An anonymous coward writes:

"Open Marxism?"

Tadzio Mueller

Reviewing Holloway, J., Change the World Without Taking Power,
London: Pluto Press 2002.

A spectre is haunting Marxism: the spectre of
anarchism. Anarchists, whether self-described or
called thus by the media, have been reaping most of
the publicity that the radical wing of the
globalisation-critical movement has been able to
generate, and Marxists are both excited and dismayed
by this. Excited, because for the first time in many
years there is a recognisable anti-capitalist protest
movement on the streets of advanced capitalist
countries; dismayed, because this relative resurgence
of anti-capitalist radicalism has not been accompanied
by a resurgence of Marxism.

"Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory"

John-Michael Bodi, H-Net

Reviewing Marxism against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole, and Glenn Rikowski, eds.
Revised
edition. Lanham and New York: Lexington Books, 2002. x + 341 pp.
Notes, bibliography, index. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7391-0345-8;
$34.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7391-0346-6.

It is always a uniquely rewarding experience to read current ideas
about philosophy and the human condition especially as they relate
to education as it is affected by capitalism. Most readers will
appreciate this book for its attempts to shed light on the evolution
of thought past postmodernism although the connections to education
are few.

While the U.S. "Big Media" rarely notice books that challenge the dominant ideology, this is not always so in other lands. Franklin Rosemont’s Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr, 2003) -- see Peter Linebaugh’s review here -- has not been mentioned in the New York Times or Newsweek, but here is an informative notice from the current (January 2004) issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, a paper with over 400,000 readers, published in Paris in nine languages. Reviewer Michael Lowy’s books in English include Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe and Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity.

Franklin Rosemont's Joe Hill

Michael Löwy

This is a splendid biography of Joe Hill (1877-1915), the legendary figure of American radicalism -- poet, composer, songwriter, cartoonist, and union militant, executed by the authorities of the State of Utah in 1915 after a notorious frame-up trial.

But this book is also a history of the counterculture created by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the great revolutionary union movement in North America. The author analyzes the internationalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and profoundly subversive spirit of this movement, emphasizing the humor, poetry, creativity, and romanticism of its culture, which in many respects seems to anticipate surrealism.

Abundantly illustrated with images, drawings, comics, and paintings produced by Joe Hill and his IWW friends and fellow workers, this 639-page book restores a too-little-known chapter in the history of the North American workers’ movement.

Surrealist Subversions:

Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States

Edited by Ron Sakolsky; Autonomedia 2002; USA; ISBN 1-57027-122-4; pbk. 742pp

Reviewed by Doug Campbell, Edinburgh Review #111, pp.113-15

Each new retrospective exhibition brings a flood of articles which seek to pigeonhole Surrealism as a Parisian Art movement of the twenties and thirties, damn it by association with Guinness ads and Dali’s careerist antics, and bury it with Breton, if not the outbreak of the second world war. Over and above the fact that Surrealism was, for Surrealists, always about far more than art, this ignores the existence of the other Surrealist groups that sprang up across the globe and of their distinct traditions.

The story of the Chicago Surrealist group, and the wider U.S. Surrealist movement that grew out of it, is a colourful one, likely to be unfamiliar to those who know Surrealism only through art historical accounts.