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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.

Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism: An Extended Discussion

By Irina Herb, Dana Abdel-Fatah, Deborshi Chakraborty, and George Edwards

Histories of ‘Everything’. A Review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

By Marcus Bajema

Jon Elster on French Absolutism and its Collapse in 1789. A Review of France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime

By Stephen J. Miller

Flashbacks, Fascism and the New Prehistory. Review of Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s by Romy Golan and Against the Avant-garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism by Ara Merjian

By Jacopo Galimberti

Everything Goes: Three Problems with The Dawn of Everything A Review of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

by Peter Kulchyski

Communists are Optimists by Profession: The Forgotten Story of the Hungarian Commune. A Review of Optimisti: roman jedne revolucije [The Optimists: The Novel of a Revolution] by Ervin Šinko

Stefan Gužvica

Following a failed counterrevolutionary uprising in Budapest in June 1919, the Hungarian Bolsheviks captured a group of young cadets from the Ludovica Military Academy who had participated in the revolt. The young men must have been horrified. They had no idea what fate lay in store for them, but they were sure it would not be good. They had heard stories of the ‘Red Terror’, of ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ roaming through the streets and summarily executing people like themselves. Their sentence was handed out at the suggestion of Ervin Sinkó, one of the commanders of the revolutionary defence: as punishment for their crimes against the revolution, they would have to read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

An Important Contribution to the History of Trotskyism in Bolivia: The Revolutionary Workers Party – Masas (POR-Masas) and the Revolutionary Tendency of the Armed Forces – Vivo Rojo A Review of ¡Abrir los cuarteles! Una historia de la Tendencia Revolucion

By Daniel Gaido

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Losing Power: The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party. A Review of The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919–30, edited and translated by Barbara C. Allen

By Daniel Gaido

DoE Cover

The Species above Constraints: A Review of The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

By Markar Melkonian

Book cover of Climate Change as Class War

White Energy Workers of the North, Unite? A Review of Huber’s Climate Change as Class War

by Michael Levien

Heinrich Contra Teleology: A Commentary on Heinrich’s Materialist Reconstruction of Marx’s Early Life

A Review of Karl Marx und die Geburt der modernen Gesellschaft [Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society] by Michael Heinrich

A Review of Revising the Revolution

: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917 by Larry E. Holmes