February 20, 2024
(T)here are terribly destructive forces — racism, organized criminality, brutal labor exploitations, battery, debauchery, gambling — from which grew an intensely beautiful art form, today denoted as ‘jazz.’ It is the classic instance of the lovely lotus arising from the malevolent mud....
February 20, 2024
“The Inca emperor Manco Inca started a rebellion against the Spanish Conquistadors in 1536 in Cusco. Although ultimately driven into the remote jungles of Vilcabamba, he and his forces were able to establish a liberated zone and declare a neo-Inca State that lasted for several decades until the execution of his son Túpac Amaru in 1572....”
February 20, 2024
On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors—streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers—fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this without police – and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. In Radical Seattle, Cal Winslow explains why....
February 20, 2024
To define a workable socialism, it’s best first to lay out what’s wrong with capitalism. Nancy Fraser’s excellent essay in Beyond Market Dystopia does just this, and these wrongs are three: injustice, irrationality and unfreedom. Injustice inheres in the exploitation of labor and theft of its surplus value. Irrationality exists in capitalism’s built-in economic crises. Unfreedom derives from social inequality and class power and also from tyranny in the work-place...
February 20, 2024
“Seth Donnelly’s The Lie of Global Prosperity, released in paperback late last year, is a methodical examination of how the World Bank spins its number crunching to cover up the extent of global poverty. Donnelly bolsters his analysis with on-the-ground reporting from numerous fact-finding trips to Haiti; the descriptions of what he found there effectively show how World Bank support for unjust governments plays out on the ground in underdeveloped nations...
February 20, 2024
This charming account of a campaign of local people to stop Shell building a refinery and gas pipeline through the glorious coastal landscape of County Mayo in Ireland is both a rage of anger at a world were profit is put before people and planet; and a celebration of the ordinary people who stand up and protest against this....
February 20, 2024
Thirty-one years ago the Berlin Wall came down and the working class in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, voted to merge with capitalist West Germany. In A Socialist Defector: from Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee veteran journalist Victor Grossman provides insight into why the GDR’s 41-year experiment with socialism did not last. He describes the ups and downs of the former GDR, spicing it up with many interesting details of life before and after the Berlin Wall….
February 20, 2024
“In The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Gerald Horne once again earns his reputation as a nuanced transnational historian of race and class. In this, his thirtieth book, Horne demonstrates that modernity arrived in the seventeenth century on the three horsemen of the apocalypse: slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. Through a focus on English colonial projects, Horne proves these phenomena to be inseparable and interlocking, rather than, for instance, separate pillars of a single structure....
February 20, 2024
In The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, departing from much previous scholarship, adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth....
February 20, 2024
There is no doubt that communism was Karl Marx’s political goal. Nonetheless, he never published a book or an article with a clear and extensive demonstration of what communism means....
