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…

“Creating an Ecological Society is an important and timely book for two reasons. First, the authors merge two rich areas of discourse—environmental conservation and anti-capitalism—in a seamless narrative that underscores both the urgency of our times and the opportunity of the moment. Second, authors Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams describe how creating an ecological society based on a set of shared values can directly improve the lived experience of individuals across the globe… | more…

Imperialism does not play out much in the 2020 presidential race. That says more about US corporate power over the two political parties and other institutions such as the new media, e.g., Comcast owning MSNBC. ¶ Meanwhile, as the US has deindustrialized, 79 percent of the globe’s industrial workers toiled in the Global South in 2010, over double the figure in 1950. The fruits of their exploited labor sell in the Global North | more…

The backward and repressive nature of the 1950s in regard to rights and opportunities for women has been widely exposed, not least through cultural representations like ‘Mad Men’, Doris Day films, and every single domestic appliance or kitchen advert from that decade and beyond. Women are housewives and mothers, slim and glamorous with high heels and frilly aprons. It’s easy to laugh now at these caricatures which hid an uncomfortable and often very unhappy reality. But it would never have occurred to me that in contrast to the life of a 1950s housewife, a bright and highly intelligent young girl would choose, in preference to that fate, to become a nun. But so was the case with Helena Sheehan, born into 1940s USA. | more…

A few days ago, Chuck Mertz, host of This is Hell!, a weekly radio longform political interview program emanating from Chicago, phoned John Bellamy Foster, author, with Brett Clark, of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift to discuss the many, devastating ways that “capitalism has ruined our relationship with nature. | more…

In The Robbery of Nature John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, departing from much previous scholarship, adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth…. | more…

Thirty-one years ago the Berlin Wall came down and the working class in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, voted to merge with capitalist West Germany. In A Socialist Defector: from Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee veteran journalist Victor Grossman provides insight into why the GDR’s 41-year experiment with socialism did not last. He describes the ups and downs of the former GDR, spicing it up with many interesting details of life before and after the Berlin Wall…. | more…

“Seth Donnelly’s The Lie of Global Prosperity, released in paperback late last year, is a methodical examination of how the World Bank spins its number crunching to cover up the extent of global poverty. Donnelly bolsters his analysis with on-the-ground reporting from numerous fact-finding trips to Haiti; the descriptions of what he found there effectively show how World Bank support for unjust governments plays out on the ground in underdeveloped nations… | more…

To define a workable socialism, it’s best first to lay out what’s wrong with capitalism. Nancy Fraser’s excellent essay in Beyond Market Dystopia does just this, and these wrongs are three: injustice, irrationality and unfreedom. Injustice inheres in the exploitation of labor and theft of its surplus value. Irrationality exists in capitalism’s built-in economic crises. Unfreedom derives from social inequality and class power and also from tyranny in the work-place… | more…

On a grey winter morning in Seattle, in February 1919, 110 local unions shut down the entire city. Shut it down and took it over, rendering the authorities helpless. For five days, workers from all trades and sectors—streetcar drivers, telephone operators, musicians, miners, loggers, shipyard workers—fed the people, ensured that babies had milk, that the sick were cared for. They did this without police – and they kept the peace themselves. This had never happened before in the United States and has not happened since. Those five days became known as the General Strike of Seattle. In Radical Seattle, Cal Winslow explains why…. | more…

“The Inca emperor Manco Inca started a rebellion against the Spanish Conquistadors in 1536 in Cusco. Although ultimately driven into the remote jungles of Vilcabamba, he and his forces were able to establish a liberated zone and declare a neo-Inca State that lasted for several decades until the execution of his son Túpac Amaru in 1572….” | more…

(T)here are terribly destructive forces — racism, organized criminality, brutal labor exploitations, battery, debauchery, gambling — from which grew an intensely beautiful art form, today denoted as ‘jazz.’ It is the classic instance of the lovely lotus arising from the malevolent mud…. | more…

Professor Helena Sheehan is internationally known as one of Ireland’s leading left-wing intellectuals. Her book Marxism and the philosophy of science: a critical history, first published in 1985, is the classic work on its subject and is still in print. She has now written her autobiography, covering the first part of her life from the 1940s to the 1980s… | more…