February 20, 2024
"The members were Santhals, Oraons,as well as tea garden workers, who were allied in a struggle for surplus land distribution. On the whole, death sentences were avoided, but arms were snatched and land was distributed. The aim was to abolish the feudal order...."
February 20, 2024
"I thought to myself, 'I've never heard any of this really,' and I (came of age during) the anti-war movement, I'm a historian of this time period." If you think you've heard enough about the Vietnam War, just wait.
February 20, 2024
"'Why do we go back?' she asked sardonically, 'because they go back,' the pro-war hawks and military establishment. The 'patriarchy,' as she put it, ruminates the defeat in Vietnam like a bad sandwich growling in its stomach through a night that will not end. The defeat in Vietnam struck at a pillar of American manhood. Vietnam veterans would sometimes be chided by older veterans: they had won their war; Vietnam veterans had lost—what kind of men were they?"
February 20, 2024
"The bargain was that if they worked together, they could expropriate the land from the Native Americans and accomplish what came to be called the American Dream, and with a little luck and a lot of pluck, they could then somehow down the road gain free labor from enslaved Africans, and so there was a sort of corrupt bargain at the onset of what is now the United States of America...And still to this very day, you have this kind of class collaboration between some of the ninety-nine percent and some of the one percent. How else can you explain how and why a faux billionaire, Donald J. Trump in November 2020, received almost seventy-five million votes?"
February 20, 2024
Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the pathbreaking Capital and Imperialism—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production...
February 20, 2024
“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.'”
February 20, 2024
"Foster and Clark show that the exploitation of wage labor in the capitalist production process is essentially tied to the expropriation of the natural world, the refusal to socially acknowledge care labor as socially necessary labor, the privatization of our common cultural heritage, the treatment of non-white communities as places where the social pathologies of capitalism (unemployment, poverty, and so on) can be concentrated, and so on. From this perspective workers, environmentalists, feminists, community activists, and anti-racists have good reason to make common cause."
February 20, 2024
In a recent review of Rob Wallace' latest work, we are reminded that "If the virus has a source it is not Yunnan but the boardrooms of giant corporations." The review takes the time to name the culprits..
February 20, 2024
Just after January 6th, Gerald Horne was one of the first to remind us that "mobocracy," generally driven by settler colonialist impulses and schemes, has been a potent force throughout this country's history...
February 20, 2024
Author Rob Wallace made a decision: His new book Dead Epidemiologists would take a personal approach. How could it not? While he introduces his work through this intimate lens, Wallace's perspective is global, tracking "the implications of capitalist agricultural production, distribution and consumption that is harming the web of life...."
