“In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship was an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers seized by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted to give his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to add even more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in this system of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized were to be ‘laid together spoon-fashion.’” | more…

Until recently many leftist theorists tended to understand materialism solely in economic terms, arguing almost on principle that historical materialism had nothing to do with ecology. The wider public, in turn, tended to presume that ecology fundamentally originated with early scientific Malthusian theories. On the contrary, as Foster demonstrates in “The Return of Nature” and throughout his talk, the development of ecology as a critical perspective arose from the socialist and materialist critique of capitalist extraction and industrialization… | more…

“A cast of characters, dramatic tensions and intellectual sword fights.” That’s how Morning Star‘s Helen Mercer described The Return of Nature last week.  The reader-owned co-operative paper recommends Foster’s Deutscher Prize winning work as both a “challenging account of the interaction between ecological science and dialectical materialism,” and a book with “a lyrical style which makes the details fascinating and absorbing”… | more…

Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies…. | more…

While the face of the gun rights movement tends to be white conservatives, Black Americans are also contributing to the recent gun industry boom. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, gun sales by Black men and women rose 58 percent in the first half of 2020 compared to the first half of 2019. The choice that some Black Americans are making to arm themselves in self defense is just one part of a long, complicated chapter in U.S. history. Gerald Horne, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston and author of The Bittersweet Science, joined Tanzania Vega on The Takeaway to discuss. | more…

In Theory co-host Disha Karnad Jani interviews Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, about his book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century… | more…

Matt and Christian, hosts of Cosmonaut, join Zhun Xu, author of From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty for a discussion on China’s communes from their construction to their dismantling. They contextualize land reform globally, elaborate on how the Chinese land reform process looked different from the Soviet one, discuss how the communes looked and functioned, and what services they provided as well as their achievements and their points of failure…. | more…

The 20th century saw a wave of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, national liberation movements transform the world, often with the aid of Soviet, Eastern European, and Cuban Communists. Just as often, these revolts against the old world–the racist, sexist world of subjugation and oppression of entire peoples–were violently suppressed…. Unfortunately, historically, inevitably right-wing opposition takes the shape of bullets–bullets emanating from Washington!… | more…

So far, Biden’s foreign policy does not differ seismically from Trump’s. Indeed Biden’s first move–recognizing the unelected pretender to the Venezuelan presidency, Juan Guaido–was as lousy as anything Trump did. It raises the specter of CIA coups, assassinations, regime changes and Washington-orchestrated color revolutions, which Biden’s two dreadful foreign policy appointees, Victoria Nuland and Samantha Power, embraced ardently in the past. Of course … this has been how the U.S. has exercised power in the world (mostly the Global South) since at least the dawn of the twentieth century…. | more…

C. S. Soong, host of Against the Grain (KPFA/94.1 FM) talks with John Bellamy Foster, author, most recently, of The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology. To what extent did Frederick Engels engage with environmental and ecological issues? When Engels wrote about the dialectics of nature, what did he mean by “dialectics”? According to Foster, Engels’s insights into ecology, dialectics, and the environmental conditions of the working class were, and remain, critically important… | more…

Don Fitz’s Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution covers a wide range of topics including medical and sanitary advances prior to the 1959 revolution such as viral disease inoculation and suppression, lessons learned from medical and military missions overseas and the challenges of developing a well-functioning healthcare system in the face of international hostility…. | more…

Gerald Horne, author of the recently published The Dawning of the Apocalypse, talks to Greg Rasheed, host of Blog Talk Radio’s The Root and Roots Show about the roots of white supremacy, begun in the 16th century, reaching all the way into the US Capitol on January 6 … and beyond… | more…