison, years of incarceration, participation in the 1990 uprising at Strangeways prison in Manchester, and eventual path to freedom.
This book is an easy read but not easy reading, graphically detailing beating after beating by violent, racist prison staff: ‘I sometimes regretted my actions in fighting the regime, but I was stubborn to a fault. I could have kept my head down like most inmates do, but it’s just not me. I wanted to make it clear from the start that they could have it the easy way, by treating me with respect as a human being, or the hard way. I always had it in my head that one day I’d beat the system and come out the better man.’ (p37)
Throughout his sentence Alan maintained a strict regime of physical training and Spartan living; on arrival at every new prison – and there were many moves – he would throw out the furniture, bleach the floor and lay a sheet on the floor. In this way he slept every night of his sentence on the ground.
Revolution- Russell Brand, Random House 2014, 372pp, £20
Russell Brand rocketed to public attention far beyond his usual fan base after a BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman during which he called for ‘no vote’ at elections. Brand’s personal life and his politics came under immediate and hostile attention from media commenters. There was outrage that an argument for a ‘no vote’ position should be presented on a major BBC platform. However, as Brand himself says in Revolution, he is neither leading nor following: ‘I think it unlikely that people aren’t voting because I told them not to; it is more likely that they’re not voting because they are subject to the same conditions that led me not to vote. The realisation that it’s bloody hopeless’ (p78).
For successive general elections Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! has adopted the slogan Don’t Vote! Organise!, sharing Brand’s view that none of the parties standing for election represent what is needed for the poorest people, the vast majority of the world. Moreover, the election machine itself feeds into a discredited pretence of democracy which sidelines and kills off real political engagement. At the last British General Election in 2010, the turnout of registered electors (which excludes prisoners and homeless people) was 65.09%. The turnout in the May 2014 European elections was 35.05% of those eligible. These figures signify a deep and widespread contempt for career politicians and distrust of their electoral promises and institutions. Growing anger about rapidly increasing poverty, privatisation of the public sector and cuts in public spending is deepened by the charade of parliamentary politics. As Brand says, exploitation has now ‘reached a pitch where the disenfranchised and exploited can look to a culpable minority with vengeful eyes’ (p79).
‘No oppressed people ever won their freedom, by hoping their oppressors would change their minds’ Assata Shakur
This book promises an ‘intensely personal and political autobiography’ and ‘a major contribution to the history of black liberation’, and it more than delivers on its promise. This account of the life of Assata Shakur, in her own words, gives us a completely different view of this brave, strong and proud woman so often simply described as the ‘most wanted’ US terrorist.
Black communist Angela Davis has written a brief foreword to this new edition of Assata Shakur’s autobiography along with Shakur’s lawyer Lennox Hinds. The book is enriched by both for different reasons. Angela Davis offers a straightforward account of some of the activities in the 1970s surrounding Assata Shakur. Along with her views on institutional racism this places the book firmly in a political context. A detailed account of one of her own experiences of police racism, abuse of police powers and police intimidation sets the tone, immediately making it clear that this book is not just another story, but one of definite political importance.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 238 April/May 2014
Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939
Hakim Adi, Africa World Press, Trenton, 2013, 444pp, £28.99.
At 5am on 3 October 1935 Mussolini’s fascist army marched across the Mareb River into Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), opening a war that would see Africa’s oldest independent country turned into an Italian colony. The invasion sparked mass protests across the globe, in many places led by the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), a member organisation of the Communist International (Comintern) which for several years had fought to organise and unify ‘the wide mass of Negro workers on the basis of the class struggle’. In this book, the fruit of a decade of research, historian Hakim Adi provides a detailed exploration of the origins, politics and role played by the ITUCNW and Comintern in the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles of black people throughout the early 20th century.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 238 April/May 2014
Look Back in Anger – the miners’ strike in Nottinghamshire, 30 years on
Harry Paterson, Five Leaves Press 2014, 288 pages, £9.99
Harry Paterson’s book is written with class consciousness and engagement. It has a political shrewdness which distinguishes it from some of the more sentimentalised accounts of the struggle of 1984-85. A focus on the Notts miners, in an area where a better-off workforce largely refused to back the strike, evokes the passions and anguish of this huge industrial and political battle. The defeat of the miners, despite their courage, signified a huge blow for the British working class as a whole.
In Nottinghamshire the majority of miners scabbed on the strike. One important reason for this was the Area Incentives Scheme (AIS), promoted by the National Coal Board (NCB) with the deliberate aim of sowing divisions between miners. This scheme was pushed through under the Labour government in 1977, against the wishes of two thirds of miners, but it had the support of right wing NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) president Joe Gormley. The militant Arthur Scargill replaced Gormley in 1982, too late to stop the AIS. Crucially, many miners in the most productive coalfields, such as Notts and South Derbyshire, supported the AIS as it could raise their incomes above the mass of miners in Britain (a short-sighted view, given Thatcher's later plans to shut most pits, including in Notts).
After a storming performance in Manchester on 10 February 2014, revolutionary US rappers Dead Prez met with young supporters of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
M1 and Sticman answered questions about their radical political approach, touching on ideas about racism, capitalism, socialism and the need for solidarity with the people of Palestine. In the first instalment of our interview, Dead Prez discuss how they became interested in political action.
