The end of 2019 has seen a growing ‘global revolt’ in countries as varied as Hong Kong, Chile, Iraq, Ecuador, Catalonia and Lebanon. Seth Donnelly’s new book is not about these revolts, but is an explanation of the dynamics that have driven the impoverishment of the Global South and how the ruling class seeks to justify things…. | more…
How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living…. | more…
This latest work by Gerald Horne, born January 3, 1949 and still producing history monographs at a rate of knots, inspired me to wonder why he is not better known in Britain. … | more…
That capitalist medicine prioritises the generation of surplus value over the health of populations should be obvious to any critical student or scholar in the field, but where Waitzkin and colleagues depart from this basic assumption is in demonstrating the political economy of health in the current phase of neoliberalism where, for example, the processes of financialization have eclipsed material production…. | more…
Saito delves deeply into Marx’s notebooks, the first to do so. He shows, time and again, that Marx was deeply aware of the unsustainable attack by capitalism upon the land itself. ¶ I have had a gut feeling about that since I first read Marx and his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels in my teens: that alienation from the land is a key underpinning of capitalism…. | more…
Kohei Saito’s book shows us how Karl Marx evolved as an ecological thinker. It is a pioneering scrutiny of the evolution of ideas, the genealogy of terms, lines of debates and kinds of evidence, from the 1840s to about 1870. The book started as a German doctoral thesis, grounded in hitherto unpublished notebooks by Marx, but also drawing on Saito’s wide erudition. Putting paid to one set of debates, the book generates new ones… | more…
The alt-right is on the move everywhere. Ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, racists, religious fanatics and other retrograde political elements–all are rising steadily from the ranks of societies across the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia. Inflicting hatred and violence on their respective populations, its constituents target all who seek to expand human rights… In short, what the alt-right seeks is a world ruled by those who are opposed to the progress of humanity itself…. | more…
Gerald Horne, author of Jazz and Justice and the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse, recently talked to Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, on Black Agenda Radio, about how Africa, in contrast to the United States, tends to see China’s role in geopolitics… | more…
“Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times. The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads…”
¶ “The feminist movement today is often criticized as ‘white feminism’ or a movement which fights for middle-class or upper-class white women…. Abolitionist Socialist Feminism seeks to remedy of the problem of ‘white feminism’ and color blind socialism by connecting anti-racism, feminism, and socialism…” | more…
Jazz is enjoying a new wave of popularity. A gig by Kamasi Washington, the last musician named in Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice, attracts big crowds, and his recordings make big sales… | more…
Why read yet another biography of Marx or start with this one? Unlike others, Heinrich checks facts meticulously and embeds Marx and his writings in the economic and social circumstances, personal and political relationships, political ideas and polemics of Marx’s life. Conjecture is rare and clearly marked…. | more…