Voices for African Liberation presents 38 interviews with African and Africanist socialists conducted by the Review of African Political Economy between 2015 and 2023, bringing to life older voices of liberation and lost radical histories alongside newer initiatives, projects, and activists who are engaged in the contemporary struggles to reshape Africa.
Detailing how US-based intellectuals on the left are always ready with critiques that deliberately obscure the imperialist siege against Venezuela every time Bolivarian Revolution is faced with renewed threats to its survival, Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz investigate these ostensibly left demands that the Maduro government cede power to the fascist-led opposition that seeks its destruction.
In this interview, Alfie Hancox sits down with Alma of the University of Birmingham Palestine solidarity encampment to discuss how the camp began, developed internally, and now their desire to engage with the radical tradition of the university, including the legacy of Stuart Hall, to take their anti-colonial and anti-racist activism into the wider city.
Describing their personal experience of the riots in Sunderland and Middlesbrough, Sophia Alderson affirms that, although the demonstrations in Newcastle and other cities were inspiring and a much needed salve for the immediate threat of fascism on the streets, the left must organise wherever the fascist threat materialises and not abandon communities to fascism.
The defence industry should not be in our schools; far from teaching students about innovative ways to engineer technology for the future, representatives of these firms normalise the role in which they play in the global political economy, reproducing war in the service of the neo-colonial system – begging the question of how educators can resist imperialist ideology within the school system.
At a critical moment, Habash’s 1973 speech reminds us that a resistance movement grounded in an oath to the martyr can never die.
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
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
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