Archive of Weekend Read

Kate Millett remembers her mother.  

An inquiry into Du Bois' articulation with Liberia, colonialism and its concomitant formations of Black middle classes, the history of the "Americo-Liberian" elite, and the advent of the United States as a colonial power.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki's prescient essay — written for New Left Review in 1984 and included in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution — on the contradictions of automated labor and the commodification of knowledge by software, which responds to claims about automation and value advanced by Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism. 

Timpanaro launches a polemic against the two major tendences of post-war Western Marxism — Frankfurt School critical theory and Althusserian structuralism — and a defense of the late Engels in an effort to reunite historical materialism with a materialism of the natural sciences, inspired by the writings of Giacomo Leopardi.

Any concept which — like "exterminism" — collates all the "inertial," "irrational," "symmetrical" and institutionally "autonomous" aspects of the arms race into a single over-riding process will make it harder to understand the purposeful, strategic function of the current arms build-up within the larger context of the New Cold War.

Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley look at the development of communist movements in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and respond to the claims of Western analysts who rooted conflicts between them after 1975 in "traditional" antagonisms. 

Gail Lewis's classic essay on the position of black women in the British economy, from Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain. 

In the essay below (reproduced here in two parts), Sivanandan, author of Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism, undertakes a thorough critique of the New Times current developed within the Thatcher-era Marxism Today, and which would prove an influence on the rhetoric of Labour in the 1990s.