Against the Current No. 235, March/April 2025

Abortion Beyond the Law:
Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion
By Naomi Braine
Verso Books, 2023, 240 pages, $24.95 paperback.

IN THE FACE of escalating restrictions and criminalization of abortion, Naomi Braine’s Abortion Beyond the Law highlights the transformative power of mutual aid and solidarity in ensuring access to abortion, despite oppressive laws.

Through interviews with activists around the world, Braine explores how informal, autonomous health....

DURING MUCH OF Barbara Dane’s lifetime, I seldom thought of her as a musical giant. She was, after all, my stepmother and that relationship, as it so often is, could be complicated. Yet in the last few years of her life, I came to understand what I had so long failed to see: how tremendous her musical gifts were and how much her deeply-held political commitments guided her musical career....

In the Company of Radical Women Writers
By Rosemary Hennessy
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023, 304pages, $24.95, paper.

Dorothy Parker in Hollywood
By Gail Crowther
New York: Gallery Books, 2024, 304 pages, $29.99, hardback.

Riding Like the Wind:
The Life of Sanora Babb
By Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024, 416 pages, $27.95, hardback.

1. In League with the Future,,,,

Truth Behind Bars
Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution
By Paul Kellogg
AU Press, 2021, 440 pages, $37.99.

“THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION brought tremendous exaltation to vast sections of the Russian people. After eight months of frustrated expectations, there was now a profound sense of relief…. The deepest sensation which October aroused in the people was joy. In city, village, and Army people rejoiced in the fullness of their liberation, in the limitless freedom that now summoned their creative efforts.” (Truth Behind Bars, 7)

So wrote Isaac Steinberg in 1953. Steinberg had been a leader of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, and served as People’s Commissar of Justice in early 1918 during the short-lived coalition government between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs.(1)

World Bolshevism
By Julius Martov
Introduction by Paul Kellogg
Translated by Paul Kellogg and Mariya Melentenyeva
 AU Press, 2019, U.S. Distribution by University of Chicago Press,
192 pages, $30.99 paperback.(1)

VICTOR SERGE, IN the article cited in the previous review of Truth Behind Bars, noted:

“In order to be fair I add that the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the anarchists, and some opposition communists, like Sapronov and Vladimir Smirnov demonstrated a clairvoyance in this regard (predicting prior to 1927 what Stalin would make of the revolution —SD) that must be recognized today as admirable and that served only to render them unpopular, since they went against the general sentiment and the sincerity of the party.”(2)

Gaza Faces History
By Enzo Traverso
Other Press, 2024, 127 pages, $15.99 paperbck.

Half a million Gazas trek north to their homes, now mostly reduced to rubble.

JAMES BALDWIN ONCE wrote that the state of Israel was created out of “Western interests” and that Palestinians had long paid the price for Europe’s “guilty Christian conscience.”

Baldwin was referring both to the realpolitik support given by Europe to Zionism as a political project,...

Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic
By Ilan Pappe
Oneworld Publications, 2024. xviii +521 pages plus bibliography and index, $40 hardcover.

“At the end of the day, many people in the twenty-first century cannot continue to accept a colonization project requiring military occupation and discriminatory laws to sustain itself. There is a point at which the lobby cannot endorse this brutal reality and continue to be seen as moral in the eyes of the world. I believe and hope this point will be reached within our lifetimes.” (521)

THIS IS THE hopeful conclusion of Ilan Pappe’s book. At the outset, this anti-Zionist Israeli historian poses a rhetorical question: “Why does this Jewish state still crave recognition of its legitimacy in the West?” (xi)...

Crude Capitalism
Oil, Corporate Power, and
the Making of the World Market
By Adam Hanieh
Verso Books, 2024. 336 pages, $29.95 hardcover.

CRUDE CAPITALISM IS a concise and fast-paced history of oil’s political and economic significance in facilitating and expanding a world capitalist market over the past 150 years. Its author warns us, however, against seeing oil as the driving force: “it is simply a sticky black goo.”

The resource becomes a valuable commodity in the capitalist logic of accumulation. Indeed, over the last third of the book Adam Hanieh explains that this dense energy resource has become even more than a commodity, but transformed into a financial derivative....

The Palestine Exception (2024), dir. Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth, prod. Marlene Eid; The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza (2024), dir. & prod. Kavitha Chekuru; Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines,Where Olive Trees Weep (2024), dir. Maurizio Benazzo and Zaya Benazzo, prod. Science and NonDuality; Israelism (2023), dir. Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, prod. Daniel J. Chalfen, Nadia Saah, Erin Axelman; Tantura (2022), dir. Alon Schwartz, dist. Journeyman Pictures; Occupation of the American Mind (2016; 2023), dir. Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, prod. Media Education Foundation; Roadmap to Apartheid (2012), dir. and prod. Eron Davidson and Ana Nogueira....

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States:
A Graphic Interpretation
Adapted by Paul Peart-Smith, edited by Paul Buhle
Beacon Press, 2024, $22.95 cloth.

ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ’S AN Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States was first released in 2015 as part of Beacon Press’s Revisioning History series. Other books in the series include the histories of queer and disabled people.

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