book review

‘The Dawn of Everything’ gets human history wrong [ClimateAndCapitalism.com]

[This post originally appeared on ClimateAndCapitalism.com on December 17, 2021. The Dawn of Everything is available for purchase at LeftWingBooks.net; these reviews and the introductory text are from Monthly Review Online, where this content is mirrored from: https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/] Is inequality inevitable? Is freedom just a choice? Two materialist critiques of …

Human History Gets a Rewrite: A Review of “The Dawn of Everything” [The Atlantic]

[This review originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of the The Atlantic. The Dawn of Everything is now available at LeftWingBooks.net] Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working …

The Radical Promise of Human History: A Review of “The Dawn of Everything” [Boston Review]

[This review originally appeared in the Boston Review, November 3, 2021.] The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity David Graeber and David Wengrow [Available now at LeftWingBooks.net] The standard history of humanity goes something like this. Roughly 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens first evolved somewhere on …

Every weakness is claimed as strength: Chuang’s ‘Social Contagion’ is critical proletarian research for our catastrophic present [Lausan.hk]

[This review of Chuang’s Social Contagion and Other Writings on Microbiological Class War in China (2021) originally appeared on Lausan.hk on November 4, 2021.] By JN A “SARS outbreak” on the mainland was first reported by media in Hong Kong on December 30, 2019. For those living in or involved …

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: A Review of False Nationalism, False Internationalism by Gabriel Kuhn

Originally posted on LeftTwoThree.org. A review of E. Tani and Kaé Sera, False Nationalism False Internationalism: Class Contradictions in the Armed Struggle (Kersplebedeb, 2021 [new ed.]). During a trip many years ago, I stayed with a friend involved in antiimperialist politics in some European capital. Before going to bed, …

Ecological Leninism: Friend or Foe? by Gabriel Kuhn

A joint review by Gabriel Kuhn of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2020) and How to Blow up a Pipeline (Verso, 2021) by Andreas Malm, both of which are distributed by leftwingbooks.net. This review first appeared on Kuhn’s new website https://lefttwothree.org/ Andreas Malm first received wider recognition …

Prospects for Anti-Capitalism in a Divided World, by Yuriy Dergunov

Review of the book: Lauesen T. (2018) The Global Perspective. Reflections on Imperialism and Resistance, Montreal: Kersplebedeb. Torkil Lauesen’s book The Global Perspective. Reflections on Imperialism and Resistance is written from a perspective that can be described as Third Worldist Marxism. For its author, such views are not just theoretical …

‘The “Dangerous Class” and Revolutionary Theory: Thoughts on the Making of the Lumpen/Proletariat’ by J. Sakai reviewed by Joshua Moufawad-Paul

(mirrored from Marx & Philosophy Review of Books) Sakai has always been provocative. His work, when it is not relegated to obscurity, is treated as either sacrosanct or heretical, and so it is very difficult to review his most recent book without capitulating to this binary. Moreover, his work is a …

A Threat of the First Magnitude, reviewed by Don Hamerquist

The recent book by Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher, “A Threat of the First Magnitude”, focuses on the FBI counterinsurgency operation against the Maoist sector of the left during the decade after 1968. The book provides important, impressively substantiated, insights into the development and application of state counterinsurgency theory and …

Gabriel Kuhn Reviews: J. Sakai, The “Dangerous Class” and Revolutionary Theory: Thoughts on the Making of the Lumpen/Proletariat (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2017)

There are people who write a lot of books, hoping that somewhere down the line they’ll have a winner. Then, there are people who write a book every thirty years and make sure it’s groundbreaking. J. Sakai belongs to the latter category. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, originally released …