February 20, 2024
Who is the cybertariat? Why care? Ursula Huws, author of Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (Monthly Review Press, 2014), has answers as a class-based technology shapes our world. An historical continuity emerges in her writing. This approach casts context on the current moment.
February 20, 2024
Activist University of Illinois scholar Robert McChesney has for some time now been a compelling voice on the "political economy of communication," an emerging new discipline that's probing how our media go about entrenching "the privileges of those at the top." This field, McChesney argues in this engaging new book, belongs on our political center stage. Our deeply unequal social order, he explains, has simply ceased working for average people.
February 20, 2024
Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress, discusses the fight for a higher minimum wage, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, labor law reform, and more on Your Call with Rose Aguilar, on KALW radio in San Francisco.
February 20, 2024
The major premises of the media reform movement remain unchanged: communication systems develop largely as a result of policies, since there is no such thing as a natural "default" course of development. From the development of copyright and postal subsidies for newspapers at the dawn of the Republic to the licensing of telephone, broadcasting, and cable TV monopolies, the state has been in the middle of the creation of the media. For example, the Internet's shift from an anti-commercial, egalitarian institution in the early 1990s to a "whoever makes the most money by any means necessary wins" undertaking was not foreordained by the gods. It was the province of politics.
February 20, 2024
At the end of the 1980s, the mood among anti-Apartheid activists was gloomy. Many of them considered the situation in South Africa to be as bad as ever, and chances of abolishing the racist system seemed slim. Two years later, Nelson Mandela was a free man, and a couple of years after his release, he was the first president of post-Apartheid South Africa. Robert McChesney tells this episode at the beginning of his latest book to point out a lesson of which we need to remind ourselves every so often: social change is rarely accurately predicted.
February 20, 2024
Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills, New York, on Long Island, and moved with his family to Brooklyn when he was not quite four years old. Like many children from working-class families (his father was, at various times, a farmer, carpenter, and house builder), Whitman left school before he turned twelve. He worked as an office boy, and at age thirteen he was apprenticed to a printer. In his late teens and early twenties, he taught school in various Long Island small towns. There he made his first tentative steps into journalism and Democratic Party politics.
February 20, 2024
Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman's life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else.
February 20, 2024
With the end of the Cold War and the victory of capitalism, and the seeming defeat of "Marxism-Leninism" in 1991, it appeared we could at last bury Lenin. And certainly, who will mourn for the death of a Lenin encased in granite monuments with his words turned into a dogmatic religion to legitimise the Eastern Bloc regimes? However, there is another Lenin who remains very much alive. This Lenin has been unearthed in recent years with the "Lenin renaissance". Different scholars and political activists such as Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Anderson, to name just a few have explored what remains very much alive in Lenin. While they don't necessarily agree on all their conclusions, all of them have challenged Soviet-era mythology and anti-communist historiography by revealing the Lenin who fused a creative and dynamic Marxist theory to develop a revolutionary political practice to change the world.
February 20, 2024
Mark Karlin: "In a Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week interview in 2013 about your book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, you reflected profound pessimism about the capture of the internet by large corporations - and the evolution of net consumers into marketing 'products.' Is the trend of the co-option of the web by a few large corporations accelerating?" Robert McChesney: "Whether the process is accelerating is a difficult question to measure or to answer. That the process exists and that it is the dominant fact about the internet is not controversial."
February 20, 2024
Join Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress for a panel discussion on Social Movement Unionism, with Mike Rotkin and Amanda Reyes. Friday Jan. 23, 1pm to 3pm, in the Redwood Lounge (across from the Baytree Bookstore), Quarry Plaza, 2nd Fl., University of California, Santa Cruz.
