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Class struggle at the video games console
BEN COWLES recommends an excellent Marxist critique of the video-games industry
Playing with Marx: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
(Haymarket Books, £12.99)
ON THE face of it, Marxists might not seem to have all that much to say about video games and gamers might not necessarily have all that much interest in Marx. But Jamie Woodcock’s brilliant book explains why they both should.
Marx made his video game debut in 2015 in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. And it was while playing through a sequence where one of the villains belittle the game’s protagonist while delivering a monologue on the industrial “miracle” that brought him his cup of tea, that Woodcock realised the vast complexity of the video game industry.
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Strike Map co-founder HENRY FOWLER discusses the significance of today’s joint union letter to video game giant Rockstar, demanding trade union recognition for its workers. Their conversation highlights how our movement can harness its collective power to rebuild union power across the private sector
ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book