For the red on your list

December 7, 2010

SocialistWorker.org columnists and contributors offer their suggestions for books, music and movies for those hard-to-shop-for radicals (or otherwise) on your holiday list.

Part 2

Sherry Wolf

THOUGH I enjoy the blessedly straightforward reporting at SocialistWorker.org as my primary means of grasping the financial finagling of the rich and powerful, Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job provides one thing SW can't--onscreen confrontations with the astoundingly clueless and arrogant masters of the universe who crashed the economy while cashing in.

Matt Damon's narration keeps the film moving along at a good clip, and the interview scenes will convince you that anyone who believes talent and merit rise to the top in our society is drinking capitalist Kool-Aid.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky has done an excellent job sleuthing out the details of Israel's secret relationship with apartheid South Africa in The Unspoken Alliance. The author's familial links to both nations and intrepid approach to research allowed him to dig up the dirt behind the smiley-faced lies of the Zionist regimes from Labor to Likud.

Readers are treated to a rare glimpse of how left-talking liberals inside government and out feigned solidarity with the oppressed while protecting billions in military profits. Particularly repellent is the special relationship cultivated between Jewish leaders and ex-Nazis in the apartheid South African government.

Sally Hawkins starring in Made in Dagenham
Sally Hawkins starring in Made in Dagenham

If you're itching to see class struggle on the big screen, you can't do much better than Made in Dagenham. Based on real events that included an all-out strike by women against Ford for pay equity in Britain in 1968, this film with Bob Hoskins and Sally Hawkins is fun to watch because the acting is great, and our side wins!

Listening to Hoskins quote Marx to foot-dragging union officials is worth the ticket price in itself, but the scenes of real-life struggle, both against the bosses and among the workers, are gems. Even though the film gives a nod to a cross-class sisterhood-is-powerful argument, Made in Dagenham remains a treat.


Danny Lucia

"EVIL WILL always triumph because good is dumb." So declares Dark Helmet in Spaceballs, Mel Brooks' somber 1987 meditation on human nature. Of course, Evil can be pretty dumb too, which is useful for our side to keep in mind. This year saw the release of two books about the stupidity running through those twin forces of Evil: Wall Street and the Pentagon.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis tells the tale of the 2008 financial crisis through the eyes of the small handful of investors who saw it coming--and got rich by "shorting" the housing and financial sectors. Working with the same information as everybody else, these investors concluded that the trillions being made off of sub-prime mortgages were a pyramid scheme.

But that's not the main story of the book--Lewis shows that this should have been fairly obvious to anyone who actually read about the mortgages they bet on. Lewis' real story is how these investors came to realize how stupid and blind the rest of the financial world was to the cliff that they were about to walk off.

Today, people in Ireland, Greece and Portugal are being told to give up their way of life in order to earn the trust of "the markets." The Big Short shows you the market's buyers and sellers and reveals them to be essentially like highly specialized dog breed trained in one skill--making short-term profits, and useless at every other aspect of life.

In The American Way of War, Tom Engelhardt paints the architects of the American Empire not as a secret cabal of diabolical geniuses but as a secret cabal of diabolical nincompoops. There is plenty of evidence from the past decade to make his point, which he uses with both outrage and wry humor.

For me, though, the all-time classic about the absurdity of the military machine is Catch-22, Joseph Heller's classic satire set during the Second World War. My all-time favorite book.

Finally, if you're specifically shopping for me, I could use some socks.


Scott McLemee

TWO EXCEPTIONALLY important biographies of American revolutionaries that appeared in the last few years have recently come out in paperback--Jeffrey B. Perry's pioneering Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 and Bryan D. Palmer's monumental James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928.

It is strange how completely Harrison's role as theorist and militant in the struggle for African American liberation was wiped out of the historical memory until recently. Cannon's role in rallying to Trotsky's defense in 1928 has tended to eclipse the importance of his work as one of the founders of the Communist Party. These absorbing books help set the record straight. Each is the first volume of a longer project, and they leave you wanting more. (I say this as a hint to the biographers in question. Finish the books, already!)

Two recent collections of work by prominent Marxist thinkers belong in every socialist's collection. You Don't Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James presents the great revolutionary "unplugged"--discussing Haiti, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin and existentialism with audiences in the late 1960s.

Less casual in tone, but equally wide-ranging, is the first volume of Selected Writings by Chris Harman, who died late last year, not long after the publication of his book Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, which has just been issued in the U.S. by Haymarket Books.

Another Haymarket title that I'm keen on (the understatement of 2010, by the way) is the hefty Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, edited by Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis. Covering the development of Marxist research in numerous fields over the course of the late 20th century, it is internationalist, interdisciplinary, and very nearly encyclopedic.

The original edition was incredibly expensive, so all due thanks to Haymarket for making it available in a more affordable format. The paperback may save not only your money, but your life. If the hardback fell from a high shelf, it could kill you.


Alan Maass

THE DISCUSSIONS at the International Socialist Organization's Marxism Day Schools in October and November reminded me of a brilliant short book by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, called Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought.

The question of how socialists organize--and in particular, the ideas developed by the Russian revolutionary Lenin on the subject--is sometimes talked about separately from the principles of Marxism, as if organization is mainly a question of tactics. In this short book written after Lenin's death in 1924, Lukács explains how a Marxist understanding of class struggle and class consciousness is tied to the need for the kind of organization Lenin put forward. The philosophical language is tough going, but this book is worth the effort.

Alright, so maybe you're worried that Dad won't cotton to a philosophical meditation on Lenin. In that case, try Zeitoun, a true story from the Katrina disaster masterfully told by the writer Dave Eggers. The book is about Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family, who fall victim to two manmade nightmares of the Bush years: The hatred directed against Arabs and Muslims in the "war on terror," and the federal government's militarized response to Katrina.

Eggers presents what happened simply and clearly, with no literary bells and whistles--just the right setting for a story that's unbelievable and all-too-believable at the same time.

Mavis Staples has been making records for more than 50 years. Her new album, You Are Not Alone, a collaboration with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, revisits many of the stages from that musical life--especially the gospel songs she sang with her father and siblings in the Staple Singers.

Her last studio album, We'll Never Turn Back, made with Ry Cooder, was devoted to the songs of the civil rights movement. You Are Not Alone is more personal and a perfect showcase for a musical treasure--Mavis' voice.