February 20, 2024
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System 280 pp, $19 pbk, ISBN 9781583676097 By Ian Angus Reviewed by Seth Sandronsky “Ian Angus’ informed and informing... READ MORE
February 20, 2024
The struggle over memory and truth about the Vietnam War continues. It reemerged in May when President Obama announced the opening of Fulbright University in Vietnam, and that Bob Kerrey would chair the board of trustees. Fulbright is the first private university in Vietnam, with ties to the Kennedy Center at Harvard and the US State Department. What does this recent appointment and the controversy surrounding it teach us about the War in Vietnam?
February 20, 2024
Facing the Anthropocene hits nails on their heads over and over again. It should transform the relationship between leftist ecological thought and Earth System science. It’s easy to praise it here, because Angus’s analysis is in many ways very similar to my own in The Birth of the Anthropocene…. I think that the great thing about Facing the Anthropocene—and this might sound like faint praise, but it isn’t—is just how sensible it is. It’s learned and principled and exciting and all of that. But most of all it’s wonderfully well-considered.
February 20, 2024
Over the last forty years, global capitalism has increasingly been shaped by the core tenets of neoliberalism. The neoliberal counter-revolution emerged as a response to the return of economic crisis in the 1970s, and to the power of working class and anti-colonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It was geared towards the interests of wealthy and corporate elites, at the expense of the vast majority of working class and oppressed people worldwide. The divisions between the 1% and the 99% have become ever more acute, with the most extraordinary and ostentatious wealth for a tiny elite alongside hardship, insecurity and poverty for many people.
February 20, 2024
Cushion is able to make a substantial case that the working-class contribution to the revolution has been severely underestimated, and that in fact Castro’s guerrilla movement would not have been able to take power without working-class militancy. The story is detailed and intricate, but full of interest, beginning with the defeat of the 1933 general strike, which first brought Batista to political leadership in Cuba, but concentrating on the years of the latter’s dictatorship proper, from March 1952, to the consolidation of Castro’s government in 1959
February 20, 2024
Studs Terkel was an American icon who had no use for America’s cult of celebrity. He was a leftist who valued human beings over political dogma. In scores of books and thousands of radio and television broadcasts, Studs paid attention—and respect—to “ordinary” human beings of all classes and colors, as they talked about their lives as workers, dreamers, survivors. Alan Wieder’s Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation is the first comprehensive book about this man.
February 20, 2024
July 2, 2016, London: John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, discusses the theoretical and programmatic challenges that the Anthropocene, a dangerous new epoch in planetary history, poses for socialists in the 21st century.
February 20, 2024
Monthly Review Press author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth and America’s Addiction to Terrorism, Henry A. Giroux writes frequently for Truthout.org “This week, Donald Trump lowered... READ MORE
February 20, 2024
E.P. Thompson (1924–1993) wore several hats during his life. His magnum opus as a historian was The Making of the English Working Class, one of the greatest history books written in the twentieth century in any language. He fought tirelessly for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, which almost surely took years off his life. He may well be least remembered for being a founder of the British New Left. For this reason, Cal Winslow’s selection of Thompson’s writings from the late 1950s to the early 1960s is especially welcome and timely—though not surprising, since Winslow was a student of Thompson’s at the University of Warwick and is a longtime activist and writer.
February 20, 2024
Laurence H. Shoup, author of Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, talks to German financial journalist Lars Schall about the... READ MORE