Book Review: Alison McCulloch, Fighting to Choose: The Abortion Rights Struggle in New Zealand
When an abortion service started in Invercargill last year, anti-abortionists quickly mobilized against it. An anonymous e-mail was to sent to the Abortion Law Reform Association NZ threatening ALRANZ and clinic staff: “People who work at the clinic are legitimate targets and so are you. You’ll be hearing from me again, that is if your […]
Interrogating capitalist democracy
BOOK REVIEW: Brian S. Roper, The History of Democracy: a Marxist Interpretation (Pluto Press, 2012) British historian Geoffrey Ste Croix described the struggle for political control over the state as “class struggle on the political plane”. It is a neat formulation that Brian S. Roper effectively deploys to explain the history of Western democracy. In […]
Tui, Tuia: Gathering the threads of working-class history
BOOK REVIEW: Jared Davidson, Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism and Early New Zealand Anarchism (AK Press, 2013) We first encounter Philip Josephs, subject of Jared Davidson’s engrossing, lovingly-written, richly detailed and passionately political new book Sewing Freedom, as he addresses Wellington’s 1906 May Day demonstration: “This meeting sends its fraternal greetings to our comrades engaged […]
Militant Classics: Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou
Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou by Ranginui Walker (revised edition 2004) Ranginui Walker presents a history of Aotearoa/New Zealand from the perspective of Maori fighting for self-determination. In this way the book has a ‘bottom up’ or ‘people`s history’ feel too it – it is an indispensable resource for activists today. Walker has been an engaged intellectual, […]
Review: We Will Work With You!
This is a wonderful exhibition, and is bound to fascinate every left-wing person interested in art and design, or just curious to see some of the history of the many social and political struggles from the past decades in Wellington. Some of the work and originality that the work building activist campaigns demands – in […]
Film Review: American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein
“Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians.” It is […]
Book Review: The Lacuna
How do you write a history of revolutionary lives and activity in the mid 20th century and sell it to the public? A tough order, certainly, but Barbara Kingsolver nails it with The Lacuna. The book follows the life of a young man, Harrison Shephard, who finds himself living between the worlds of his Mexican mother and American […]
TV Review: Songs from the Inside
Songs from the Inside is a brilliant documentary series currently on Maori TV about four musicians coaching inmates at Arohata and Rimutaka to write their own songs. The documentary is a welcome antidote to “reality TV”. Both the producer Maramena Roderick and director Julian Arahanga are very aware that they do not want to create a […]
