By the time his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, was published in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois was already a rara avis—a prominent Black activist-intellectual in the midst of Jim Crow. Dapper and diminutive, and nattily clad in suit and tie, he was renowned throughout the country. The first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, Du Bois cofounded the NAACP in 1909 and thereafter helped organize a pan-African movement that bedeviled European colonizers. But what distinguished his close study of slavery and Reconstruction (and does so even today) was its Marxism. Du Bois had been exposed to Marx’s penetrating analytical framework in the early 1890s in
‘Socialist Register 2022’ delivers thought-provoking analysis of the factors and forces driving multiple polarizations in our world, including identities of nation and race, social class and political parties, the coronavirus pandemic and climate catastrophe. That is a partial list. | more…
In Foster’s own words, ‘what we must dethrone today is the idol of capital itself, the concentrated power of class-based avarice, which now imperils the ecology of the earth’. This reaffirms the importance of the fusion of red and green. In effect, this fusion is a revival of the historical tradition started more than a century ago by socialist materialists such as Marx, Engels, Lankester, and Morris to combine socialism and ecology… | more…
With contributions from: Walden Bello, Bill Fletcher Jr., Virginia Fontes, Samir Gandesha, Ana Garcia, Jayati Ghosh, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Sam Gindin, David Harvey, Rejane Hoeveler, Ilya Matveev, Simon Mohun, Adolph Reed Jr. and Touré F. Reed, Vishwas Satgar, James Schneider, Ingar Solty, Samir Sonti, Hilary Wainwright, and Oleg Zhuravlev…. | more…
Gerald Horne discusses the drive behind Pan-Afrikanism, the “poverty-stricken” discourse on class in the United States, his hopefulness about younger black radical scholars and activist-organizers, and, as is always the case with Dr. Horne, much, much more…. | more…
On Saturday, May 7th John Bellamy Foster will present on the ecology section of “The Marx Revival” (Cambridge University Press), alongside Marcelo Musto, who will present the Communism section of the book. The event is co-sponsored by the Marxist Education Project and Shelter and Solidarity. | more…
During the Red Scare, a telling phrase came to describe some who had been clamoring for more demonstrative anti-Hitler manifestations before the U.S. entered the war in late 1941: “premature antifascists.” Outside a narrow wartime period, antifascist convictions were now seen from a postwar vantage as suspect, evidence of Communist loyalty. Now forgotten is that there was an offshoot of this tendency: one whose adherents we might call “premature antiracists”…. | more…
In what might prove to be the most serious blow yet to Trump’s effort to stay out of jail, on March 28th, a federal judge ruled that both former president Trump and Atty. John Eastman who had advised him on how to overturn the 2020 election had most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States…. | more…
Prashad begins by reminding people that almost a quarter of the world’s wheat is grown in the region stretching between Ukraine and Russia, and that when there is a food shortage, political crises typically follow worldwide, as occurred during the 2011 drought and the period around the Arab Spring… | more…
If there is one way in which the Ukrainian analogy with Spain applies, it is the tragic way the country is being used as a proxy in a battle between the world’s great powers…. | more…
The product of several decades of research, this is a book accessibly written but rigorously researched with footnotes meticulously collected for those looking for a jumping off point through various archives. It reveals a hidden history of the relationship between science and sociology, between economics and nature and gives us characters who were able to see the seeds we were sowing, but also an unyielding faith that it doesn’t have to be this way… | more…
