Category: Book Reviews

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia

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By Gregory Elich

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. By Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2022, xiv + 227 pp., $80.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781503610255

By all accounts, precarious labor has been playing an increasingly significant role in global capitalism in recent years. Employment in nonregular positions tends to be of limited duration, providing low wages and little or no labor and health protections. Essentially, business offloads the risks of work onto the worker while simultaneously cutting labor costs. This trend has broader ramifications in eroding social protections even for regular workers. Indeed, the authors of Precarious Asia argue that the binary categories of regular vs. irregular work and formal vs. informal work fail to explain the complexities of developments in global labor. In their view, the term precarious work should be applied to any worker who bears the risks of employment, regardless of labor categorization. 

“Asia is the world’s factory,” the book reminds us, and what happens on the continent is directly connected to economic patterns elsewhere in the world. The shift toward precarious labor within developed capitalist countries produces competitive downward pressures on labor throughout the global value chain. In focusing on Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, the authors intend “to understand the similarities and differences for the insights they can provide into precarious work in different national contexts and to suggest some generalizable conclusions from the three cases” (6). This global perspective is crucial for understanding the interconnected nature of labor issues.

Migration as Economic Imperialism

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By Gregory Elich

Numbering an estimated 169 million, [1] international migrant laborers are generally regarded in mainstream economic circles as playing a substantial role in poverty alleviation and economic development in their home countries. This is accomplished, it is asserted, through remittances sent home by migrants, reaching an estimated $647 billion arriving in low- and moderate-income countries in 2022, a total that surpasses foreign direct investment in those nations. [2] As one World Bank policy researcher explains, remittances “have a profound impact on the living standards of people in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.” [3]

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Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966–1985

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By Gregory Elich

Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966-1985. ed. Christopher J. Lee, Seagull Books, Kolkata, 2022. 624 pp., $45.00 hb

Since Alex La Guma passed away in 1985, his name has generally faded from public memory, at least in the Western world. Yet during his lifetime, La Guma was a well-regarded novelist, short-story writer, and South African anti-apartheid activist.

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Race, Militarism and the US Scheme to Control the Pacific

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By Gregory Elich

Christine Hong’s marvelous book, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, arrives at a time when Washington’s Indo Pacific Strategy is driving U.S. political, economic, and military confrontation in the Asia-Pacific, as the culmination of a long process that began in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

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The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66

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By Gregory Elich

Review: The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66, by Geoffrey B. Robinson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Cloth, pp 429.

Half a million people killed and more than a million imprisoned and tortured; the tragedy that befell Indonesia in 1965 was among the more dramatic moments in 20th-century history. It is also one of the most ignored. After more than half a century, Geoffrey B. Robinson’s new book is the first comprehensive history to appear in the English language.

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A Strong Antidote to Western Propaganda on Korea

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By Gregory Elich

Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, by Stephen Gowans. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018. Paper, $24.95, pp 270

The release of Stephen Gowans’s superb new book could not be better timed. With the Korean Peninsula on the potential brink of major change, looking to Western mainstream media for reasoned analysis is a fool’s errand. Gowans provides a valuable service in filling that gap by situating Korea in its historical context while making no compromise with received opinion or resorting to lazy formulations.

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The War on Syria: Exposing Media Distortions

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By Gregory Elich

The war in Syria, mainstream media tell us, is a simple story, with a brutal dictator on one side and freedom-loving rebels on the other. Into this mix, the Islamic State has inserted itself, while the benevolent United States must intervene to rescue the Syrian people. U.S. involvement in Syria, motivated by altruism, the story goes, arose in direct response to events in 2011.

This view is as fanciful as it is notable for its myopic self-regard.

In Washington’s Long War on Syria, Stephen Gowans dismantles the official story, myth by myth, and provides the context without which it would be impossible to understand events.

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Bombs for Peace: A Review

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By Gregory Elich

George Szamuely.  Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia.  Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Paper.  Pp. 611.

In Bombs for Peace, George Szamuely, a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute at London Metropolitan University, has produced a revealing and sharply argued analysis of Western intervention in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.  The primary focus of the book is on Western diplomatic and military interventions, which played a crucial role in the breakup of Yugoslavia and the plunge into conflict.  Continued intervention fueled deeper conflict, as the United States repeatedly smashed every prospect for peaceful settlement until it could impose its control over the region.

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Constructing the North Korean Revolution

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kim

By Gregory Elich

Suzy Kim.  Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press.  Cloth, 45.00, pp 307.

With Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950, Suzy Kim has filled a major gap in the history of North Korea.  In the West, it has become customary to fixate on the top leadership in historical coverage of the subject.  That approach stems partly from a lack of access to North Korean archives, but perhaps more strongly from an inclination to smooth over complexities in order to supply a simplified narrative that is easily digestible and harmonious with the imperatives of Western policy.

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America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity

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By Gregory Elich

America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, by Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009. $26.95; paper, $18.95, Pp. 439

U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era has been notable for its militarism, with the United States embroiled in a more or less permanent state of war coupled with military spending that now exceeds that of the rest of the world combined. How this came to be is the question that Craig and Logevall set out to answer in America’s Cold War.

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