While vaunting itself as an oasis of democracy, the United States, in reality, has become a superpower by infiltrating foreign governments, obliterating entire cultures, and carrying out murderous military interventions in developing countries all over the world. Washington Bullets is about U.S. imperialism—the bullets sent by various Washington, DC administrations to crush revolutions, assassinate democratically elected leaders—to destroy hope…. | more…

“If you want to understand why Black Lives don’t Matter under the current system, look to the events of five hundred years ago,” says historian and University of Houston African American Studies professor, Gerald Horne. Drawing from his most recent book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse, Dr. Horne speaks with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report about these five hundred years–and their impact on our lives today… | more…

The Seattle General Strike lasted only five days, but people have been fighting over what it means for a hundred years. Cal Winslow raises this discussion to a new level. Sticking close to the workers themselves, he shows us why the strike matters…. | more…

Red Library: A Political Education Podcast for Today’s Left offers a program called the “Lost Futures Series.” In the latest podcast, Comrade Adam (a.k.a. Chairman Bane) joins podrades Remi and Niko from Cosmonaut‘s Ecology Cast series to discuss Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. Included in the conversation: the concept of metabolism, Marx’s evolution of thought on ecology being the core realm of capitalist crisis, agricultural chemistry, the role of a Marxist ecosocialist perspective to stop the destruction of capital across the planet, and more… | more…

If you’re living in a settler-colonialist society–which is virtually all of the Americas–the seeds of fascism have been implanted because of the violent uprooting of the Indigenous population that helps to create a culture of mega-violence… They really drank the kool-aid with regard this idea of the United States being this democracy with a sturdy constitution… | more…

If they are paying attention, progressives worldwide know that Cuba provides healthcare that saves lives and prevents disease more effectively than does the United States, its major capitalist enemy. They know that Cuban health workers have been caring for people throughout the global South and, during the Covid -19 pandemic, in Europe too. And the word is out that Cuba educates vast numbers of physicians for much of the world… | more…

Ronnie Kasrils, activist and the author of The Unlikely Secret Agent, the story of his wife as an underground agent for the African National Congress, recently wrote about anti-apartheid leader Ruth First, who was killed by a letter bomb on August 17, 1987. Kasrils’s article about First, commemorating the 38th anniversary of her death, is based on a lecture he presented on 23 August 2020. It first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, an online voice of the South African working class… | more…

John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, published in 2000, brought awareness of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel’s writings on and relevance to, environmental thinking. His latest work, The Robbery of Nature, written with Brett Clark, demonstrates the importance of understanding nature and society with a Marxist perspective…. | more…

Historian and author Gerald Horne, most recently, of The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talks with Jacqueline Luqman on The Real News Network about how the colonization of the United States helped create the American obsession with property rights and property damage over people’s rights… | more…

World War I, given all the rousing “Over-There” songs and in-the-trenches films it inspired, was, at its outset, surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As opposition increased, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration became intent on stifling antiwar dissent. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was jailed, and Deb’s Socialist Party became a prime target of surveillance operations, both covert and overt. Drastic as these measures were, more draconian measures were to come. In Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, Eric Chester reveals that out of this turmoil came a heated public discussion on the theory of civil liberties—the basic freedoms that are, theoretically, untouchable by any of the three branches of the U.S. government. | more…

Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Rising Up with Sonali, a progressive news radio and TV show, recently spoke with Shaun Richman, author of Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century… | more…

Daniel Jacobs: What led you to research the history of the 16th and 17th centuries with respect to the settler colonial project?
Gerald Horne: A number of factors led me in that direction. One is that I was looking for synthetic overviews of the 16th and 17th centuries and was unable to find those overviews. You can find studies and monographs that deal with various aspects of those two centuries and, as my footnotes suggest, I draw upon those various studies extensively. The second point is when I started on this road I was generally dissatisfied with the origin stories, which I refer to often as creation myths, of the founding of the United States of America…” | more…

John Bellamy Foster, one of the foremost thinkers about ecological Marxism, is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Here, Mitch Jeserich, host of Letters and Politics, talks to Foster about his work, beginning with his latest book, which opens with an account of the funerals of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin… | more…