Books of the year
Socialist Challenge1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
CHRISTMAS is the time for giving your friends and loved ones the books that you want to read yourself. PHIL HEARSE suggests the following, as the key books of the year for socialists.
Bevanism, Labour's High Tide, Mark Jenkins, Spokesman, £4.95
Mark Jenkins tries to explain Bevanism in terms of its relationship with Stalinism. Nonetheless, packed with factual information about the witch-hunts and the divisions in the Labour left. Essential reading for anyone contemplating entrism.
Comrade and Lover, Rosa Luxemburg, Pluto, £4.50
Rosa Luxemburg's love letters edited by Eliza Ettinger. All the questions of combining full-time revolutionary activity and personal life are posed here. Highly recommended, despite the very silly introduction.
Inside BOSS, Gordon Winter, Penguin £2.95
Gordon Winter was a journalist and agent of the South African security service BOSS. A very nasty piece of work (and probably still is). But fascinating insights into how our enemies work.
Food Without Frontiers, Gerard Chaliand, Pluto, £2.50
Marxist cookery from Gerard Chaliand. Single pot dishes. Just right for Marxist bed-sitter subversive infiltrators with little time between meetings.
Long Waves in the History of Capitalism, Ernest Mandel, CUP, £7.95, and Capital Vol 3, K Marx, introduced by Ernest Mandel, Penguin, £6.95.
Long Waves is a tour de force, situating the present crisis and the prospects for the future. Penguin's Capital Volume Three is mainly remarkable for Mandel's 80-odd page introduction, in which he delivers the polemical karate chop to opponents of the law of the declining rate of profit. Classic stuff.
Tell them Everything, Margaretta D'Arcy, Pluto, £1.95.
The struggle of the Armagh women.
Nicaragua, The Sandinist Revolution, Henri Weber, NLB, £3.25, and Nicaragua, Susan Meiselas, Writers & Readers, £5.95p.
Weber's book is a little speculative and uncritical, but is packed with the facts. Meiselas's book is a coffee-table picture book, but the pictures are beautiful.
Sour Cream 2, Sheba, £1.95.
A second volume of very funny feminist cartoons.
The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, Michael Lowy, £4.50.
The theory of permanent revolution brought up to date. Essential for all those currently debating Iran and Central America -which includes at least 55 of our readers.
The Dollar and its Rivals, Riccardo Parboni, NLB £3.95.
Parboni traces the struggle of the dollar against the yen and the Deutschmark, and the new international monetary order after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early seventies.
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Penguin, £2.50.
Compelling. Anyone who has seen the TV series can't help but be fascinated by the long and difficult struggle of the bourgeoisie to find things to occupy their time. Pulls at the heart strings.