I wasn’t a terrorist—just a journalist, which, in Israel’s eyes, is almost as bad….Everything people learn in journalism school about risk management and safety in the field feels like mere theories on paper in Gaza. Being a journalist during this war means continuing to write your story with one hand on your phone because the second air strike on the targeted residential area scattered metal and glass shrapnel in your arm and destroyed your laptop. It means waiting for the drone to lift higher in the sky so you can escape its surveillance radar and bullets that target every moving object, especially those marked with “PRESS” on their chests… | more…
While Mina, Sofie, and the other Jewish residents knelt in front of the synagogue, one of the Nazis threw a match onto the gasoline-soaked floor of the building. As the synagogue burned, Judenberg’s residents were ordered to shout, “We are burning the synagogue! We are burning the synagogue!” Mina and other Judenberg residents cried bitterly as they watched the building that was so central to the life of their close-knit community burn to ashes…. | more…
The book’s political heart is the chapter which discusses national sovereignty and begins with a succinct history of the nation state. Lage views Cuban sovereignty as a safeguard of Cuba’s social project, protecting it from neoliberal capitalism and the ills it has wrought on the ‘underdeveloped’ world…. | more…
In a speech on January 15, 1960, a year after the Revolution came to power, Fidel Castro remarked that, “The future of Cuba will necessarily be a future of men (sic) of science.” The landscape would change dramatically.
The Cuban Academy of Sciences was reactivated in 1962. In succession came: the National Center for Scientific Research (1965), the Center for Biological Research (1982); the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (1986) with its 38 scientific institutions, the Immunoassay Center (1987), the vaccine-manufacturing Finlay Institute (1991), the National Center for Biopreparations (1992), and the Center for Molecular Immunology (1994)…. | more…
John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?” | more…
Very soon after the loss of her life-partner, a giant of the Irish left, author of ‘Until We Fall’ and ‘Navigating the Zeitgeist’, Helena Sheehan shows as much commitment as ever…. | more…
The strike was very popular with the American people. Many Americans had their sons and daughters working part-time shifts or their brothers and friends as UPS drivers. They were regular faces on America’s Main Streets, in businesses, diners, and coffee shops… | more…
As a bonus, ‘Ron Carey and the Teamsters’ includes an afterward by Steve Early and Rand Wilson, two labor organizers and leaders who have been allied with TDU for decades. They add historical perspective, and place Carey’s leadership in the history of insurgency that has brought us to the “movement moment” of today’s Teamsters and the labor movement… | more…
The War Against the Commons is a brilliant examination of the rise of capitalism. It smashes some of the bases of capitalist ideology, and vindicates the possibility of democratic control of the earth. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on the left, connecting anticapitalism to defense of the environment. It shows that capitalism has always been opposed to ecological sanity–for example demonstrating the direct connection between capitalism and fossil fuels, especially coal. | more…
Each phase of Carey’s rise and fall, as recounted in “Putting Members First,” is worthy of close study by those seeking to follow in his footsteps as a shop-floor militant, an opposition candidate for local union office, and a coalition builder with other reformers. Last, and most impressive, was Carey’s role as a national labor leader faced with the daunting challenge of transforming a dysfunctional organization in the face of employer hostility and the internal resistance of union officials protecting their own perks, political power, and personal fiefdoms. Read on for some of the critical components of union revitalization, as recounted in this biography, that have continuing relevance to present-day reform struggles…. | more…
The shadows of this history continue to cast a dark cloud over people and the planet. Take the new US Cold War against China and Russia. We see the slow motion train wreck of US economic power in decline and its military drive to dominate the world, directly and by proxy. The unipolar world order is changing, which Sheehan’s autobiography fleshes out in practical and theoretical ways. She is no armchair academic… | more…
““However, it happened that one summer ten distinguished members of my faculty convened (five at a time) and unanimously declared me guilty of ‘deviousness, artfulness, and indirection hardly to be expected of a University colleague.’ I had refused, first before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and then before these juries of professors, to answer yes or no to the question, was I a Communist….” | more…
In 1964, reality came crashing into the ‘theoretical discourse’ when the Brazilian bourgeoise funded and supported, with the backing of American imperialism, a coup against the democratically elected government of João Goulart and installed a military dictatorship that lasted two decades. The orthodox analysis of Brazil’s dependency left orthodox communists ill-prepared to offer any sort of resistance. Unfortunately, the view that the road to breaking with dependency by developing capitalism is still predominant in some sections of the left…. | more…
