February 20, 2024
In this interview, Horne goes so far as to argue for the migration of Black people from the U.S., abroad because, "given the dangerous turn" things have taken here, "we're going to need people to mobilize on our behalf" from overseas, "in case things get more precarious"....
February 20, 2024
There are several important lessons to note from Washington Bullets....The first is the importance of collective struggle in breaking free from capitalism....The other lesson is the lengths to which the capitalist state is willing to go in order to destroy the chances of socialism and a radical redistribution of wealth and power...
February 20, 2024
Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian scholar and activist based in New York City: "Seeing a growing movement of unabashedly anti-Zionist Jewish groups is an important and inspiring reminder that these groups are building on a long legacy of Jews who, long before Israel established itself as a settler-colonial state, rejected Zionism and rejected Israel’s ethnic cleansing project... "
February 20, 2024
In the early 1600s, new settlers, were uniting across class and even religious lines, and what united them was their “whiteness”. The settlements had become a kind of joint European enterprise. Religious differences, that had so hampered the Spanish invasions, fell away as the white invaders came together “to bludgeon indigenes and batter Africans”.
February 20, 2024
"....activists ought to be clear-eyed about the limitations of regulatory interventions. While there is certainly utility in digital media and tech reform, antitrust legislation and similar policy courses are insufficient for large-scale social transformations that characterize Marxist aspirations..."
February 20, 2024
The Return of Nature is a genealogy of ecological thinking. The word ‘ecology’ was not in common usage until the twentieth century, leading many to consider ecological thinking a fairly recent development. However, in this impressive volume, John Bellamy Foster convincingly identifies a materialist ecological sensibility within works dating back a century prior to ecology’s popularization..."
February 20, 2024
How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response.....What does this mean for today? It means rejecting the new Cold War against Russians and Chinese and, instead, forging alliances with both. It means linking demands for reparations nationally with likeminded struggles in the Caribbean and Africa. It means realizing that the uncanny ability of some on the U.S. left to hand rhetorical weapons to the right to bash the oppressed – from “political correctness” to “cancel culture” – is hardly a coincidence or accident but simply another expression of a “cross-class alliance” that has propped up settler colonialism from its inception.....
February 20, 2024
One main thread runs through every aspect of every story: Stories of Black rebellion and resistance. When Horne tells of Texas' efforts to secede and the impact of the arsons of 1860, allegedly set by slaves, he comments, "Our enemies are the ones who put out the rumor that we're docile, because they want us to be docile today." That's fallacious, he says. "Arsons were one of our favorite tools. Arson, poisonings, insurrections, murders." And in fact, during the Madison administration, Africans actually joined the British in torching the White House in 1814, sending James and Dolly fleeing.
February 20, 2024
"...In 2018, Venezuela was only able to import $11.7 billion in goods, according to Torino Capital. The impact on medicine imports was especially destructive. According to U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot, while its economy was still growing in 2013, Venezuela was importing about $2 billion per year in medicine. By 2018, that amount had fallen to an astonishing low of $140 million—an especially horrifying development because medicines are much more difficult to substitute with local production than food. It is impossible to deny that a collapse in medicine imports has killed thousands of people between 2017 and 2018, as Mark Weisbrot and U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs argued in a paper published in April 2019. Weisbrot and Sachs cite a 31 percent increase in general mortality in the 2017–2018 period, according to a survey by anti-Maduro Venezuelan academics. That increase works out to an extra forty thousand deaths...."
February 20, 2024
"He is currently working on another book focusing on the underlying drivers that cause human society to conflict with nature and create rifts in the metabolic cycles of the planet."
