Marx’s reflections assume the existence of a money commodity, in this case gold. If a commodity functions as money, then the value of the money commodity is no more imaginary than the value of other commodities…. | more…
Born in a Jim Crow hospital. Attended racially segregated “apartheid schools.” Grew up in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, an area similar to Tulsa’s Black Wall Street and home to several prominent Black businesses that were erased forever by racially motivated construction projects… | more…
“As an epidemiologist, you’re supposed to want to put yourself out of business,” Wallace said. “Everyone has bills to pay; I understand that. But the extent to which your corruption might lead to a pathogen that could kill a billion people—that’s where my line is”….“You can intellectually understand something but still not assimilate the oncoming damage,” he told me later, as he recalled the “sour vindication” of having his worst fears come true. “So there’s an aspect of rage, and an arrival at an understanding.” | more…
Zhun Xu, author of “From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty,” spoke alongside Chris Matlhako, Elias Khalil Jabbour, and Bikrum Gill on a panel titled, “Political Economies of Chinese Socialism.” | more…
Chavez inherited an impoverished country with a thin, glittering layer of affluence at the top. To the horror of Washington and Venezuelan plutocrats, he promptly began redistributing wealth to the poor… | more…
In their new book “Extraordinary Threat,” Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur delve into the critical questions: What is the nature of Venezuela’s government? Is it a dictatorship? Are Venezuela’s problems due to misgovernment, or are they due to U.S. interference? What would happen if Venezuela fell to U.S. imperialism? How has the U.S. been able to get away with this? And above all: Taking Venezuela as a case study, how does regime change propaganda work? | more…
…in the service of besieged Venezuela, en route to Iran, another nation similarly blockaded by America, when he was intercepted by Cape Verde authorities and thrown into prison there…. | more…
….and the “normal” body, if you want to use that term, is the one which can keep up with the productivity of machinery, of factory life. And what Marx argued in fact was that in most cases, the productivity of machinery could outpace that of the ‘normal’ body, if you want to put it that way…” | more…
The conversation begins with the story of Vivian Rothstein’s participation in a 1967 peace delegation to North Vietnam, and her encounter there with the Americans held at Hoa Lo Prison — the subject of ‘Dissenting POWs.’ One might think that that delegation’s visit to Hoa Lo Prison, and the dissent expressed by almost half of its POW inmates, would have been so controversial as to gain a fair amount of attention at the time…. | more…
“Vietnam veterans were commonly portrayed in film and news reports as casualties of the war, their mission sold out on the home front and their homecoming marked by ingratitude and condemnation. Representations of POWs followed a similar path…It was trauma, not politics and conscience, that moved in-service resisters.” | more…
Michael Heinrich “has a powerful critique of vulgar Marxism and the orthodoxies of the 19th and 20th centuries…Nerds, you’re not going to want to miss this one!” | more…
It is worth summing up some of these key lies: 1) Venezuela was “once prosperous.” In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth; 2) Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo…. | more…