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.
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
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.
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
White Energy Workers of the North, Unite? A Review of Huber’s Climate Change as Class War
by Michael Levien
A Review of Revising the Revolution
: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917 by Larry E. Holmes
Ruth Fischer: The Ongoing Fascination of the Ultra-left
A Review of Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895–1961) by Mario Keßler
Wherefore Art Thou Socialism?
A Review of Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
Ukraine 1917: Socialism and Nationalism in a World Turned Upside Down
A Review of The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918, by Marko Bojcun
