Paul Buhle

a review of

Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present Edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2011, 417pp, $19

Syndicalism, the love child of socialism (or Marxism) and anarchism, seems to be badly outdated, or is it?

The idea that the working class could overthrow capitalism and the state through a general strike, and administer a new society through workers councils reached a peak popularity shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, but sunk rapidly thereafter. It was sometimes criticized as the propensity of highly skilled workers, but actually it was the faith of the lower levels (especially in the Industrial Workers of the World, if rarely called syndicalism by them).

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a review of

A Cultural History of The Punisher: Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance by Kent Worcester. University of Chicago Press, 2023

Literally hundreds of comic books and graphic novels bear the imprint, directly and indirectly, of one luminous character: the Punisher. Most of us know little about this ultra-violent global icon who has been around since 1974 and continues to draw millions of readers. That the Punisher seems so deeply ambivalent, heroic or anti-heroic by turns, is obviously key to his status.

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a review of

Me, Mikko, and Annikki: A Community Love Story in a Finnish City by Tiitu Takal. North Atlantic Books, 2019

The continuing interest at the Fifth Estate in anarchist/community struggles as seen in comic art, inadvertently passed over an extremely remarkable example in Tiitu Takal’s Me, Mikko, and Annikki: A Community Love Story in a Finnish City, to which I wrote the Afterword.

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a review of

Resurgence: Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism and the Resurgence Youth Movement 1964–1967 edited by Abigail Susik. Eberhardt Press, 2023

Who would have suspected that the humble mimeograph duplicator, invented for office work and used by organizations of every imaginable kind, would also have a political-cultural role across generations?

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a review of

Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS by Janet Biehl, PM Press, 2021

This is a remarkable graphic novel that could be described as part of an emerging genre of comics journalism. Joe Sacco famously showed the way with his on-the-scene descriptions of conflict in the Balkans and the West Bank, graphic novels that reached all the way across the world in many languages.

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