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

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

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

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

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