Presuming Donald Trump’s electoral defeat will lead to little more than some revenge firings, a parade of pardons for any Trump fixers still standing, and a practice run at the mechanics of a rightist coup for next time, what does a Biden administration promise us come January 2021?… | more…

Eric T. Chester, author of the recently released Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, talked to Mitch Jeserich, host of KPFA’s Letters and Politics, about the legacy of dissent, what happens when the United States works to suppress it, and how this might play out in light of the oncoming Biden administration… | more…

While I was recommending his earlier book, Wallace himself was being bombarded with requests for interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Out of that came this excellent new book. Dead Epidemiologists is a collection of material that grapples with the big questions around Covid-19 – its origins, the failure of capitalist governments to deal with it and the way the disease exacerbates existing social, political and economic fractures in society…. | more…

Historians Gerald Horne, author, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century and Nikki Taylor, author, most recently, of Driven Towards Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and the Tragedy on the Ohio, appeared last week on the first 36 minutes of The Real New Network’s new Marc Steiner Show. They talked about the history of–and resistance to–fascist violence against Indigenous and Black communities in the US… | more…

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… | more…

“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… | more…

Named for the historian Isaac Deutscher and his wife Tamara, this prize is awarded each year for a book demonstrating “the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition.” Previous prize winners include Mike Davis, Robin Blackburn, Ellen Mieksins Wood, and Monthly Review Press authors Michael A. Lebowitz, Tamás Krausz, Lucio Colleti, István Mészáros, and Kohei Saito… | more…

“’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….” | more…

Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog. In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London gravesite—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity… | more…

New Year’s Eve 2019: 5,000 people on the beach at Mallacoota, Victoria, watch pitch-black skies turn a deep red as the bushfire approaches. They huddle, powerless against the fury of this climate change-fuelled nightmare. By March 2020, 33 people, one billion animals, 3,094 houses and over 17 million hectares of land had been destroyed in fires across Australia… | more…

“History continuously reminds us that racism and capitalism are two peas from the same pod. Those of a predominantly European descent wreak worldwide havoc, carrying out the much-fabled white man’s burden, imposing themselves as ruling elites. Black lives still don’t matter in many societies because the miserable claim of ‘white supremacy’ has been effortlessly intertwined with the neoreligion; capitalism….” | more…

Covid-19 comes from the primary forest, from bat caves. In a world without industrial agriculture encroaching on that forest, in a world without the corporatization of a wild-food industry, Covid-19 would probably never have left those caves. As it becomes endemic, it may become unstoppable. But not so the next pestilence. If we revamp our food production system now, maybe the pathogens lurking in primeval forest viral reservoirs will stay there… | more…

Venezuela has been the stuff of frontpage news extravaganzas, especially since the death of Hugo Chávez. With predictable bias, mainstream media focus on violent clashes between opposition and government, coup attempts, hyperinflation, U.S. sanctions, and massive immigration. What is less known, however, is the story of what the Venezuelan people—especially the Chavista masses—do and think in these times of social emergency. This revolutionary grassroots movement still aspires to the communal path to socialism that Chávez refined in his last years. Venezuela, the Present as Struggle is an eloquent testament to their lives… | more…