A review of Tina Ngata’s Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions
Tina Ngata of Ngāti Porou has recently published Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions. At the launch of this book on 28th November 2019, Tina Ngata described how she had started with a blog called The Non-plastic Māori, exploring “the experience of living for a year without purchasing any new plastics”, which quickly developed to explore […]
Chernobyl
Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin, dir. Johan Renck. A co-production of HBO and Sky UK. This outstanding TV miniseries covers the accident that occurred in the early hours of 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then part of the USSR. From the confusion in the control room straight after the […]
History for a new generation
Dawn Raid, by Pauline (Vaeluaga) Smith, Scholastic New Zealand Limited, 2018. Meet Sophia Savea, a 13-year-old who lives in Cannons Creek, Porirua during the 1970s. It’s when the minimum wage was $1.95, when milk was delivered every day, when disco music reigned supreme, and when there was the National government headed by hated ‘Piggy’ Robert […]
New Perspectives for Rebuilding Union Power
On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War By Kim Moody (Haymarket Books, Chicago 2017) Is there a revival of working-class confidence happening in Aotearoa? The PPTA and NZEI are going into bargaining with big pay claims (e.g. 16 percent over two years for primary teachers) and health workers went on strike for […]
An Act of Cultural Resistance
The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story by Ramzy Baroud (Pluto Press, London 2018) Ramzy Baroud’s The Last Earth is a collection of eight narratives told by ordinary Palestinians who have, in their own way, struggled against the violence inflicted upon their country by Israel over the past one hundred years. The book bears witness to […]
The Expropriators are Expropriated
Review of ‘The Expropriators are Expropriated’ and other writings on Marxism By Tom O’Lincoln (Melbourne: Interventions Inc). Tom O’Lincoln’s The Expropriators are Expropriated is a collection of talks and essays from his political career in socialist organisations in Australia from the early 1980s. Tom’s writing is immensely readable and easy to understand. In this collection, […]
A Rebel’s guide to Eleanor Marx
A Rebel’s Guide to Eleanor Marx, by Siobhan Brown “Eleanor Marx saw an alternative: a class that organised across borders, just as the rich do. She was a champion of the oppressed who linked the everyday struggles to a big vision. Our task remains the same.” These are the concluding lines of Siobhan Brown’s short […]
Review: Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)
Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement by Jane McAlevey, Verso, 2014. Workers today, in more cases than not, bear passive witness to a world where we have less power and a smaller share of society’s wealth than in generations. It’s rare for us to see any substantial challenge to […]
Review: Love’s Labour’s Lost
Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Ania Upstill. The Dell, Wellington Botanic Gardens until 27 February. Tickets here. The scene is set for a pitched battle at Ania Upstill’s Summer Shakespeare production of Loves’ Labours Lost. We sit along a thrust stage, or rather lawn. At one end sits the stuffy pomp of the Court of […]
When Black Workers Organized Against Jim Crow
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression by Robin Kelley. A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this wonderful classic work of workers’ history was published last year. Robin Kelley has magnificently brought to light the little known struggles of communist party-supporting workers and sharecroppers, the majority of whom were black, under ferocious conditions of […]
