What is socialism, anyway?
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…
J.W. Horton
Making sense of the senseless war in Ukraine
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…
Dismantling the cult of Churchill
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…
Byung-Chul Han and capitalism’s ‘death drive’
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…
Communist love in the time of capitalist doom
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,…
God or Mammon?
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…
Critiquing capitalist spirituality
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…