Category: Monthly Review Press /

John Bellamy Foster at the Left Forum Closing Plenary [video]

John Bellamy Foster at the Left Forum Closing Plenary [video]

John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and author, most recently, of The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney), gave an address at the closing plenary of the Left Forum on June 9, 2013, in New York City. He was joined by Alvaro Garcia Linera, Vice President of Bolivia; Catherine Mulder, John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY and CUNY's Murphy Institute; and Tadzio Muller, political scientist, climate justice activist, and translator, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Read an excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on Truthdig

Read an excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on Truthdig

RUTH FIRST IS BURIED in Llanguene Cemetery in a dusty Mozambican suburb. Her grave lies next to those of other members of the African National Congress who were killed by the apartheid government in a 1981 raid, referred to as the Matola Massacre, where South African soldiers in blackface committed cold-blooded murder. Ruth's killing was no less brutal: the South African regime sent a letter bomb that detonated in her hands and sent shrapnel into the bodies of her colleagues at Eduardo Mondlane University. Joe Slovo is one of two white South Africans that lie in rest at Avalon Cemetery in Soweto, one of Johannesburg's massive black townships. His funeral, a national event, took place before a crowd of over 40,000 people packed into Orlando Stadium, home of Soweto's premier soccer club, where he was eulogized by among others, the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Cyril Harris.

Read another excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on LINKS

Read another excerpt from Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid on LINKS

JOE'S FIRST IMPRESSION of Ruth was that she and her intellectual friends at the University of the Witwatersrand were "just too big for their boots." It was 1946, Joe was just returning from the army and the Second World War, and Ruth was in the midst of her social science studies at the university. They were both engaged in political protests and actions through the Communist Party of South Africa,already committed militants and engaged intellectuals, each looking toward a life of struggle for justice and equality.

Arun Gupta on Coachella and The Taming of the American Crowd in Truthout

Arun Gupta on Coachella and The Taming of the American Crowd in Truthout

Now in its 15th year, Coachella is the highest-grossing festival in the world. For the region it's a quarter-billion-dollar revenue generator, which outstrips Jamaica's GDP on an annual basis. Tickets run up to $800, luxury Safari tents top out at $6,500, and everything costs: parking, water, showers, even charging phones. The dominant tribe is money-flush youth with the will to endure three sleepless days of being mashed in a delicious sound taco of Indie rock. But Coachella is also the modern incarnation of medieval carnivals that revealed "another way of life that stood in stark contrast to the austerity and fixed hierarchy of the official order," notes Al Sandine in The Taming of the American Crowd.