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ResoluteReader reviews Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

In the introduction to his latest book historian Gerald Horne makes clear the consequences of European settlement in the Americas:
“Though disease spread by these interlopers is often trotted out to explain the spectacular downturn in the fortunes of indigenous Americans, genocide – in virtually every meaning of the term, including volitional acts by invading settlers – is the proximate cause of this towering mountain of cadavers. Thus, even when enslaved Africans chose suicide, which they were often forced to do, it would be follow to suggest that enslavers were guiltless….” | more…

Gerald Horne on the Centrality of Race, via WORT Community Radio

Allen Ruff, a host of A Public Affair on radio station WORT (89.9FM, Madison, WI), interviews the irrepressible African-American historian Gerald Horne, author of numerous titles exploring the centrality of race and class for understanding the contemporary world. His most recent book is The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean | more…

Counterfire reviews A Redder Shade of Green

Ecosocialism is often seen as something of throwaway buzzword on the left, with some commenting that today’s left, which at least acknowledges that environmental concerns are essential part of the criticism of capitalism today, doesn’t even need it. Ian Angus, a writer of books such as Facing the Anthropocene and Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket Books 2011), with Simon Butler, and maintainer of the blog Climate and Capitalism, feels that it is a term that means much more than just a passing nod of one movement to another….  | more…

New! Samir Amin’s Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value

Unlike such obvious forms of oppression as feudalism or slavery, capitalism has been able to survive through its genius for disguising corporate profit imperatives as opportunities for individual human equality and advancement. But it was the genius of Karl Marx, in his masterwork, Capital, to discover the converse law of surplus value: behind the illusion of the democratic, supply-and-demand marketplace, lies the workplace, where people trying to earn a living are required to work way beyond the time it takes to pay their wages…. | more…

How Short-Term Production & Profit Wrecks our Food System: a review of Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism

Billions of people around the world are drinking water contaminated with plastic…. We’ve been warned about the impact of capitalist production on natural processes for a long time. In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, insisted that the principal causes of ecological degradation, were ‘the gods of profit and production’ served by a cabal within industry, government and academia which betrayed the cause of scientific truth… | more…

Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism reviewed by the ISR

‘Ecosocialism needs Marx,’ Kohei Saito once wrote. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito shows why. Saito is associate professor of political economy at Osaka City University in Japan. In 2015, he earned a PhD in philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin and spent time as a guest researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities where he contributes to the editing of Marx’s natural science notebooks…. | more…

“The Wire and the World”: Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney via Jacobin

Helena Sheehan, author of the recent The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left, and Seamus Sweeney, a “recovering academic,” who has written about the representation of Baltimore in the work of David Simon, recently collaborated on an article for Jacobin about how the decade-old TV series, The Wire, was a Marxist’s idea of what TV drama should be… | more…

“Marx the Ecologist”: Counterfire Considers 2 new books by Kohei Saito and John Bellamy Foster & Paul Burkett

In 2001, as a Green Party candidate in the general election, I was invited onto local radio to debate with the Socialist Alliance candidate. The interviewer, as it turned out, was hoping for a no-holds-barred ideological battle and was most disappointed when we candidates found ourselves agreeing with each other on every question he put. ‘You’re a green and he’s a socialist,’ he complained. ‘You’re not supposed to be on the same side!’ ¶ In this, he was reflecting a view then some twenty years in the making, that socialism was inherently anti-ecological… | more…

New! Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health

These days, our health and well-being are sorted through an ever-expanding, profit-seeking financial complex that monitors, controls, and commodifies our very existence. Given that our access to competent, affordable health care grows more precarious each day, the arrival of Health Care Under the Knife could not be more timely. In this empowering book, noted health-care professionals, scholars, and activists—including coordinator Howard Waitzkin—impart their inside knowledge of the medical system: what’s wrong, how it got this way, and what we can do to heal it. | more…