February 20, 2024
He hoped that, if he kept his head down and his mouth shut, then he could live out his military career in peace and quiet. Conscription had been renewed for Korea, but he was fortunate enough to be sent to Germany. This was also the time of peak McCarthyism....
February 20, 2024
About the time of the First World War, when interest in Marxist theory was virtually nonexistent in the United States, rival schools of thought in Japan emerged, and brilliant debates took place on Marx’s Capital and on capitalism as it was developing in Japan. Forty years ago, Makoto Itoh’s Value and Crisis began to chronicle these Japanese contributions to Marxist theory. Now, in a second edition of Value and Crisis, Itoh deepens his study of Marx’s theories. The promise of these theories has not waned. If anything—considering the failure of Soviet-style socialism and the catastrophe of neoliberalism—it grows daily.
February 20, 2024
In Guatemala, Congo, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Haiti, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Yemen, Sudan, Grenada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Angola and so many other countries, Washington’s bullets have been deployed in the pursuance of regime change, the protection of US hegemony and opposition to the emergence of truly sovereign post-colonial nations, all in flagrant violation of international law....
February 20, 2024
John Bellamy Foster’s ground-breaking Marx’s Ecology in 2000 demonstrated that Marxism, from the beginning, dealt with ecological questions. Its long-awaited sequel, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, developed these ideas from the deaths of Marx and Darwin to the 1960s, tracing a continuous thread of dialectical thinking about the environment. It is a meticulous study of the co-evolution of socialism and ecology citing a huge wealth of sources, including the significant contributions of Engels, the 'Left Darwinist' Ray Lankester, and the Romantic Marxist, William Morris...
February 20, 2024
Chris Time Steele, host of Channel Zero's podcast Time Talks, and Gerald Horne, author of dozens of histories of white supremacy--most recently The Bittersweet Science: racism, racketeering and the political economy of boxing, discuss Dr. Horne's The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century...
February 20, 2024
DOUBLE HEADER: "A must-read for anybody who wishes to truly understand Covid-19...." AND listen to Rob Wallace talking recently with Chuck Mertz on This Is Hell...
February 20, 2024
“'A man dressed like Karl Marx' Michael Heinrich observes 'would hardly arouse attention walking through the streets of Paris of London today.' Some biographers assert that Marx was a product of a past epoch, the early 19th century 'increasingly distant from our age.' (Jonathan Sperber 2013) By contrast the first volume of a projected account of Marx’s life sees his reflections on the 'epochal rupture' that created modern capitalism, to be, if more arresting than his clothing, recognisably part of today’s world....”
February 20, 2024
"Stop centering white people—there are so many other newer faces to see and they are already here..." Zillah Eisenstein, author, most recently, of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, has, in the wake of the presidential election, written "The New US: While Calling Out Trump White Women" for Portside, a leftist news aggregator and alternative communication medium...
February 20, 2024
Tamás Krausz, author of Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, recently talked to Alex Anfruns of LeftEast about the premise of Krausz’s book, which asserts that Vladimir Lenin’s theoretical and political legacy is of real interest to the political left--and that only after the disappearance of the USSR can we better understand Lenin's thought and actions...
February 20, 2024
The Right to Live in Health and Cuban Health Care, when read together, historicize Cuba’s pathbreaking medical system. ... While observers often focus on Cuba’s health infrastructure and policies, Rodríguez and Fitz instead emphasize consciousness and ideology. These two books show that throughout the twentieth century, Cubans voiced new demands and prioritized specific values, and, as a result, crafted a revolutionary healthcare system...
