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…

Sunday, January 31 @ 1:30pm-4:00pm: Join this online reading group and discussion of the most recent issue of Socialist Register dedicated to Leo Panitch. This first session begins with Ursula Huws‘ essay, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Digitalization, Restructuring, and Mobilization in the Covid Crisis.” This work addresses the changes currently sweeping through global labor markets during the coronavirus pandemic…. | more…

Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Big Flu and Dead Epidemiologists, has become an international pundit in the conversation about the rise and spread of global epidemics. Here are two of his latest articles on COVID-19 and beyond…. | more…

Since the Covid-19 pandemic pummeled the economy, millions of workers have been displaced, while others continue to work amid increasingly harsh, often hazardous working conditions. With Covid forcing millions to choose between a paycheck and their health, some labor activists have hoped for a wave of wildcat strikes, and in the wake of the election, perhaps even a ‘general strike’ if Trump refused to concede…. | more…

To say that the Tory government’s response to Covid-19 has been disastrous is merely to state the obvious. Their unwillingness to take decisive action at the right time, coupled with their ability to contemplate tens of thousands of deaths with equanimity, has earned them a special place even in the annals of Tory incompetence and self-serving cynicism…. | more…

Michael Lebowitz deepens the arguments he made in his award-winning book, Beyond Capital. Whereas Karl Marx, in Capital, focused on capital and the capitalist class that is its embodiment, Lebowitz, in Between Capitalism and Community, demonstrates that capitalism contains within itself elements of a different society, one of community… | more…