All human societies, from the most primitive to the most modern, have an important commonality—the need to work. Water, food, shelter and other basics of life don’t arrive as gifts. Work is required to secure them and to raise the next generation. ¶ So fundamental is this basic principal of human life that generations of Marxist theorists have based analyses of social societies and structures on the economic base of a given society…. | more…

Dr Helena Sheehan is a well-known left-wing intellectual. Her book, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: Critical History, published in 1985, became a classic work on its subject. ¶ She has now written her autobiography, and this is the first volume, covering her life from the 1940s to the 1980s, a book which is full of interest for a particular view of Ireland and the world today…. | more…

Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s revolutionary ecological materialism. More than simply a study of Marx, it commenced an intellectual and social history, encompassing thinkers from Epicurus to Darwin, who developed materialist and ecological ideas. Now, with The Return of Nature, Foster continues this narrative. In so doing, he uncovers a long history of efforts to unite issues of social justice and environmental sustainability that will help us comprehend and counter today’s unprecedented planetary emergencies…. | more…

Historian Gerald Horne, author of several books, including the forthcoming The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talks to Esha, host of Historic.ly, the web program that “decolonizes history and debunks myths and misinformation taught to you in school and on corporate media.” Much of Dr. Horne’s work, it turns out, is based on his question, “Why is there not a stronger left movement in the USA, the leading imperialist country?” | more…

Students at A-level are taught to back up their arguments with data obtained from reputable sources. Teachers guide them towards official institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. Donnelly in this book warns us to be cautious of the assumptions made when collecting data, and the argument which the data is supporting…. | more…

Professor Horne is under no illusions as to the reception which such bold, defiant assertions will be received by bourgeois and liberal historians, because every statement in the book is scrupulously footnoted, and indeed there are no less than two in the introductory paragraph quoted above. Professor Horne comes to the field of combative ‘history from below’ both well-armed and unwilling to take prisoners. This is an assertive position, which in the view of this reviewer, is well due admiration and applause…. | more…

Recently, commemorations took place across the country to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970. But often left out of the history books is the Jackson State massacre. Two students were killed and 12 wounded eleven days later when, on May 15, 75 state and local policemen opened fire on a dormitory at the predominantly Black Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. Police said there was a sniper on the roof of the dorm. That turned out to be a lie…. | more…

Facing the Anthropocene describes a new geological epoch (the anthropocene) and its impacts on the earth system. The book further identifies the possible cause of the present crisis of the earth system (fossil capitalism) and discusses the effects of fossil capitalism on the earth system (environmental degradation, climate change)…. | more…

“The earth is dying and capitalism is to blame. Facing this, one can opt for hope, as Marxist ecosocialists do, or one can succumb to pessimism fed by dark thoughts on human nature and the intractable, deadly persistence of our economic system of exploitation. Human nature has a destructive and murderous side, while capitalism, expressing that side with its endless growth, endless greed, blights the planet like cancer…” | more…

Allen Ruff, host of A Public Affair, from community radio station WORT in Madison, Wisconsin, talks to Dr. Gerald Horne, historian and prolific author—whose book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse, is forthcoming this July. In their conversation, Horne explores the assertion that the arrival of COVID-19 has exposed inequities in our social system and continues to act as a catalyst for deep and simmering social and economic crises—all worsened by the current political system…. | more…

The first volume of Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx, if any indication of the two volumes yet to come, signals a genuine event in the understanding of Marx and his work. With it, the terrain for understanding all aspects of Marx’s life has likely changed fundamentally…. | more…

In this comprehensive study of the connections among capitalism, slavery and white supremacy, Gerald Horne, the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston and the author of more than 30 scholarly books, takes a deep dive into the 17th century, revealing fallacies in what later ages have said about the earlier ones, showing the slow and steady consolidation of axes of differentiation in the service of capital, and ultimately connecting the choice in 2016 of “a vulgar billionaire” with the cross-class coalition that originated in the colonial settlements of the New World…. | more…

This book is expressive of a new wave of scholarly reassessments of China’s transition from its socialist past to capitalist present. From a Chinese perspective, it has not much in common with the canonical CCP narratives widely circulated in printed media and Party phone apps, as Zhun Xu employs a “betrayal of the revolution” rhetoric that pinpoints ruptures between a socialist China under Mao Zedong’s leadership and a capitalist China headed by Deng Xiaoping and afterwards … | more…