Books by David Black

The year is 1944, and Lieutenant Harry Gilmour is recovering in Beirut from an ill-fated British campaign to seize the Greek Islands.After four years at sea, he is expecting a shore job as his next appointment. Instead, a flash signal from C-in-C Mediterranean arrives: Report to Alexandria and assume command of HM Submarine Saraband.His new command has just arrived there en route to the Indian Ocean and the war against Japan. But there has been trouble on board, 'Conduct prejudicial to naval discipline,' and the skipper and first lieutenant have been summarily removed. Now it's up to Harry Gilmour to pick up the pieces.With a sullen, uncooperative crew, Harry must navigate Japanese convoy routes through the shallow, treacherous waters of the Malay Archipelago. There, endless, sweltering hunts for targets through the island chains leave Saraband's crew even more exhausted and demoralised. Yet, if they are to survive against an Imperial Japanese Navy growing in anti-submarine expertise, Harry must turn them into a taut fighting machine.Because waiting for them, as the war in the Far East grinds towards its final conclusion, is a mission as daring and audacious as it is vital. One that could deliver the Royal Navy's most spectacular success of the war.

Despite the transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. This collection of essays demonstrate how the consequences of inequality extend throughout society and the political economy, crippling the quest for social justice, polarising the politics, skewing economic outcomes and bringing devastating environmental consequences in their wake.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel located the origin of philosophical abstraction in the false conciousness brought about by the new money economy of Greek Antiquity. In the Enlightenment the conceptual barrier Kant put between phenomenal reality and the thing-in-itself expressed, in Sohn-Rethel's view, the reified consciousness stemming from commodity-exchange and the division of mental and manual labor. Because Sohn-Rethel saw the entire history of philosophy as branded by a timeless universal logic, he dismissed Hegel's concept of totality as idealist and Hegel's critique of Kantian dualism as irrelevant to Marx's critique of political economy.David Black, in the title essay of The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism, suggests, contra Sohn-Rethel, that Marx's exposition of the fetishism of commodities is historically-specific to capitalist production, and therefore cannot explain the origins of philosophy, which Black shows to have involved various historical developments in Greek society and culture as well as monetization. Just as Hegel's critique of Kantian formalism informs Marx's critique of capital, Hegel's writings on how the proper organization of labor might abolish the barrier Aristotle put between production and the Realm of Freedom prefigure Marxs efforts to formulate of an alternative to capitalism. Part Two, Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class Consciousness and Reification, begins with Surrealism, whose disappearance as a revolutionary artistic and social force Guy Debord and the Situationists sought to make up for by superseding the poetry of Art with the poetry of Life. As well highlighting Debord's achievements in both theory and practice, Black points to his philosophical shortcomings and relates these to Debord's later pessimistic assessment of the possibility of revolutionary class consciousness within globalizing capitalism. The four essays in Part Three cover the Aristotelian anarchism, the ambivalent legacy of Lukcs theory of reification, Raya Dunayevskaya's Hegelian-Marxist concept of absolute negativity as revolution in permanance, and Gillian Rose's philosophical challenge to both postmodernism and traditional Marxism.

Helen Macfarlane, revolutionary social critic, feminist and Hegelian philosopher wis the first English translator of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel's theCommunist Manifesto (her original translation is included in this edition). Marx publicly admired her as a rare and original thinker and journalist.

Like all young men of a certain age, Harry Gilmour had his own notion of how a naval battle should be. This wasnΓÇÖt it.Norway, 1940: Sub Lieutenant Harry GilmourΓÇÖs first encounter with battleship action is not the adventure he had hoped for. Faced with a thankless task and ill equipped to handle it, GilmourΓÇÖs inexperience leads to a damning allegation. His future hangs in the balance.But then Lieutenant Peter Dumaresq steps in to offer him a lifelineΓÇöan advanced navigation course that will take him aboard a crack submarine, HMS Pelorus, under the command of a Royal Navy hero. Faced with a possible court martial, Harry chooses life underwater. Once aboard, however, Harry is confronted for the first time by the full horror of submarine warfare. If he can just overcome his fears, it will be the making of him.Because survival itself is the challenge now. For Harry and the rest of the crew, the next depth charge could be the one that sinks them.