The disease of racism continues to cause suffering and misery across the globe. The eruption of the Black Lives Matter protests this year has exposed the extent to which systematic racism continues to oppress and demonise black and minority ethnic communities, particularly in the US and Britain. This racism in many ways stems from colonialism and imperialism, and therefore capitalism, particularly through the devastating trans-Atlantic slave trade… | more…

Near the close of his panoramic and richly researched Jazz and Justice, Gerald Horne points to Adorno’s characteristically modernist assertion that the most an artist can accomplish, faced with the contradiction of enchained art in an enchained society, is to realize that contradiction through emancipated art, although the attempt is most often only a recipe for despair. In the spirit of Adorno’s observation, Horne’s book is a chronicle of the course of individual and collective material struggles in the practice of jazz… | more…

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… | more…

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… | more…

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… | more…

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…. | more…

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. | more…

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…. | more…

Michael Heinrich’s projected biography of Marx that is supposed to consist of four volumes is an extraordinary ambitious undertaking. Only the first volume “Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society” has been published so far. It covers the years before Marx’s birth (because it deals with his parents) and goes up to his doctoral dissertation done in 1841, when he was 23. The biography is extraordinary ambitious for three reasons…. | more…

As digital technology becomes ever more integral to the capitalist market dystopia, it refashions our ways of working, consuming, and communicating. Essays in Beyond Digital Capitalism explore alternative ways of living: from artificial intelligence to the arts, from transportation to fashion, from environmental science to economic planning—all against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic… | more…

Gerald Horne, historian, author, and labor lawyer, recently talked to Wilmer Leon of The Critical Hour about how President-elect Joe Biden’s pro-union stance boosts unions at a critical time. So far, unions have been pleased with Mr. Biden’s picks for top economic jobs, according to a report in The Financial Times. But they’re closely watching the positions of labor secretary and U.S. trade representative… | more…

The interview was recorded online in August 2020. Promjena okvira is produced by the portal Slobodni Filozofski and its video-addendum SkriptaTV, and this episode was first aired on August 19th 2020 on the Croatian regional television KanalRi from Rijeka. All episodes that have so far been published online are available on this playlist… | more…