February 20, 2024
Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress and Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, looks at the role of labor unions in dealing with sexual harassment and how “to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the ‘house of labor’”...
February 20, 2024
Urdang’s memoir maps out her quest for the meaning of home, as she grapples with the power of nostalgia, and for the lived reality of revolution with empathy, courage, and a keen eye for historical and geographic detail. This is a personal narrative, beautifully told, of a journey traveled by an indefatigable exile who, while yearning for home, continues to question where, as a citizen of both South Africa and the United States, she belongs. “My South Africa!” she writes, on her return in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, “How could I have imagined for one instant that I could return to its beauty, and not its pain?”
February 20, 2024
David L. Wilson, author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (2d ed.), and frequent contributor to Truthout.org, writes that the tax bill that just passed the U.S. Senate will “keep America Great” by putting Trump and his billionaire friends and donors first
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission
February 20, 2024
Reports have it that Greece has begun to reenter the European bond market, where it has for the past decade been crucified on what the American statesman William Jennings Bryan once called a cross of gold…. ¶ The election of Syriza in a Europe none of whose other nations had dared to empower a government committed to breaking the stranglehold of the banks was its gesture of defiance. And all Europe took hope from it. Its consequent failure was, as Helena Sheehan’s The Syriza Wave makes clear, a major international event…
February 20, 2024
Two decades ago, barely anyone called themselves an ecosocialist. Yet today the term is widespread on the left. ¶ This comes from an awareness that any viable alternative to capitalism must do away with the current destructive relationship between human society and the wider natural world. It also stems from a recognition that too many socialists in the 20th century failed to take environmental issues seriously. ¶ Climate and Capitalism editor and ecosocialist activist Ian Angus’s latest book, A Redder Shade of Green, is an impressive contribution to this vibrant trend in radical politics...
February 20, 2024
Henry A. Giroux, founding figure in the movement for critical pedagogy and author of more than sixty books, including America’s Addiction to Terrorism and America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth, is one of North America’s most influential public intellectuals. He writes in Salon about the grotesqueries of Trump–and our need for a vocabulary that sees us as agents, not victims...
February 20, 2024
Helena Sheehan, author of The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left, discusses her book–and the origins and history of Syriza, the radical Greek coalition party–with Tom O’Brien, host of the podcast From Alpha to Omega
February 20, 2024
Howard Ryan is an educationalist and journalist, who has written a handbook that offers ‘theory, strategy and organizing case studies to inform and inspire those who are working to rebuild public education and put an end to the corporate occupation of our schools’. The book can be read as a whole, or can be used as a reference guide to explore some key ideas, as the book is neatly divided up into sections...
February 20, 2024
Don’t expect a whole lot of taste when you sit down to a plateful of commodities. That might be a fitting but unintended lesson for foodies who work through the new book by Eric Holt-Giménez. A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism will reward a careful reader with lots of insights—but it won’t do much for the taste buds. While A Foodie’s Guide is lacking in recipes or menu ideas, it shines in helping us to understand the struggles of the men and women who work in the farms and packing plants...
February 20, 2024
No consumer, farmer, or activist participates in the food system without also participating in capitalism. To Eric Holt-Giménez, the director of Food First, this is a basic truth that’s too often overlooked in the struggle to change our broken food system. In his new book, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, Holt-Giménez delineates the basic truths of capitalism and how they are connected to the history of our food system. Part history book, part practical guide, the book links many of the injustices associated with food to other inequities, arguing that capitalism fuels and is fueled by oppression. If we better understand “the rudiments of how capitalism operates,” he explains, ‘we can better grasp why our food system is the way it is, and how we can change it
