When I was still in a 401(k)-like plan and approaching age sixty-five after thirty-seven years of university teaching, I took stock of my future retirement income. I wanted to know what it would look like in terms of achieving the 70 percent of pre-retirement income that retirement experts state is necessary to maintain one’s standard of living… | more…
‘Radical Seattle’ identifies the IWW as a catalyst for the germination of a class consciousness that encouraged individual laborers to recognize a kinship in their struggle and respond collectively. | more…
The authors begin their introduction to the book on Memorial Day of 2012, when President Barack Obama declared that: ‘Today begins the fiftieth commemoration of our war in Vietnam’ and thereby prompted nation-wide efforts to explore the record of that conflict… | more…
It is a promising thing when a book titled Can the Working Class Change the World? feels current amid national and global upheaval, despite having been published two years ago…. | more…
Mainstream scholars tend to portray Warren and President Woodrow Wilson as quintessential Progressives. But Chester’s evidence clearly demonstrates their authoritarian tendencies. In general, Chester scrutinizes the very jurists, policymakers, and political thinkers who scholars often credit with defending and advancing the cause of civil liberties during and after World War I. But the traditional “heroes”—Roger Baldwin, Zechariah Chafee, Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, etc.—simply do not measure up to Chester’s absolutist position on the right of free speech and dissent…. | more…
I read this gorgeous, furious book while teaching the first half of the U. S. history survey: 1607–1877….In this book as well as its recent antecedent, ‘The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean,’ Horne turns to examine the earlier foundations of empire and racial capitalism. Unlike much of his other work, these books are primarily secondary-source–driven. But Horne is that historian, as skilled in the pyrotechnics of historiographical revision as he is at archival spelunking. | more…
In a discussion of the new book, “Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts Against Venezuel,” Justin Podur clarifies: What they’re doing in Colombia is what they say is happening in Venezuela…” | more…
Russell provides sound advice for those negotiating about the terms of these defined benefit plans, which still number 50,000 and have 60 million participants among active or retired workers. As he notes, in the current bargaining environment, “participants and their union representatives are more likely to be thinking defensively”… | more…
This thesis was provocative for several reasons, but perhaps most of all because it implied that once the material roots of slavery had been ripped up, the modern world would finally witness the progressive erosion of anti-Black politics and culture… | more…
Value Chains thoroughly and powerfully critiques modern-day forms of capitalism by bringing back to the table the much-needed analytical lens of imperialism to show the continuities of unevenness, an unequal world economic system, and the dominance of powerful corporations and nations over other regions, places, economies, labour and resources. | more…
It isn’t all black and white, of course. “Mastery over nature” doesn’t by definition preclude environmental conservation, nor does indigeneity bar overexploitation. But neither is the resulting system a mush of gray. For capitalists themselves cast the operative distinctions here as a matter of celebrated principle. | more…