A Nation of Shopkeepers offers a provocative analysis of Britain’s culturally mediated class structure and critique of the educated ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of the left. But Evans’s rigid and ahistorical opposition of working-class and identity-based political claims, based on a misreading of Sivanandan, fails to grasp the necessity of uniting demands for economic redistribution and social justice.

A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Dan Evans
Repeater Bookers, 2023
9781913462697

Whereas John Kelly’s Contemporary Trotskyism erred on the side of sympathy towards Trotskyists contributing to the Corbyn project, Daniel Frost writes, The Twilight of World Trotskyism is much more recalcitrant. As an attempt by Kelly to put the nail in the coffin of ‘a dead end for socialists’, this book rarely provides the depth and range of evidence which could break through the sectarian walls to which Kelly devotes so much attention.

The Twilight of World Trotskyism
John Kelly
Routledge, 2023
9781032350080

Jake Fremantle assesses how Monumental Lives offers what initially appears to be a promising Marxist analysis of the ‘culture wars’ and its recent preoccupation with the toppling of statues, but how this is increasingly limited by Bevan’s tendency towards an idealistic veneration of ‘authenticity’ which strays into a conservative position against what it terms an over-enthusiastic left ‘identity politics’.

Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past
Robert Bevan
Verso Books, 2022
9781839761874

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant’s Health Communism is both a wake-up call and call to action driven by clear analysis and radical demands, urging us to raise the bar beyond ‘saving the NHS’. Recognising that, under capitalism, we are not all sick but ‘none of us is well’, the populations that capital has marked as ‘surplus’ must be centred in our struggle for global health justice.

Health Communism
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Verso Books, 2022
9781839765162

Who cleans the world? This urgent question which Françoise Vergès poses at the outset of A Decolonial Feminism sets the tone and trajectory of this powerful book, encouraging readers to wrestle with their preconceived notions of care work and the reproductive labour that working class racialised women engage in.

A Decolonial Feminism
Françoise Vergès (trans. by Ashley J. Bohrer)
Pluto Press, 2021
9780745341125

Like Orwell, Paul Mason has fallen victim to a kind of fatalism: the belief that in the end hope lies not with the proles, but with the bourgeois state that is able to overcome fascism - reflecting trends within the British left unable to contain their admiration for Starmer’s ‘ruthless pragmatism’.

How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance
Paul Mason
Penguin Books, 2022
9780141996400

Ezra Otieno of Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League writes how Caroline Elkins' study of the violence of the British Empire illuminates the colonial legacy that remains in Kenya and informs its present internal contradictions and, fundamentally, how independence in the country is still a mirage.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
Caroline Elkins
Bodley Head, 2022
9781847921062

If you want a conclusion to Lenin's question ‘What is to be done?’, you may be disappointed by Althusser’s book. Written in 1978 but ultimately unfinished, the book focusses on the emergent Eurocommunism and their focus on civil society rather than the state but Althusser's critique remains largely moralistic.

What is to be done?
Louis Althusser, trans. by G. M. Goshgarian
Polity, 2020
9781509538614

The United States and British establishments are in mourning over Afghanistan. Not because of the tens of thousands of lives lost but for fear of America's declining influence. This is what makes Daniel Immerwahr’s book such a vital resource, as it details how the empire was born and how it continues to change.

How to Hide an Empire
Daniel Immerwahr
Macmillan, 2020
9781250251091

Transgender Marxism finally acknowledges the necessity of strategies for the working class and oppressed trans people globally, but its dependence on social reproduction theory presents Trotskyism as the acceptable form of trans Marxism.

Transgender Marxism
Edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson & Elle O’Rourke
Pluto, 2021
9780745341668

As a light piece of polemical writing, How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes its case for militancy well. However, it points to another book that needs to be written - a book that we should write with our actions as much as our words, where we need to deepen our strategic understanding and our militant tactics.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Andreas Malm
Verso, 2021
978183976025

What is necessary for Fisher and for Colquhoun is the creation of counterculture to ‘smuggle’ radical ideas into popular culture. But when Fisher refers to two television adverts as hyperstitious moments that produce desire, to even attempt to incorporate this desire into class consciousness is to move in terms not just set by capitalism but the culture industry itself.

Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
Mark Fisher, ed. by Matt Colquhoun
Repeater, 2021
9781913462482

Spade provides a useful introduction to mutual aid work, but a more detailed book based on the experiences of mutual aiders would have been even more valuable. Mutual aid is a start but ultimately more enduring revolutionary organisations are going to be necessary to secure a decent future for all.

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
Dean Spade
Verso, 2020
9781839762123

The resounding clarion call that runs through the book is that, without an end to global slums, healthcare for profit, and the dismantling factory farming, there will be no respite from global pandemics. Until capitalism is buried, we will live in a world in which pandemics continue to rage on.

The Monster Enters: Covid-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism
Mike Davis
OR Books, 2020
9781682193037

With its immediate recourse to non-violence, the most notable thing about Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence is not its case for a particular philosophy either as an ethical or tactical choice but in revealing the impotence of liberalism to deal with contemporary politics.

The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
Judith Butler
Verso, 2020
9781788732765

D. Hunter bares themselves to the reader in order that they view incidents in their life through the prism of class and oppression, in what is a truly intersectional picture of the lumpenproletariat in Britain that deconstructs and subverts approved working-class narratives.

Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors
D. Hunter
Lumpen, August 2020

Rather than a mass act of mindless violence, as the American press reported it, Bevins convincingly writes that the violence in Indonesia was part of a program of international anticommunist extermination that repeated itself in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973.

The Jakarta Method
Vincent Bevins
Public Affairs, May 2020
9781541742406

Recognising LGBT struggles is incredibly simple; it doesn’t require conceding ground to anyone – to the middle class, to reactionary politics, to postmodernism – and with Marxism and Transgender Liberation, Red Fightback recognises this. But it could go further.

Marxism and Transgender Liberation: Confronting Transphobia in the British Left
Red Fightback, 2020
9780244869779

Yanguas is perfectly placed to provide insight on the contradiction between intentions of funders and the wider development community, however,Yanguas never explicitly questions how the true goals of the development agencies of imperialist capitalist powers might differ from – or even contradict – their stated goals.

Why We Lie About Aid
Pablo Yanguas
Zed Books, 2018
9781783609338

The embodiment of some of capital’s worst exploits, Walmart may be something of an apparition from the future; it has ascended to dominance on the free market through the payment of poverty wages to its employees and ruthless union busting, but its successes have been predicated on a corporate structure which has eliminated its own internal market.

People’s Republic of Walmart
Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski
Verso, 2019
9781786635167