Book Reviews

While our journal no longer carries a reviews section, and shorter reviews are now featured on our website, Historical Materialism welcomes articles addressing key contemporary interventions in critical Marxist theory or literature reviews that seek to provide critical surveys of contemporary debates. The word length and criteria for these articles, including the peer-review process, are the same as for other submissions to the journal.

If you are interested in writing articles that critically address recent volumes in critical Marxist theory or critical literature reviews please contact the editorial board in advance with information about the volume(s) under consideration and a short abstract (250 words) outlining your argument.

If you are interested in submitting a shorter review, about a recent Marxist publication to the website, please send us your submission directly to website@historicalmaterialism.org.

Re-enchanting the Moving Image: On Julia Alekseyeva’s Antifascism and the Avant-Garde

Alexander Billet

There was a time when the works of Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, and Matsumoto Toshio were lauded as innovative and revelatory well outside the ranks of film school aesthetes and underground video stores, when they reached into at least the fringes of mainstream discourse.

Revolution and the Modern State: A Review of Eren Duzgun, Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity

Stephen Miller

'Capitalism, Jacobinism, and International Relations' amounts to a brilliant book, showing that, in France and the Ottoman Empire, universal citizenship, equality before the law, and mass conscription did not represent components of nascent capitalism but of an alternative Jacobin form of strengthening the state.

Response to Peter Lamb

Matt McManus

I wanted to express appreciation for Peter Lamb’s generous review of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Lamb’s review stresses the book’s scholarly merits and suggests it will be “very resourceful” for critical theorists interested in “immanent critique”. Lamb emphasises the “untapped potential” of the argument for liberal socialism and my failure to push it into a “new dimension”. I will respond two of Lamb’s major objections. Firstly, I will clarify liberal socialism’s commitment to normative individualism and methodological collectivism. Secondly, I will respond to Lamb’s concerns about the relationship between liberal socialism and Marxism.

Liberal Socialism, Marxism and the Limits of Liberalism

Peter Lamb

The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, Matthew McManus, Abingdon: Routledge, 2025.

Dance, Labour and Abstraction

Dave Beech

Josefine Wikström’s book Task Dance and Event Score: A Critique of Performance is a very timely and compelling contribution to the understanding of labour in art theory.

The Last Albanian Trotskyist?

Tevfik Rada

Little known today, Sadik Premtaj is nonetheless a crucial figure for understanding the early years of the Communist Party of Albania (CPA).

A Timely Book on Urgent Questions: Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers

E. Ahmet Tonak

E. Ahmet Tonak reviews Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre, Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers: Classical Political Economics, Imperialism and Ecological Breakdown. New York: Routledge, 2025

Marx the Good

Matt McManus

A review of Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought and Vanessa Will’s Marx’s Ethical Vision

On Zionism, capitalism, and labour: a review of Matan Kaminer’s Capitalist Colonial

Heba Taha

Matan Kaminer, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Stanford University Press, 2024.

Fully Emasculated, Red Lipstick Communism Now!

Cat Moir Wolfe

Ciara Cremin, The Spectral Woman: Transfemininity and the Abolition of Gender, Pluto Press, 2025

Enemies, Comrades, and The Counterrevolutionary Logic of Cisness

Katharina Hunfeld

Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, Trans femme futures: Abolitionist ethics for transfeminist worlds. Pluto Press, 2024.

Council Communists Meet Philosophers from Heidelberg – The Pre-History of Critical Theory in 1920s Germany

Jonathan Roessler

In der Dämmerung: Studien zur Vor- und Frühgeschichte der Kritischen Theorie (In the Twilight. Studies on the Pre- and Early History of Critical Theory) by Christian Voller, Matthes & Seitz, 2022, 414 pages, German.