Through a rigorous examination of Lenin’s writings and the shifting contexts in which he wrote them, Freeman masterfully rebuffs both accusations towards Lenin of elitism, and the determinist conclusions that many have drawn from Lenin’s political legacy.

Freeman defends Lenin’s conception that revolutionary Marxist conclusions can only originate externally to the working class (after all, workers generally do not have the time and resources to sit in the British Library for decades writing Capital), but also shows that Lenin’s goal was not an elitist seizure of power by middle-class intellectuals, but for working-class intellectuals to develop and ultimately make middle-class intellectuals obsolete within the revolutionary party.

Freeman also demonstrates the continuity of Lenin’s political thought. While Lenin did argue for a number of different organisational schemas for the party, these did not represent breaks in his politics, but rather a continuity in his argument that as material circumstances change, and as the class consciousness of layers of the proletariat develops, the party must both respond to these changes and, most importantly, that is only by adapting the party’s organisational structure that it is able to intervene in the class struggle to further develop the class consciousness of the most advanced laters of the proletariat.

Whilst this text is interesting in its own right in uncovering the history of class struggle in the Russian Empire, it’s major significance undoubtedly is in its political lessons: firstly, that it is possible for a small group of committed and serious revolutionary Marxists to grow to encompass the vast majority of the working class, and bring about the overthrow of capitalism and the self-emancipation of the working class; and secondly, in order to do this it is absolutely necessary for revolutionary Marxists to build a revolutionary Marxist party to actively intervene in the class struggle.

An incredibly inspiring read.

End Game is, by far, the most racist, elitist, anti-human, vile and dangerous book I have ever read. It is nothing but neo-Malthusian garbage.

In the 1700s the Reverend Thomas Malthus campaigned against improving the living standards of the poor because they would only have more children and thus require more investment in their quality of life. These ideas have proved popular with the ruling class and have inspired enforced famines, sterilisation programs and eugenics research. Malthus’s ideas were argued against strongly by Frederik Engels who summed them up thusly: “The earth is perennially overpopulated, whence poverty, misery, distress and immorality must prevail; that it is the lot, the eternal destiny of mankind, to exist in too great numbers, and therefore in diverse classes, of which some are rich, educated, and moral, and others more or less poor, distressed, ignorant and immoral.” These words could easily describe End Game.

The authors are explicit in their desire, not to eradicate inequality (in an echo of the logic of Malthus they note that improving the infrastructure in poor countries would simply raise the cost of living, so best let them just live in squalor), but simply to minimise the conflicts which arise from unequal distributed resources. Given that they repeatedly recount wearing pearls to exclusive parties and dining with powerful businesspeople, they clearly see themselves as the “rich, educated, and moral” and simply want to protect themselves from the “poor, distressed, ignorant and immoral.” They are clearly worried about the social order being upset by angry poor people wanting their fair share of Earth’s resources, repeatedly and at length quoting from US military and intelligence reports which equate inequality not with human suffering but with ‘national security’. They are also terrified of the Arab Spring, seeing it not as a powerful and inspiring example of class struggle overturning authoritarian regimes, but as a fateful warning: if there are not enough old, wise, (and preferable white) people, and too many poor, brown, thirsty, hungry, unemployed people, they will mess with the natural and legitimate order of society! Wouldn’t it be terrible if more young, working-class people “destabilise” society in other countries, such as the US or Australia!

If the fear mongering about ‘national security threats’ wasn’t already an indication, the authors of this book are extremely racist—jaw-droopingly racist, in fact. Just like Paul Erlich, who popularised the neo-Malthusian overpopulation myth in the 1960s and is quoted extensively in this book, the authors note they were first convinced that there are too many humans in the world when they first visited India and were overwhelmed and disgusted by the sheer number of brown people they saw. An explicit theme of the book is that, while the supposed impacts of ‘overpopulation’ are currently only being felt in far away lands populated by brown people who you don’t care about, these impacts will soon affect white people like you! Most chapters begins with the authors and their children—I like to think of them as The Racist Thornberries—traveling aboard to carry out scientific research. These vignettes all follow the same basic pattern. They begin by exoticising the location and the people who live there, before transforming into a tale of terror in which the local brown people are inhuman beasts. Crazed Nepalese villagers hack at each other with machetes, Indians with sinewy muscles point guns while uttering unintelligible sounds, South Africans with dead eyes reach through the bars of a take-away shop’s fence to grasp at fried chicken. And the message is always explicit—this is coming to your town. People in poor countries are described as ‘seething masses’ who will soon be ‘banging on the doors’ of rich nations. Population growth in Africa is described as a ‘tidal wave’ which will wash over Europe and North America. Muslim refugees, it warns, will soon be in your town, preying to Mecca, taking your job, and stealing your social security. One wonders if Australian Immigration Minister and Torturer-in-Chief hadn’t read this when he warned of ‘illiterate, innumerate’ refugees flooding Australia, taking our jobs while simultaneously languishing on the dole queue.

