Fighting fossil fuel companies can be dangerous business. The people of County Mayo, Ireland, found that out when they rose up against Shell Oil in the early 2000s. The uprising lasted 15 years. Protesters were beaten and jailed. But they delayed the refinery’s opening by 10 years, cost Shell billions of dollars and caused the company a public relations nightmare, as a new book by Fred Wilcox, Shamrocks and Oil Slicks, recounts…. | more…

This is a special book, bearing an almost sacred topic for all those interested in the history of the American labor and the Left. The vibrant, pre-1920 Socialist Party, waxing strong and confident until struck down for its resistance to the US entry into the First World War, stood for a larger and more diverse radicalism. including Wobblies, quasi-wobblies. labor and cultural radicals of no certain description and of several generations. They had in common the sense that dramatic change in society was possible, perhaps inevitable…. | more…

Norman Otis Richmond and Malinda Francis, hosts of WBPU-LPFM 96.3 “Black Power 96.3 FM,” Saint Petersburg, Florida, catch up on current politics with historian Gerald Horne, author of dozens of books, including the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century  | more…

Jaisal Noor, of The Real News Network, talks to Gerald Horne, historian and author of the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse about fighting for basic rights amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the increasingly catastrophic government response to it. Is there any reason to hope, given the dire economic outlook and two unappealing options at the ballot box in November? | more…

Capitalism has always been international in nature. Even reaching back to its earliest embryonic form, in the concentrations of industry and merchant capital in Renaissance Italy, capital depended upon a European-wide trading market. The system’s true emergence came in the context of the European conquest of the Americas, its trading outposts in Asia, and the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade. An international hierarchy enabled by atrocity, war and plunder has always been central to the functioning of capitalism… | more…

Popular uprisings are rarely as spontaneous as the mainstream press often makes them out to be. Instead, from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring and beyond, they are more often the result of extended grassroots organizing, previous actions and strikes, and even legislative campaigns. The rates of participation are almost always linked to the amount of organizing that took place weeks, months and even years before the event takes place. ¶ It is this understanding that makes Cal Winslow’s recently published book Radical Seattle such an excellent history…. | more…

COVID-19 like most disease is democratic—it can affect anyone, although with differing options to respond to it. The world, including the US, is not democratic. This does not bode well. But we can move forward because simple individualism contradicts the interdependency of this COVID crisis. ‘We’ all suffer when one person circulates with symptoms—and we will flourish if we accept responsibility to isolate/distance and protect one another…. | more…

Where did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading…. | more…

Over the last few decades John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have been at the forefront of showing how classical Marxism is the foremost tool in explaining capitalism’s rift with the ecological systems that support our society. They have shown how Karl Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ explains how capitalism is a break with other historical modes of production, a break that has transformed our relationship to the natural world and then broken the ongoing metabolism between humans and the planet. Reading this book while trapped at home during the Covid-19 pandemic it is very easy to see the practical application of Marx’s metabolic rift theory…. | more…

Fred Wilcox tells the story of peaceful resistance met by cruel violence, over a period of fifteen years, by a people whose love for their families and communities, the sea, their rivers, lakes and bogs, pitted them against Shell Oil -one of the world’s most destructive predators. Through their struggle, they have also shown us a way of resisting the powerful corporate/government interlock which threatens communities with destruction of the environment and their way of life…. | more…

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, explains, via The American Scholar, that if we want to understand global outbreaks of infectious disease, you have to look at global agriculture…. | more…

Viewed, it would seem, from every possible angle, jazz seems to be a topic about which there is little left to say. But no one has quite seen it in the lurid, smoky light of the jazz demimonde – a world of pimps, gangsters, strung out divas, knife-wielding trumpeters, Bolshevik pianists and impresarios in white hoods. The author’s research is breathtaking. To read the book is to be barraged with anecdotes, quotations, statistical asides and mini-histories that are often no more than a paragraph long…. | more…