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

With its immediate recourse to non-violence, the most notable thing about Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence is not its case for a particular philosophy either as an ethical or tactical choice but in revealing the impotence of liberalism to deal with contemporary politics.

The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
Judith Butler
Verso, 2020
9781788732765