The authors are also profoundly anti-human. While they recognise that climate change, pollution, hunger and war are all problems, they view the root cause of all of these issues as arising from there simply being far too many humans. This is simply factually incorrect. Humans are not the problem. Instead, the problem is the system of capitalism which organises the world, enforcing the logic of profit which decides how the world’s productive capacity is used and how resources and wealth are distributed. It is not the vast majority of humanity which is destroying the planet, waging wars, and causing hunger and starvation, but instead a tiny minority of capitalists. The necessity for continued economic growth is not, as asserted by the authors, a myth, but is instead built into the system of capitalism. Looking for a second just at climate change, the authors themselves repeatedly acknowledge that the turning point for pollution and climate change was not around the dawn of humanity tens of thousands of years ago, but instead the Industrial Revolution a mere few hundred years ago, when the capitalist class had cemented their rule over the western world. They also mention that if the largest producers of consumer goods followed regulatory guidelines and used more sustainable technology they could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50%. However, they do not see the problem here as the being the capitalist minority, but instead the fault of all of humanity. Did you know that environmental catastrophes during the mining of rare earth metals for use in mobile phones is not the fault of corporations cutting corners as they strive for greater and greater profits, but instead is because people are greedy and want too much stuff and have too many babies?

Through convoluted twists of logic, the authors manage to use the supposed over-abundance of humans as the scape-goat for literally everything, from red pandas dying in the Himalayas, to terrorism, to school students being stressed when applying to tertiary educational institutions. They are adamant that humans are inherently awful people, believing ‘human nature’ encompasses everything from competition, over-consumption and obsession with status symbols to war, closed-mindedness, and intolerance. The Israel-Palestine conflict, it turns out, is not due to British and US imperialists colonising Palestine to gain influence in the oil-rich Middle East, but is somehow because there are too many people, and those people have intransigent religious and cultural beliefs (and also Palestinians are all suicide-bombing terrorists, just for some extra racist flavour). This leads to the authors having absolutely no plan to fix any of the very real problems they describe in their book. They do try to offer suggestions. First of all, they suggest that if rich people went on more holidays to poor countries, they will see they don’t need to buy so much stuff! Next, they are big proponents of green capitalism, suggesting that entrepreneurs stop selling things and instead sell experiences like wind surfing—genius!—and supporting the sorts of carbon pricing schemes which have totally failed in Europe and Australia (“more profits for the good guys”!) But most of all they put the onus on “people” and the “general populace” to “shift their attitudes”, acknowledge that “climate change is real”, overcome the “popular resistance to changing our ways”, stop craving after stuff, stop making babies, and stop having those pesky cultural differences that make us want to kill each other. But this isn’t even a solution going by the internal logic presented by the authors. Aren’t humans greedy monsters? Isn’t human nature inherently awful? By their own logic this is a dead end, and the earth is doomed.

Luckily, there is solution. Already, contrary to the authors’ assertions, most people recognise that climate change is real. It is not the intransigence of the working class which needs to be overcome, but the system of capitalism itself. In the US we have seen the heroic resistance of First Nations peoples and their supporters to the building of oil pipelines. In Australia there have been protests against the Adani Mine. It is direct, public, mass actions like these which can develop the class consciousness of working class people to recognise that it is the corporations, the governments and the police who are the ones destroying the planet. Similarly, while governments may be able to whip up patriotic fervour for a time, most people are generally against war. The historic demonstrations and mobilisations against the Iraq War show that the capitalist class are the ones who choose to go to war, and that it is the working class who oppose war, because it is in our interest to do so. The example of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is both illustrative and inspiring. The ruling class of Russia chose to go to war. They sent the workers and peasants of Russia to die in the trenches, and diverted the countries resources to the war effort leaving those on the home front starving and destitute. The workers and peasants raised the demand for Bread and Peace - they did not want the war, but instead wanted to be able to feed themselves. The Bolshevik Party recognised that neither the aristocracy nor the rising capitalist class was interested in these demands, and therefore could not be pleaded with but instead must be overthrown. Through months of protests and strikes the majority of the working class and peasantry, and thus the majority of the population of the Russian Empire, was won to this position, capitalism in Russia was overthrown, and Russia’s involvement in the war was ended. The Russian Revolution inspired a similar revolution in Germany which, while not successful, did end Germany’s involvement in the war and ended WWI. In Russia, now that the working class controlled production instead of a tiny minority of capitalists, resources could be distributed based on human need, not profit. Laws were passed to establish national parks, and technology was introduced to improve crop yields while minimising environmental degradation. It is this example that we need to follow if we want to see a world free from war, poverty, starvation, pollution and climate change.

