Barry Healy

The Managed Heart, Commercialization of Human Feeling Arlie Russell Hochschild University of California Press, 2012 339pp, $39.95 Forcing front line staff to engage at a “personal level” with customers has been an increasingly obnoxious part of low paid workers’ employment. To obscure the all-pervasive low quality of the “food” and “services” that capitalism offers, what is sold now is the “experience” of social interaction. Key to the Happy Meal is the “happy sale”.

All That I Am, A Novel By Anna Funder Penguin 2011 370 pp, $29.95 Germany at the end of World War I entered a political and cultural maelstrom that tested the integrity of all its participants. This factually based narrative, or “open-source novel” as author Anna Funder calls it, brings to life some of those who committed their lives to trying to bring socialism to Germany and combat Hitler.

In Western Australia, mental illness is the second-highest cause of disease for women and the fourth-highest cause for men. Premier Colin Barnett has responded by publishing a green paper for public discussion for a new Mental Health Act. The proposed act contains provisions that would improve the rights of people subjected to a Compulsory Treatment Order (CTO). But it negates those same provisions by allowing the treating psychiatrist to simply ignore them.

“A is for Alienation, that made me the man that I am, and B's for the Boss who's a Bastard, a Bourgeois who don't give a damn.” So goes Scottish folk singer Alex Glasgow’s witty song, “The Socialist ABC”, which is a succinct introduction to Marxism. However, for a slightly more rounded alphabetical introduction this volume is very good. In it the authors manage to condense quite readable explanations of some of the Western intellectual tradition’s most challenging concepts.

Soldaten, On Fighting, Killing & Dying: The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs By Sonke Neitzel & Harald Welzer Scribe Publications, 2012 448pp, $22.99 Our Harsh Logic, Israeli Soldiers Testimonies from the Occupies Territories, 2000-2010 Compiled by Breaking the Silence Scribe Publications, 2012 400pp, $22.99 There is unmitigated evil in both these books ― cruelty, violence, criminal’s countries. The fact that the awful truth comes out of the mouths of the perpetrators makes it all the more shocking.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a federal royal commission into child abuse in Australian institutions on November 12. The announcement came after growing scandals about paedophilia within the Catholic Church had reached the point where it was politically untenable for the government to continue with inaction.

Pages From a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader Edited by Stephen M. Ward, Wayne State University Press, 2011 401 pp, $US27.95 The Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci coined the term “organic intellectual” to describe workers who educated themselves in advanced economic and social theory. Such people are essential to the task of the working-class understanding its historical role in changing society, he believed.

Warhol to Picasso: Fourteen Modern Artists Art Gallery of Western Australia Until December 3 This exhibition brings together 120 of some of the 20th century’s most important art works that catalogue some critical attempts to break through the bourgeois encirclement of human existence and point towards liberation. Using Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and American Andy Warhol as the convenient gateposts, it allows us to read the rise and fall of the century’s revolutionary sentiment.

Fanaticism, On the Uses of an Idea Alberto Toscano, Verso 2010 269 pages, $43.00 Review by Barry Healy “Nothing great has been accomplished in history without fanaticism,” Leon Trotsky wrote in 1938. Certainly, the great turning points in human history, such as the Anabaptist peasant revolt in Central Europe or the Russian Revolution, required their participants to set aside their normal dispositions and assume a single-minded dedication to a cause greater than the self.

Love & Capital: Karl & Jenny Marx & the Birth of a Revolution By Mary Gabriel, Little, Brown & Company 2011 707 pages, $39.99 The spectre of Karl Marx still haunts the capitalist world. Only 11 people attended his funeral in 1883 and the corporate press still loves to dance on his grave, constantly declaring that his ideas are irrelevant. Yet with every economic crisis all eyes return to Marx's masterpiece, Capital, to understand what is really going on in our economic system.

Toward the United Front, Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 Edited & translated by John Riddell, Brill, 2012, 1310 pp. Many leftists have spent dreary evenings meeting in draughty community halls where the reading of the minutes of previous gatherings seems to drag on interminably. Refreshingly, for a variety of reasons, this 1200-page compendium of 90-year-old proceedings makes for revitalising and pertinent reading.

Snow White & the Huntsman Directed by Rupert Sanders Staring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, Chris Hemsworth In cinemas now Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the most derivative of them all? I suppose to even ask that of a Hollywood movie is foolish. Hollywood thrives on figuring what has previously interested the audience and recycling it through its cultural mashing machine to produce what it knows best: schlock.