I found The God Market vital reading for a number of reasons (and that’s my favorite kind of book: one that has multiple uses and educates me on several subjects at once). You will get a quick primer on the history of Indian government and foreign and domestic policy from 1947 to the present (you certainly won’t have been taught any of that in high school). You will get an excellent summary of what “globalization” actually means in practice and how it is affecting and changing religion and ideology the world over, with India as a star example … But what I found most useful of all is the picture I saw throughout of what actual, contemporary Hinduism is and is like (and how it has changed, and is changing). | more…

In an important new book entitled Cocaine, death squads, and the war on terror: U.S. imperialism and class struggle in Colombia, scholars Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle expose the sinister motivations behind—and manifestations of—the “U.S. war on drugs and terror” in Colombia. Refuting USAID’s seemingly charitable concern for the cultivation of morally upstanding crops, the authors provide a succinct but detailed history of the United States’ alliances with drug traffickers and paramilitaries and its contributions to Colombian state repression and the institutionalization of the cocaine industry. | more…

The ‘Tea Party’ comes in for close scrutiny in a new book by Anthony DiMaggio, which exposes that faction’s pretensions to be a real social movement as false, dominated as it is from the top-down by established right-wing forces, argues William Alderson. | more…

These videos were recorded at a lecture on May 19, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They feature Irv Kurki, coordinator for essential discussions of advanced theory, discussing “Capital’s (Dis)organizing Systems and the Socialist Alternatives”; and Doug Enaa Greene, member of the Kasama Project and an activist at Occupy Boston, on “Critiquing Capital from Capital’s Viewpoint: Meszaros’s Critique of Sartre and the Occupy Movement.” | more…

MORE THAN A year has passed since the mass protests of February-March 2011, at Madison and elsewhere across Wisconsin, erupted in response to Republican Governor Scott Walker’s effort to bust the state’s public employee unions. The three-week occupation of the State Capitol building and truly massive outdoor demos in the surrounding streets drew the attention of the entire country and much of the world. Ongoing rallies, with crowds sometimes numbering well over a hundred thousand, drew organized labor and the unorganized, private and public sector workers, high school and college kids, farmers, the elderly and the young, retirees, the unemployed and recently returned veterans, and whole families with kids and grandkids — from every city, town and county in the state. | more…

I live in California, where a fledgling public health insurance marketplace is ushering a new gold rush of sorts. A driving force is of course President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Under such reform, capital cheers when the commodity of health care grows. A different kind of health-care system concerns author Steve Brouwer. In Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care, he details that alternate way ahead for medicine and people to improve social equity and solidarity. It’s moving ahead now in Latin America. Brouwer’s book teems with his first-hand accounts from a village in Monte Carmelo. His focus amplifies the model of de-commoditized health care that rules the roost stateside. | more…

With The Devil’s Milk, John Tully has produced a significant work that demands wide readership, consideration, and debate. Documenting capitalist hell, Tully serves as a captivating Virgil as he guides readers through rubber’s many layers. Dedicated to those who resisted and documented rubber’s atrocities, The Devil’s Milk serves as a forceful reminder that embedded within antagonism and conflict are multiple possibilities not only for the prolongation of this hell but also exit from it. | more…

Announcing a public lecture on the work of István Mészáros, in Boston, May 19, at the Harvest Co-operative in Cambridge. The presenters will offer their reflections on Mészáros’s latest work and relate that to the current situation. The presenters will contend that the American mind is stocked with the categories, symbols and rules of the 1 percent and that it is absolutely necessary to start discarding and restocking with the relevant structures of the 99 percent. | more…

Michael Lebowitz has drawn on the diverse experiences that led to the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and elsewhere, and those in Venezuela where he has resided for nearly a decade, to bolster his thesis on the need to place the transformation of values at the center of socialist construction. In his emphasis on consciousness, Lebowitz follows the tradition of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsh and Che Guevara, while rejecting the determinist notion of the superstructure as an appendage of the structure lacking in autonomy. | more…

In a debate that is often dominated by right wing creationists and reactionary neo-atheists, the authors manage to chart a different course. They succeed in showing how life has developed without needing to invoke supernatural forces. At the same time they sensitively discuss how materialist ideas have developed over the last several thousand years in a way which allows the reader to appreciate how radical and powerful such ideas can be. | more…