This book is indescribably terrible. It lavishes praise on the Chinese One Child policy, implies that multiple waves of colonisation, slavery, and indentured servitude in Mauritius was a positive experience, and somehow thinks the US military and insurance industry are progressive because they acknowledge the existence of climate change. But it is right about one thing. At one point, the authors mention that wishy-washy liberal intellectuals and pro-military conservatives have more in common than they’d like to admit. After reading pages and pages of racist, pro-capitalist, liberal rubbish, all I could think was, “lol tru”.

Don’t read this book. Here are some things you could read instead:
- http://isreview.org/issue/68/are-there-too-many-people
- http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/autumn-2011/70-dealing-with-climate-change
- http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/autumn-2011/68-overpopulation-or-overblown-lies
- http://isj.org.uk/dispelling-the-malthus-myth/
- http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no-11-summer-2016/129-marxism-and-the-natural-world
- http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/autumn-2011-78/63-marxism-and-the-arab-revolutions

The best book ever written about the most important event to ever happen in human history.

Absolute best book ever!

Chris Harman clearly demonstrates the tendency of capitalism to enter into recurrent economic and political crisis, and explores the context and outcomes of one such period of crisis, the events of 1968-74. He looks at both the objective factors shaping this crisis, but also the subjective factors--the people and organisations which took part in these events, and the arguments they made about how to best go about shaping them.

Reformist forces such as the Stalinist and eurocommunist Communist Parties, various social democratic parties, trade union bureaucracies, etc, were able to restrain the struggles of workers and students, keeping them within the bounds of the capitalist system, ultimately allowing ex-fascists, hard-right conservatives and neo-liberal social democrats hack away at workers' gains over the next few decades. Revolutionary socialists, while making gains and playing an important part throughout these struggles, were not able to make use of the opportunities presented and follow through on the full potential of the situation. The potentials that existed can be seen in the actions of the students and workers, their inspiring self activity, their occupations of universities, factories and other workplaces, and the revolutionary conclusions many of them came to.

Harman examines the weaknesses of the revolutionary socialist groups--their theoretical and organisational failings, as well as the simple fact that at the start of 1968 these groups were tiny. The message of the book is clear: if you want to change the world for the better you need to be prepared for the next crisis of capitalism, the next revolutionary upsurge--the fire next time. You need to not only be in a revolutionary socialist organisation, but you need to be active. Only through activity can a group's theory be clarified, and only by putting in the effort to help the group grow can it be sizeable enough to take advantage of the opportunities that arise.

As Rosa Luxemburg said, we stand at a crossroads between socialism and barbarism. Reading this book helps you understand why the fire last time ultimately failed to reach socialism and instead led us back to the path we are on now: to the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay; to offshore processing of refugees and the death of Alan Kurdi; to Milo Yianoppoulos and the United Patriots Front; to the NT intervention and Aboriginal kids in spit hoods; to the ABCC and the slashing of weekend penalty rates. And hopefully people reading it will be inspired to take action and get involved in socialist politics so that next time the opportunities presented will be grasped with both hands, the working class will bring an end to class-divided society, all forms of oppression will be abolished, and instead of the horrors of capitalism, humanity will be able to live under socialism.

A very interesting, if somewhat politically confused, look at the US working class (specifically those who are white and from the South). Bageant's rather idiosyncratic mixture of left-liberalism and social democracy is often internally contradictory, but he clearly has something of a working class consciousness, even if it is tainted by a strong dose of liberalism and illusion in the potential of the Democratic party and of tertiary education. The book is entertainingly written, often insightful, has good positions on topics like gun control, imperialism and prisons, and is a good antidote to other books in a similar vein such as Hillbilly Elegy. A shame about the weird chunks of one chapter that ramble on about Scotts-Irish culture and King James and how they somehow are responsible for white trash, though.

Shawki clearly and succinctly takes the reader through the major struggles for Black liberation throughout US history, and the theories and arguments of the leaders of those struggles. Through celebrating the successes of these struggles and examining their failings, Shawki puts forward his own arguments for how to ultimately win Black liberation—spoiler warning, it’s socialism. Excellent book, a must-read for anyone who wants to fight against racism.