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Engels on Ecology: Against the Grain talks to John Bellamy Foster

C. S. Soong, host of Against the Grain (KPFA/94.1 FM) talks with John Bellamy Foster, author, most recently, of The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. To what extent did Frederick Engels engage with environmental and ecological issues? When Engels wrote about the dialectics of nature, what did he mean by “dialectics”? According to Foster, Engels’s insights into ecology, dialectics, and the environmental conditions of the working class were, and remain, critically important… | more…

Counterfire on Don Fitz’s “Cuban Health Care”

Don Fitz’s Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution covers a wide range of topics including medical and sanitary advances prior to the 1959 revolution such as viral disease inoculation and suppression, lessons learned from medical and military missions overseas and the challenges of developing a well-functioning healthcare system in the face of international hostility…. | more…

SR 2021: Ursula Huws on “Reaping the Whirlwind,” via Marxist Education Project

Sunday, January 31 @ 1:30pm-4:00pm: Join this online reading group and discussion of the most recent issue of Socialist Register dedicated to Leo Panitch. This first session begins with Ursula Huws‘ essay, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitalization, Restructuring, and Mobilization in the Covid Crisis.” This work addresses the changes currently sweeping through global labor markets during the coronavirus pandemic…. | more…

1919 Direct Power: Journal of Working Class Studies reviews “Radical Seattle”

Since the Covid-19 pandemic pummeled the economy, millions of workers have been displaced, while others continue to work amid increasingly harsh, often hazardous working conditions. With Covid forcing millions to choose between a paycheck and their health, some labor activists have hoped for a wave of wildcat strikes, and in the wake of the election, perhaps even a ‘general strike’ if Trump refused to concede…. | more…

Counterfire reviews “The Dawning of the Apocalypse” by Gerald Horne

The disease of racism continues to cause suffering and misery across the globe. The eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests this year has exposed the extent to which systematic racism continues to oppress and demonise black and minority ethnic communities, particularly in the US and Britain. This racism in many ways stems from colonialism and imperialism, and therefore capitalism, particularly through the devastating trans-Atlantic slave trade… | more…

Marx & Philosophy on Gerald Horne’s “Jazz and Justice”

Near the close of his panoramic and richly researched Jazz and Justice, Gerald Horne points to Adorno’s characteristically modernist assertion that the most an artist can accomplish, faced with the contradiction of enchained art in an enchained society, is to realize that contradiction through emancipated art, although the attempt is most often only a recipe for despair. In the spirit of Adorno’s observation, Horne’s book is a chronicle of the course of individual and collective material struggles in the practice of jazz… | more…

Counterpunch names three MRP titles among its top 25 of 2020

Counterpunch names three Monthly Review Press titles among its top 25 books of the year. In alphabetical order:

The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century

Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID

The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology

Thank you to editor Jeffrey St. Clair and our other dear comrades at CounterPunch! | more…