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.
Response to Peter Lamb
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
The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, Matthew McManus, Abingdon: Routledge, 2025.
Dance, Labour and Abstraction
The Last Albanian Trotskyist?
A Timely Book on Urgent Questions: Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers
Marx the Good
On Zionism, capitalism, and labour: a review of Matan Kaminer’s Capitalist Colonial
Matan Kaminer, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Stanford University Press, 2024.
Fully Emasculated, Red Lipstick Communism Now!
Ciara Cremin, The Spectral Woman: Transfemininity and the Abolition of Gender, Pluto Press, 2025
Enemies, Comrades, and The Counterrevolutionary Logic of Cisness
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
In the Twilight. Studies on the Pre- and Early History of Critical Theory) by Christian Voller, Matthes & Seitz, 2022, 414 pages, German.
Materialism and the Legal Form
Sonja Buckel, Subjectivation and Cohesion, trans. Monika Vykoukal (Brill, 2021)
The USSR Home Front and World War II
Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer (eds.), Hunger and War. Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II, Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015
