Reviews

Ian Parker reviews “I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalyptic Communism”.

Slavoj Žižek’s latest book mines the possibilities of exactly these new conditions in which we respect others in a quite new way, and he repeatedly returns to the question of what kind of social link COVID-19 creates in the world now.

Henry Maitles reviews ” Critique of Modern Barbarism: Essays on fascism, anti-Semitism and the use of History” by Enzo Traverso.

This film tells the true story of a corporate lawyer, Ron Bobitt, who started out defending big chemical companies like Dupont. But as a result of a family connection he ends up backing a farmer whose cows are being poisoned by Dupont. The insider becomes a redoubtable challenger to corporate power.

Sylvia has not written a history: it is better than that. She recollects the activities, the feelings and the hopes of young people coming into politics. The story is delightfully irreverent and funny.

Parasite by Korean director Bong Joon Ho, which has done so well at the Oscars, is at its heart about class war and family.

It was written, Hamja Ahsan says, ‘on the back of a lifetime of resentment’, and it throws a sharp unsparing light not only on the ‘Extrovert Supremacy’ but also on left practices that prop up the ghastly loud world of celebrity, extravagance and self-promotion that is the excessive unsustainable stuff of consumer capitalism.