Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies…. | more…
Don Fitz’s Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution covers a wide range of topics including medical and sanitary advances prior to the 1959 revolution such as viral disease inoculation and suppression, lessons learned from medical and military missions overseas and the challenges of developing a well-functioning healthcare system in the face of international hostility…. | more…
Gerald Horne, author of the recently published The Dawning of the Apocalypse, talks to Greg Rasheed, host of Blog Talk Radio’s The Root and Roots Show about the roots of white supremacy, begun in the 16th century, reaching all the way into the US Capitol on January 6 … and beyond… | more…
Sunday, January 31 @ 1:30pm-4:00pm: Join this online reading group and discussion of the most recent issue of Socialist Register dedicated to Leo Panitch. This first session begins with Ursula Huws‘ essay, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitalization, Restructuring, and Mobilization in the Covid Crisis.” This work addresses the changes currently sweeping through global labor markets during the coronavirus pandemic…. | more…
Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Big Flu and Dead Epidemiologists, has become an international pundit in the conversation about the rise and spread of global epidemics. Here are two of his latest articles on COVID-19 and beyond…. | more…
Since the Covid-19 pandemic pummeled the economy, millions of workers have been displaced, while others continue to work amid increasingly harsh, often hazardous working conditions. With Covid forcing millions to choose between a paycheck and their health, some labor activists have hoped for a wave of wildcat strikes, and in the wake of the election, perhaps even a ‘general strike’ if Trump refused to concede…. | more…
To say that the Tory government’s response to Covid-19 has been disastrous is merely to state the obvious. Their unwillingness to take decisive action at the right time, coupled with their ability to contemplate tens of thousands of deaths with equanimity, has earned them a special place even in the annals of Tory incompetence and self-serving cynicism…. | more…
Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning book, Beyond Capital. Whereas Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment, Lebowitz, in Between Capitalism and Community, demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community… | more…
The disease of racism continues to cause suffering and misery across the globe. The eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests this year has exposed the extent to which systematic racism continues to oppress and demonise black and minority ethnic communities, particularly in the US and Britain. This racism in many ways stems from colonialism and imperialism, and therefore capitalism, particularly through the devastating trans-Atlantic slave trade… | more…
Near the close of his panoramic and richly researched Jazz and Justice, Gerald Horne points to Adorno’s characteristically modernist assertion that the most an artist can accomplish, faced with the contradiction of enchained art in an enchained society, is to realize that contradiction through emancipated art, although the attempt is most often only a recipe for despair. In the spirit of Adorno’s observation, Horne’s book is a chronicle of the course of individual and collective material struggles in the practice of jazz… | more…
DOUBLE HEADER: “A must-read for anybody who wishes to truly understand Covid-19….” AND listen to Rob Wallace talking recently with Chuck Mertz on This Is Hell… | more…
