“Just over a year ago, diplomats from around the world were celebrating the final ratification of the December 2016 Paris Agreement, proclaimed to be the first globally inclusive step toward a meaningful climate solution. The agreement was praised as one of President Obama’s signature accomplishments and as a triumph of his “soft power” approach to world affairs. But even then, long before Donald Trump and his coterie of plutocrats and neofascists
Historian Gerald Horne, author of several books, including Confronting Black Jacobins and Race to Revolution talks with TRNN anchor Paul Jay about Trump’s firing FBI Director James Comey… | more…
Henry A. Giroux, professor at the Department of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University and author of several books, including America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth and America’s Addiction to Terrorism, spoke recently at the McMaster Alumni Association Progam… | more…
Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in just five weeks in the spring of 1937. ¶ Then living in Paris, Picasso, fifty-five, was already well-known. Born in Spain in 1881, he went to Paris in 1900; he had visited Spain in 1934 but would never return. ¶ Still, the insurgent Popular Front government appointed him director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, in absentia, and Picasso undertook several projects sympathetic to the Republic and to raise funds on its behalf. The government in turn asked him to produce a mural for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, and he agreed, though progress at first was slow. It was the April 26 attack at Guernica that moved him. He threw himself into the painting and in less than five weeks, astonishingly, had completed Guernica…… | more…
August Nimtz’s essay in this book on Marx and Engels, and organization, alone would make it worthwhile. Nimtz shows that though they didn’t write a huge amount about political organization, Marx and Engels showed through their practice and fragmentary comments that they believed, like Lenin after them, that socialists need to get organized in advance of great social struggles if they wanted to transform society.… | more…
6:00-8:00pm April 30 at the Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 Presented by the Marxist Education Project (MEP) Sickened by the contamination of their water, their air, of the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing them. It is now clearer than ever that capitalism is also degrading the Earth’s ability to support other forms of life. Come hear Fred Magdoff, author (with Chris Williams) of the upcoming Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, talk about his book and how it really might be possible to to envision and create a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable.… | more…
PAUL JAY: So, what do you make of this moment? Trump is under attack for being pro-Russian, and just a few days ago he talks about over-throwing Assad is not the target. Which must have royally — excuse the language — pissed off a whole lot of the American foreign policy establishment. GERALD HORNE: Well, I think you put your finger on a major issue, that this attack on Syria can be easily interpreted as a kind of wag the dog strategy by Mr. Trump. That is to say, the bloodhounds were on his trail, as a result of his pre-November 2016 contacts with Moscow. … | more…
Miroslav Krleža was a giant of Yugoslav literature, yet remarkably little of his writing has appeared in English. Harbors Rich in Ships gives English-speaking readers an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate the astonishing breadth of Krleža’s literary creations. Beautifully translated by Željko Cipriš, this collection of seven representative early texts introduces a new audience to three stories from Krleža’s renowned antimilitarist book, Croatian God Mars; an autobiographical sketch; a one-act play; a story from his collection of short stories, Thousand and One Deaths; and his signature drama, The Glembays, a satirical account of the crime-ridden origins of one of Zagreb’s most aristocratic families. This collection will help readers of all interests and ages see just why Krleža is considered among the best of the literary moderns.… | more…
Second Annual Boston Socialist Unity Project Conference, April 21 and 22 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Edgerton Lecture Hall, Room 34-101 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA Come hear socialist scholars and activists including Vijay Prashad, Barbara Madeloni, Sherri Mitchell, the Green-Rainbow Party, and Fred Magdoff, co-author (with Chris Williams) of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation… | more…
Marx’s Capital after 150 Years: Critique and Alternative to Capitalism May 24-26 at York University, Toronto, Canada ADMISSION TO THIS CONFERENCE IS FREE For many scholars, today Marx’s analyses are arguably resonating even more strongly than they did in Marx’s own time. This international conference brings together several world-renowned sociologists, political theorists, economists, and philosophers, from diverse fields and 13 countries.… | more…
If Karl Marx were writing Capital today and had paid attention when Friedrich Engels and his publisher implored him to make the first chapters of volume one less abstract and more accessible, rather than dismissing their suggestions with declarations about a royal road, he might well have chosen a specific commodity from which he could unravel capital. And, if he wanted to choose a commodity in which the relations of the contemporary political economy had been crystallised, he might well have chosen an iPhone. In following the social relations that sit behind the iPhone, Marx would have observed children mining for cassiterite in the Congo; followed the global production chains from the neo-futurist Apple Campus in Cupertino …… | more…
