Against the Current No. 233, November/December 2024

The Zone of Interest
Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer
Produced by Film4, Access & Polish Film Institute
Distributor A24; 2023)

The Höss family's spacious garden, with the concentration camp in the background.

THE ZONE OF Interest shows us some months in the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who live with their family (five children, several servants) in a house with a spacious garden in the “Zone of Interest” next to the extermination camp, the interior of which is almost never seen,...

The Specter of Materialism:
Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus
By Petrus Liu
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023, x + 239 pages,
$29.95 paperback.

EFFORTS TO PRODUCE a ”queer Marxism,” at least by that name, date back a mere 15 years, to the publication of Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire in 2009.(1) The great majority of queer Marxism publications in the intervening years have been by U.S. academics or academics in other English-speaking rich countries, focusing more often than not on U.S. examples.(2)

In keeping with the anti-imperialist tradition in Marxism and the “transnational turn” in queer studies, there have however been attempts by queer Marxists for years....

The Patriots’ Dilemma:
White Abolitionism and Black Banishment
in the Founding of the United States of America
By Timothy Messer-Kruse
London, Pluto Press, 2024. $26.95 paperback.

THE PATRIOTS’ DILEMMA explores the contradictory attitudes of the U.S. founders toward slavery. Timothy Messer-Kruse’s new book argues that although many founders opposed slavery, their vision of a “white republic” inhibited their meager attempts to abolish it.

The racist idea of a whites-only country, which existed even before independence, aimed to create a society based on the elimination of Black and Indigenous people. This goal led them to develop harsh legal, political, and military methods to control enslaved people after 1781....

Quitting the Master Race:
A Daughter’s Journey to Break the Bonds of Hate
By Barbara Leimsner
Friesen Press, 2024, 240 pages. $12 paperback.

QUITTING THE MASTER Race is a memoir in which the author grapples with the legacy of her father’s Nazi past. I knew the author in the 1990s, when we worked together on several campaigns incuding one to get an abortion clinic set up in Ottawa. I was only vaguely aware of her parents’ story so I was very interested to hear her account when the book came out.

Barbara Leimsner’s family came to Canada from Germany in 1957 when she was almost four years old. They settled first in Oshawa, Ontario and later in Whitby,...

The Next Shift:
The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
By Gabriel Winant
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021,
368 pages. $19.95 paperback.

IN THE SPRING of 2007, I accepted a temporary clerical position at a large, not-for-profit teaching hospital in Michigan. Over the past 17 years, through transitions from temp to permanent employee and from clerk to registered nurse, I have observed first-hand the ways that lean management techniques have degraded working conditions as well as patient care.

While the principles of lean management, originally developed at Toyota, moved from manufacturing to penetrate the health care industry only in the early 21st....

Troubled Waters
A Sea Story
By Syd Stapleton
288 pages, $18.99 from Amazon

SAY YOU HAPPENED to sit down next to Frank Tomasini in a waterfront bar somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. You nod and exchange pleasantries. Three hours later you would be in deep, delightful, and consequential conversation with this new friend. Tomasini, the protagonist in Syd Stapleton’s new mystery novel Troubled Waters — a Sea Story, is a 47-year-old marine surveyor in Washington State’s San Juan Islands.

On a dreary evening, Tomasini receives an urgent radio distress call as he sits down to supper on his boat,...

After teaching in the men's prison in Batouri, Ellen Poteet relaxing with the neighborhood children.

ELLEN SPENCE POTEET, a former editor of Against the Current (ATC) and member of Solidarity, died at age 64 of an unknown illness in early April 2023 in the town of Batouri in the East Region of Cameroon. At the time, Ellen was on leave from her position as Lecturer in the History Department of the University of Michigan (U-M), planning to return to Ann Arbor in August.

That month she had planned, with editor Dianne Feeley, to complete a commissioned ATC article about the South African revolutionary Neville Alexander (1936-2012), whom she had long admired.

For much of the previous year Ellen had been teaching English and French four hours a day in a prison....