review
Latin America’s Turbulent Transitio
China's 'bureaucratic capitalism'
Photo: Alex Mahan/Flickr.
Review: Tommy Sheridan bio 'essential reading'
Tommy Sheridan: From Hero To Zero? A Political Biography
By Gregor Gall
The 'Marx party' -- Karl Marx's revolutionary household
Nature’s matrix: Linking agriculture, conservation and food sovereignty
Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty
By Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer, and Angus Wright
Earthscan, 2009
Review by Ian Angus
October 17, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission -- In any discussion of biodiversity and species extinction, someone usually insists that overpopulation is the problem. More people equals more farms equals less wilderness equals more extinctions. Life is a zero-sum game: you can have people and farming OR wildlife and biodiversity, but not both.
Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK and the Kurdish struggle
Prison writings: The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century
Communist International's Fourth Congress: revolutionary fulcrum of the modern world
Toward the United Front, Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 192
New book on the history of the Tamil people's struggle for self-determination
Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka
By Ron Ridenour
New Century Book House
Chennai, India
(available from Resistance Books)
Review by Chris Slee
August 9, 2012 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Ron Ridenour‘s latest book is a very informative history of the struggle for self-determination by the Tamil people on the island of Sri Lanka. Ridenour explains the reasons why many Tamils took up arms to fight for an independent Tamil state. He shows the history of racism in Sri Lanka and the violent repression carried out by successive governments against peaceful Tamil protests. He denounces the history of mass murder of Tamils, both through government-instigated pogroms and through the bombardment of civilians by the Sri Lankan armed forces. He acknowledges that the Tamil independence fighters have also committed atrocities.
The debate about the nature of the former Soviet Union: Who was right?
Moscow 2008.
[For more discussion on the nature of the Soviet Union click HERE. See also the related discussion on Stalinism HERE.]
By Chris Slee
July 30, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The nature of the former Soviet Union was an issue which divided the left for many decades. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, differing analyses of its class nature should no longer be a reason for maintaining separate socialist organisations.
Nevertheless, this historical debate has relevance to current politics, since the theories developed to explain the nature of the Soviet Union were subsequently applied to other countries, including Cuba. In particular, the theory of state capitalism, of which British Socialist Workers Party leader Tony Cliff was a leading exponent, is applied to Cuba by many groups today, including Solidarity and Socialist Alternative in Australia.