What lies across the water, Stephen Kimber, Fernwood Publishing 2013, Can$19.95
Stephen Kimber’s remarkable work is both a forensic expose of anti-communist terrorism and the definitive guide to the story of the Cuban Five. With in-depth analysis of the activities and motivations of many key players in US-Cuban relations over the last 50 years and a detective-thriller writing style it is both highly readable and politically explosive.
In September 1998, five Cuban intelligence agents – Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Gonzalez and Rene Gonzalez – were arrested in Miami. The story of the necessity of their presence on US soil, infiltrating terrorist networks amongst the febrile world of Miami’s rightwing Cuban exile groups, reveals a hidden history of CIA-assisted intrigue. Their trial and the conditions of their imprisonment demonstrate the ruthlessness of the imperialist state and the thinness of the veneer of fairness that covers its oppressive ‘justice’ system.
Kimber reveals the existence of a widespread terrorist conspiracy among Cuban exile organisations. For every successful murderous plot such as the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing, which killed 73 civilian passengers, or the 1997 Havana hotel bombings, there are many more abortive or less spectacular attacks. Kimber exposes not just the involvement of the key figures of anti-communist terrorism, the real-life movie villains Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, but also the clear trail of money and support for them from supposedly ‘mainstream’, US government-friendly organisations such as the Cuban American National Foundation.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 235 October/November 2013
Cuba and its neighbours: democracy in motion,
Arnold August, Zed Books 2013, £16.99
In Cuba and its neighbours: democracy in motion, Canadian journalist Arnold August demolishes the bourgeois propaganda that socialist Cuba is somehow ‘undemocratic’ by examining the very idea of what we mean by democracy.
The first part of this comparative study, ‘Cobwebs around democracy’, is an analysis of the US system. August exposes the deceptive character of the US two-party system as a cover for what he describes as an ‘oligarchic’ state but we would call imperialist. Using Barack Obama as a case study, he shows how a cautious ‘benefit of the doubt’ attitude towards Obama by Latin America faded in the face of a military coup in Honduras, perpetrated with US backing. August points out that ‘a new face’ changed nothing in US relations with Cuba: ‘His role, based on the illusion created regarding the two-party system, was to change tactics because they had failed to reach the same goal of regime change.’
Directed by Comrade Sergio Amigo with Daniel Kelly as Karl
Wednesday to Sundays till 13 October
The Calder Bookshop and Theatre, 51 The Cut, London SE1 8LF
www.calderbookshop.com
Tickets £10 (£8 concessions) To reserve a ticket call 020 7620 2900
or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Also two nights at The Marx Memorial Library
Tuesday 22 and Wednesday 23 October 7pm
37A Clerkenwell Green, London, Greater London EC1R 0DU
Howard Zinn’s play has Marx fighting in heaven for the right to return to Soho (unfortunately he ends up in New York Soho rather than his old London haunts) and prove that his ideas are not dead but still relevant in the 21st century. ‘Why must they declare me dead, again and again?’ He is allowed only an hour on earth and a wonderful hour of theatre it is.
Review: One day in December: Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout
Monthly Review Press, New York, 2013, 457 pages. ISBN: 978-1-58367-317-1
Nancy Stout has treated the reader to an exhilarating biography of Celia Sanchez, recording her vital contribution to the revolutionary struggle and the socialist state in Cuba. This is long overdue. While many supporters of the Cuban Revolution will have heard about Celia and her close relationship with Fidel Castro, few will have understood or appreciated the role she played. Celia’s great political and revolutionary strength lay in her organisational capacity, as well as her sacrifice and commitment. As novelist Alice Walker says in her foreword, the book offers: ‘A clear vision of what balanced female leadership can be; and, even more to the point, what a truly egalitarian revolutionary leadership of female and male partners might look like.’
[Published by Myrdle Court Press, 2013]
On 7 April 2012, Trenton Oldfield disrupted the Oxford vs Cambridge University Boat Race in the River Thames in protest against elitism, inequality and government cuts and surveillance. He was arrested and initially charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which does not carry a custodial sentence. Following a politically instigated CPS review, this was then changed to ‘causing a public nuisance’, for which he was sentenced on 19 October 2012 to six months’ imprisonment. He served a month and a half of this in Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, before being released on Home Detention Curfew electronic tagging. Trenton – an Australian who has lived in London for ten years – is now fighting an attempt by the British Home Office to make him leave the country on the basis that his presence here is ‘not conducive to the public good’.
By Jack Colhoun, OR Books, New York, 2013, 361 pages, £17.
Paperback ISBN 978-1-935928-89-8. Ebook ISBN 978-1-935928-90-4
www.orbooks.com/catalog/Gangsterismo
Jack Colhoun is a journalist and archive researcher with a distinguished record of investigating US foreign policy in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Middle East and publicising the impact of special interest lobbies on domestic politics like the Obama Healthcare legislation. He was the leader of the draft and military resistance registers exiled in Canada during the Vietnam War.
