Alex Miller reviews Lea Ypi's fascinating memoir, which paints a vivid picture of growing up in Albania during Communist rule and the descent into casino capitalism and civil war.
Alex Miller
Alex Miller reviews a new booklet from the Scottish Socialist Party that makes the case for a socialist green new deal.
The influence of French colonialism on the work of existentialist writer Albert Camus is significant. But Alex Miller argues that a new introduction to Camus' work vastly overstates the case.
Alex Miller reviews The Jakarta Method, a powerful book examining the US-backed anti-communist program of extermination in Indonesia.
June marks eighty years since the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. It was a titanic struggle that decided the outcome of World War Two. One of the fronts of struggle was cultural, as Alex Miller explains.
Alex Miller reviews a highly speculative and naive work on the death of Albert Camus, who was perhaps France’s most prominent philosophical writer of the 20th century.
Hit and Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan & the Meaning of Honour
By Nicky Hager & Jon Stephenson
Potton & Burton, 2017
159 pages
In this well-written and powerful book, Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson present a barrage of evidence that “New Zealanders and their United States allies were involved in war crimes” in Afghanistan in 2010.
Who Rules The World?
By Noam Chomsky
Hamish Hamilton, 2016
Noam Chomsky, who turns 88 this month, revolutionised the study of linguistics in the second half of the 20th century, starting with books like Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). He remains professor emeritus at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.
Left-wing supporters of Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum campaign.
Is There A Scottish Road to Socialism?
Edited by Gregor Gall
Scottish Left Review Press
Third edition, 2016
£5.99, 164 pages
This is the third edition in a series previously published in 2007 and 2013. A range of left-wing activists and commentators debate the question of whether Scottish independence would help or hinder the prospects for socialism in Scotland.
The People’s Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never Be the Same Again
by Paul Geoghegan
Luath Press 2015
177 pages
The British-wide general election for the Westminster parliament scheduled for May 7 looks set to be very close, perhaps even closer than the 2010 election that resulted in the Labour Party being replaced by a Conservative Party-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
Opinion polls suggest that neither of the two main British parties, Conservative or Labour, will win enough seats for a majority of their own in the House of Commons.
Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland
By Iain MacWhirter
Cargo Publishing, 2014,
174 pages
The independence referendum on September 18 last year has been hailed by many as the most important event in the recent Scottish history.
The result was far closer than any supporter of independence would have dared predict even a few months before the vote. About 1.6 million voters (45%) refused to be swayed by a sustained fear campaign by the British state and its allies ― voting “Yes” to Scottish independence.
In Place of Fear II: A Socialist Programme for an Independent Scotland
By Jim Sillars
Vagabond Voices Publishing, 2014
www.inplaceoffear.com
Jim Sillars is a well-known and well-respected figure on the Scottish political scene.
Elected a Labour Party MP for South Ayrshire in 1970, he shifted away from mainstream Labour Party politics due to his commitment to setting up a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.
Megrahi: You are My Jury ― The Lockerbie Evidence
John Ashton
Birlinn 2012
￡14.99, 497 pages
Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town Lockerbie in December 1988 and is usually described in the mainstream media as “the Lockerbie bomber”.
Readers familiar with Paul Foot’s series of penetrating articles on Lockerbie in Private Eye will already be familiar with the potentially problematic nature of Megrahi’s trial and conviction. But this book brings the story up to date.
A Rose Loupt Oot
Edited by David Betteridge
Smokestack Books 2011
£8.95, 64 pages
www.smokestack-books.co.uk
Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the work-in Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1971, a campaign by Scottish workers that resulted in the reversal of the Conservative government’s decision to close down a number of shipyards on the River Clyde in Glasgow.
A Rose Loupt Oot is a collection of poems, songs and artwork marking the anniversary.
Downfall: The Tommy Sheridan Story
By Alan McCombes,
Birlinn 2011
326 pages, pb £9.99
In the elections to the Scottish parliament in May 2003, the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) polled just under a quarter of a million votes and won six seats.
By any stretch of the imagination this was a remarkable achievement for a party well to the left of Labour. It was a beacon of hope and inspiration for socialists the world over.
By 2011, the SSP’s vote had slumped to below 9000. It failed to regain any of the six seats it had lost in 2007.
Springtime: The New Student Rebellions
Edited by Claire Solomon and Tania Palmieri
Verso 2011 283 pages,
paperback, ￡9.99
In years to come, when people look back at 2010-11 and try to identify the moment the fightback against the British Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition really got under way, many will select the huge March 26 TUC-sponsored demonstration in London.
Magnificent and inspiring as March 26 was, however, November 10, 2010 has perhaps a greater claim to be recorded as the moment the fightback began in earnest.
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