The title of this both intelligent and highly accessible book made me suspect it would simply advocate an anti-capitalist theology and present a vision of Jesus as a socialist. But in effect, Jesus and the Politics of Mammon by Hollis Phelps, does something a little different than simply presenting a socialist Christ.

In 2020, Joe Biden finds himself as the pick of the Democratic establishment for the US presidential primaries. Their case for Biden is a “return to normalcy” as the strategy to beat Donald Trump in the general election. In Branko Marcetic’s Yesterday’s Man, however, there is a strong case to be made against the 77-year-old’s presidential candidacy by looking into Biden’s legislative record.

Minor shortcomings aside, Latin America’s Pink Tide is, without exaggeration, the richest and most complete overview of the region’s leftist experiments to date. The volume is an essential starting point for debate on progressive governments’ legacy and strategic lessons for counter-hegemonic processes everywhere.

Ronald Purser’s new book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality presents a stunning takedown of a mindfulness that has been hijacked and manipulated by capitalist culture to neuter its political potential and make it useful to the corporate world.

Opening at the Film Forum in New York City Beanpole is a Russian film set in Leningrad just after the Second World War has ended. In addition to the shattered buildings left behind in the 900-day siege, there are also shattered human beings who survived by their wits and a stubborn desire to enjoy a normal life once again.

Priyamvada Gopal’s new book, Insurgent Empire, offers a thorough analysis of these episodes of rebellion throughout the British Empire from the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India, to the Mau Mau Rebellion in 1950s Kenya. Essential to these movements was the interaction of white and racialized activists, bringing forward ideas of freedom from the struggles and constructed poverty of colonial subjects. Emancipatory ideals among British thinkers didn’t just come from their own thought; these ideas were imparted on to them from diasporic anticolonial resistance.

Author and investigative reporter, Linda McQuaig’s latest publication offers a very readable and succinct review of the history of key Canadian public services and the threat that privatization poses to our country’s public wealth. She lays out how the virtues of public ownership have increasingly been replaced by the dogma that the market does all things better. McQuaig documents how this agenda has accelerated in the past four decades through deregulation, privatization and free trade initiatives.

What good is American Dharma for politics? Superficially, the film draws back the curtain on a cynical campaign that far exceeds the influence of the presidency in its implication, having commenced when Donald Trump was a cavorting Democrat. But this is only Bannon’s résumé, damnable as fact, and Morris does little to push back against his leading man’s perception of himself as a clandestine kingmaker.

Wisdom Engaged shows powerfully that health and well-being must also be at the centre of decolonisation and reconciliation efforts. The book gives compelling evidence that Indigenous health is fundamentally tied to land, language, and culture. “Being well” is the end purpose of community empowerment, emplacement, and self-determination

A true communist future requires a break with billionaire futurism, and that means not being blinded by the sleek visions of Silicon Valley that present technology as the solution to all our problems. Bastani should have left ‘fully automated luxury communism’ to massively online meme lords, but instead he has tainted any real left vision of the future by falling prey to the billionaire futurist version.