MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
The reactionary basis of identity politics
ALEX HALL is intrigued by a left-wing account of the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics
CLEAR THINKING: International Red Aid propaganda poster in Russian and Uzbek language: "Wrest eight innocent young negroes out of the hands of the American bourgeoisie!" American policeman is depicted in front of the Nazi swastika with baton raised against food rioters
[Russian State Library/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics
Kenan Malik, Hurst, £20
EVENTS have not gone as Kenan Malik would have liked since about the 1960s and definitely not since the late 1980s and the Salman Rushdie affair. As an anti-capitalist activist, journalist, academic and broadcaster, the disarray and ineffectiveness of the left has been a major concern.
The problem has been the disappearance of class-based solidarity in favour of identity-based solidarity, and although he left the left (or perhaps, as he might put it, the left left him) he now explains the intellectual threads which brought the cleavage between class-based politics and culture-based politics.
Today’s “culture wars” are the present tail-end of this phenomenon. This book is a remarkable help in untangling some present threads and themes, although it doesn’t quite give us Ariadne’s thread out of the Labyrinth.
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