One main thread runs through every aspect of every story: Stories of Black rebellion and resistance. When Horne tells of Texas’ efforts to secede and the impact of the arsons of 1860, allegedly set by slaves, he comments, “Our enemies are the ones who put out the rumor that we’re docile, because they want us to be docile today.” That’s fallacious, he says. “Arsons were one of our favorite tools. Arson, poisonings, insurrections, murders.” And in fact, during the Madison administration, Africans actually joined the British in torching the White House in 1814, sending James and Dolly fleeing. | more…
How and why the U.S. left has tailed the ruling class on such a bedrock matter as conceptualizing white supremacy soars far beyond the confines of this brief response…..What does this mean for today? It means rejecting the new Cold War against Russians and Chinese and, instead, forging alliances with both. It means linking demands for reparations nationally with likeminded struggles in the Caribbean and Africa. It means realizing that the uncanny ability of some on the U.S. left to hand rhetorical weapons to the right to bash the oppressed – from “political correctness” to “cancel culture” – is hardly a coincidence or accident but simply another expression of a “cross-class alliance” that has propped up settler colonialism from its inception….. | more…
“….activists ought to be clear-eyed about the limitations of regulatory interventions. While there is certainly utility in digital media and tech reform, antitrust legislation and similar policy courses are insufficient for large-scale social transformations that characterize Marxist aspirations…” | more…
The Return of Nature is a genealogy of ecological thinking. The word ‘ecology’ was not in common usage until the twentieth century, leading many to consider ecological thinking a fairly recent development. However, in this impressive volume, John Bellamy Foster convincingly identifies a materialist ecological sensibility within works dating back a century prior to ecology’s popularization…” | more…
“Here are a few pieces of advice I got from Michael, that I would have liked to have had earlier in my career: Make sure your case tells a story – a story of your client and a story of the law…Be wary of judicial and prosecutorial ego – but know that there are people with both power and conscience…Trust the capacity of jurors to learn and dispense justice…Decide what you want and ask for it…Don’t mistake lawyering for movement work – but don’t forget about the movement either…Believe that one case at a time can, over time, make a difference…Bring others along on your journey – and remember their contributions to it with graciousness and gratitude…..” | more…
“Richman argues against the usual approach of organisers to ignore the fortunes of ‘at will’ workers because their suffering presents workers with an incentive to join the union and pay their subs…” | more…
“Prashad’s guidebook to US imperialism acts as a springboard for readers for their own journey in understanding imperialism and the role of the US in global politics. Reference is made to economic sabotage in Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia; to trampled revolutions in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Grenada; to hybrid wars, outright killings, and other forms of subversion from Burkina Faso to Greece; Iran to Iraq; from Indonesia to Japan…..” | more…
“…It’s no accident, as historians like to say, that the Founding Father George Washington was a grand real estate speculator, just like the 45th U.S. President…” | more…
In this moment of what a philologist or scholar of poetry might call correctio, Michael performs the self-reflexive, intertextual move of being in conversation with his own text as a form of revision…. | more…
Angus recounts the history of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). First developed in the late 1920s, by 1970 more than 750,000 tons of CFCs had been pumped into the earth’s atmosphere. In the mid-1970s, scientists began to discover the link between CFCs and ozone depletion, and the chemical industry went into full denial mode, arguing that scientists’ arguments were ‘just theories’….As it turns out, the British Antarctic Survey had been measuring ozone levels since 1957…. | more…
“This is a complex array of themes to pursue, particularly given that the scientific and social dimensions of sexual politics in the lives of many of these figures is highly relevant as well. Bellamy Foster rightly emphasises the importance of such issues within the overall picture, as a genuinely dialectical understanding of society and nature could hardly avoid confronting the alienated character of gender relations in class societies….” | more…
“…this is the problem that has actually plagued the entire attitude to vaccine development and production in this pandemic. A few companies have got the rights, and they are holding onto those rights, and they are only producing themselves. They must share this knowledge, and they must allow other producers, because that’s the only way we’re going to confront the crisis…” | more…
