Author: J.W. Horton

Detail of “Man at the Crossroads” (1933), a fresco by Mexican painter Diego Rivera, showing Leon Trotsky, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Socialism: A Very Short Introduction Michael Newman Oxford University Press, 2020 Have you got a friend who’s always complaining about “socialism” and doesn’t know

Soviet-era monument in Riga, Latvia, which was splashed with the colours of the Ukraine flag the day after Russia invaded in February 2022. Photo by Kārlis Dambrāns/ Flickr. War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies OR Books, 2022 General Nathan Bedford Forrest

Winston Churchill. Illustration by Lyn Ott (1942). Image from Wikimedia Commons. Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes Tariq Ali Verso, 2022 When I was about 10 years old, my first historical hero was Winston Churchill. I had a poster on my bedroom wall of his family genealogy. For many years

Capitalism and the Death Drive Byung-Chul Han Polity, 2021 Capitalism and the Death Drive is a set of 19 essays and interviews published between 2012 and 2020 by South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. All the essays and interviews are short and accessible, and at 150 pages,

The Communism of Love: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Exchange Value Richard Gilman-Opalsky AK Press, 2020 “This book is about the communism of love. It is, in other words, about the necessarily and irreducibly communist form and content of love.” So begins this broad-ranging book on a largely neglected

Jesus and the Politics of Mammon Hollis Phelps Cascade Books, 2019 The title of this book made me suspect it would simply advocate an anti-capitalist theology and present a vision of Jesus as a socialist. God knows we need to challenge the diabolical hash Christian fundamentalism makes of its professed

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality Ronald E. Purser Repeater Books, 2019 It is interesting to note just how many of the leaders of self-help culture present their credentials as businesspeople, CEOs, “wealth creators” and so on as if it could be taken for granted that success as