“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…

Despite Trump’s promises, this reduction of immigration will do nothing to slow the pandemic or to protect citizens’ jobs. Its only real effect will be to excite Trump’s base, disrupt the lives of tens of thousands of families, and expose the underlying hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy…. | more…

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…