Russell Brand Revolution Century, 2014, pp384, £20 It is a terrible force of habit (and probably a shameless indication of my inbuilt confirmation bias) that, whenever I pick up an otherwise unknown book with the word ‘revolution’ in the title, I invariably flip straight to the index. I am looking for one thing: Marx, the bewhiskered ...
CS National Executive member Callum Williamson reviews The year of dreaming dangerously Slavoj Žižek: dictatorship The year of dreaming dangerously attempts to “locate the events of 2011 in the totality of the global situation, to show how they relate to the central antagonism of contemporary capitalism” (p1). Slavoj Žižek attempts to do this by addressing the rise of ...
In the first of a series for Red Mist Reviews on the troubled relationship between the left and culture, CS'er Maciej Zurowski investigates reactionary musical counterculture and looks at the anti-fascist response Warning! Attention, everybody! It looks like for the first time since the 80s, London's ethnic communities must fear for their safety when certain rock ...
Ben Lewis reviews director Stevan Riley's 'Fire in Babylon' (2011, DVD, £12.99) Those who labour under the illusion that cricket is the dull and dreary preserve of the British establishment, that the gentle thwack of willow on leather should hold no interest for the workers’ movement and should be confined to the fields ...
Harley Filben reviews Owen Jones 'Chavs: the demonisation of the working class' Verso, 2011, pp298, £14.99 (first published in the Weekly Worker) This book, at first glance, appears to have come out of nowhere to dominate the world. Owen Jones is a supporter of the Labour Representation Committee, one of the main hotbeds of ...
The wooden spoon goes to the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, writes James Turley Ryan Giggs: own goal He has played for a single football club over 600 times in the last 20 years; he quickly became iconic of Manchester United’s ‘golden generation’, of which he is almost the last survivor; and as such has seen more success ...
Ben Lewis reviews Peter Watkins's (director) 'La Commune' 2000, DVD (first published in the Weekly Worker) La Commune Sitting through this film in its 345-minute entirety requires much coffee and many breaks. You will be thrust into the world of the 11th arrondissement in Paris 1871, to a world where seemingly eternal values are being turned on ...
James Turley argues that those wishing to rid the world of the sexist idiocy of Andy Gray and Richard Keyes must set their sights higher. It has been a bit of a rollercoaster for Rupert Murdoch's media empire these last few weeks. While the occasional Murdoch nemesis, Tommy Sheridan, has been sent ...
Ben Lewis reviews 'The Trotsky', Jacob Tierney (dir), Alliance Films (general release in Canada). Leon Bronstein, a young, privileged Canadian of about 17 and three-quarters, is not your average high school student. How could he be? How would you feel if, on reading Leon Trotsky’s biography My life, you realised that your life was ...
A festival of sporting genius, or an incitement to chauvinism? James Turley looks at the contradictions of the football extravaganza. The world’s eyes are on South Africa - and not because of Aids epidemics or the legacy of apartheid. The French nation is locked in mutual recrimination, the English narrowly avoiding the same fate by hanging ...
Creeping censorship must be opposed - even if feelings get hurt, argues James Turley It seems that freedom of speech is once again being quietly undermined. The recent libel case of Simon Singh, the scientist sued by the snake-oil salesmen of the British Chiropractic Association, had the positive effect of outlining the absurdly punitive restrictions on ...
In 2010 we might jsut see a sporting world where homosexuality is at least less of a taboo, and for this we must thank Alfie Thomas, writes Ben Lewis It is rare that you read or see something in the news that cheers you up. The far left press’s eternal Panglossianism - occasionally tantamount to ...
James Turley reviews Mark Bould and China Miéville (eds) Red planets: Marxism and science fiction Pluto, 2009, pp293, £19.99 When English literature departments first arose in Anglo-Saxon academia, their purpose was in some ways relatively well defined. The bourgeoisie, so its political allies in the aristocracy and flunkies among the intelligentsia argued, was culturally bereft; worse, ...