For Wallis, who sees capitalism in strictly Manichean terms, as an absolute evil, it’s revolution or nothing. Reforms are of no avail, will never ever go far enough, and he completely rejects social democracy for having nothing of a lasting nature to commend itself, writing acerbically that the “alternative [to not opposing capitalism totally] is to reinforce the basic assumptions of anticommunism, which, in their social democratic variant, call for the decomposition of any coherent vision of social transformation and its replacement by a hodgepodge of socialist proposals grafted onto a presumably indestructible capitalist framework”
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THERE HAVE BEEN DOZENS of excellent and insightful reviews of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent project in response to this political and cultural moment. As a Weather Underground veteran, I suppose if I could add anything useful it would be to provide perspective on the history of extra-legal, anti-capitalist resistance groups
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THIS BOOK IS ABOUT failure and defeat.” It seems whether writer, activist, and podcast host Amber A’Lee Frost’s new memoir, Dirtbag, will stir lively curiosity or morbid fascination will depend on the reader. Those prone to wisecracks will revel in the deluges of “shade” dripping from each page; it has Chapo Trap House, the irreverent Left podcast the author co-hosts, written all over it. Like Chapo — Patreon’s most popular podcast until 2020 and which remains in the platform’s top 10 — Frost’s rise to prominence coincided with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, with Frost endorsing Sanders on the podcast and in the pages of Jacobin.
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IN MINORITY RULE: Adventures in the Culture War, British Left commentator Ash Sarkar seeks to expose how “minority elites” use the culture wars to stoke fear and panic in the media landscape. Over the course of her analysis, Sarkar mounts an extended criticism of contemporary identity politics on the Left. She contends that, through the kind of politics of victimhood and grievance it adopted, “the left unwittingly forged the political weapons being used against it by our political opponents”.
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THE JAPANESE COMMUNIST PARTY (JCP), founded in 1922, is in its 103rd year in 2025. In 2023, the Party published the party history book 100 Years of the Japanese Communist Party to commemorate its centenary. However, it is a self-congratulatory book written by the JCP itself and does not analyze the history of the rise and fall of the Party in a social and class-based context.
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