New Transnational Unionism: Review of ‘Choke Points’ eds. Alimahomed-Wilson & Ness (2018) Introduction At a time when rightwing nationalism appears increasingly to be the only voice for the embattled union movement in the global north. At a time when there is a widespread misconception of union obsolescence given the historic ebb in working class organization. At a time when the[Read More…]

 Review of ‘The Struggle for Food Sovereignty’ eds. Herrera & Lau (2015)   Peasants produce 70% of the world’s food. They constitute over half the world’s population. Yet, in a world where 3500 calories of food gets produced, per person, per day. The majority of the one billion who go hungry nonetheless, are peasants, are the food producers themselves1. Capitalism[Read More…]

  “What to do?” (53). A short question with a very complex answer. In The World We Wish to See, Samir Amin delves into the contemporary political conjuncture with a succinctness and ease that belies the monuments scope of the topic he addresses – how do counter-hegemonic movements findconvergence in diversity, in an age when political lines are being redrawn[Read More…]

  Dhawale, A., Sainath, P., Deshpande, S., Prashad, V.(2018). The Kisan Long March in Maharashtra. LeftWord Books. “Land reform is on the agenda of mankind”. So wrote William Hinton over five decades ago, in the preface to his agrarian classic – Fanshen. The events described in The Kisan Long March– 50,000 farmers marching over 200km, in a veritable sea of[Read More…]

  AMIN, S. (2017). OCTOBER 1917 REVOLUTION: A century later. S.l.: DARAJA PRESS. “[R]evolutions are ‘great’ precisely because they…are far ahead of…their time” (36). In the five essays presented inOctober 1917, renowned radical political economist, Samir Amin, pushes far beyond the immediate necessity of emphasizing the historical weight of October, and launches, into an ambitiously broad analysis of the trajectory[Read More…]

Tumultuous Rapids: Review of Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism by Samir Amin (2016) Theo Vynnychenko Kenji Amin, S. (2016). Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. NYU Press. “History…is not a peacefully flowing river, but made up of different moments, separated by tumultuous rapids” (134). When the USSR broke apart in 1991, an unprecedented[Read More…]