“Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, by Zillah Eisenstein, is an ambitious book for our perilous times. The planet is burning, and the author makes her case for left social change as right wing politics spreads…”
¶ “The feminist movement today is often criticized as ‘white feminism’ or a movement which fights for middle-class or upper-class white women…. Abolitionist Socialist Feminism seeks to remedy of the problem of ‘white feminism’ and color blind socialism by connecting anti-racism, feminism, and socialism…” | more…
Jazz is enjoying a new wave of popularity. A gig by Kamasi Washington, the last musician named in Gerald Horne’s Jazz and Justice, attracts big crowds, and his recordings make big sales… | more…
Why read yet another biography of Marx or start with this one? Unlike others, Heinrich checks facts meticulously and embeds Marx and his writings in the economic and social circumstances, personal and political relationships, political ideas and polemics of Marx’s life. Conjecture is rare and clearly marked…. | more…
“A state, to be a state, has to punish … bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” ¶ Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Pem Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites…. | more…
Zillah Eisenstein, professor emerita of political theory at Ithaca College and author of Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, recently talked with Tish Perlman, host of Out of Bounds, a weekly radio show focusing on people living, working, and thinking outside the mainstream. In this interview, Zillah discusses the necessity to abolish pervasive white supremacy, her Communist upbringing, and how we should all just shut up about Trump… | more…
Ever since he died fighting for the Republican cause in Spain in February 1937, there has been a recurring critical debate about the work of Christopher Caudwell. Indeed, between 1950 and 1951 there was what came to be known as ‘the Caudwell controversy’ where leading members of the British Communist Party, of which Caudwell was a member, debated in the pages of The Modern Quarterly whether Caudwell was really an orthodox Marxist or just a bourgeois idealist…. | more…
Much of the interest in Sheehan’s life-story has concentrated upon her journey from being a young nun in Philadelphia in the early 1960s to her joining the ‘Official’ IRA and subsequently the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in the 1970s. Her own text, Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun(published in the mid-1990s), has helped to focus readers’ attention upon this unusual trajectory. | more…
Berlin — Media jubilation reaches a climax on November 9th, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their ‘welcome present’ of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system…. | more…
I ask us all to think as imaginatively as possible in these next several months before the first primaries. I see these current thoughts as a continuance of the challenge thrown out by me in my recent book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism, to think boldly about how we find the newest anti-racist feminisms that can mobilize for the 2020 election and beyond. | more…
A Redder Shade of Green is one of the more grounded books I have encountered this year. Ian Angus’s concerns are earthly, practical, and immediate, all of which are virtues given how his eco-socialism stands in stark contra-distinction to neoliberal ecological reasoning… | more…
This Nov. 9, the world’s imperialists and big capitalists will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They will fill the media, all too available to them, with lies claiming this event was a victory for democracy and freedom. They will be slandering the German Democratic Republic and all the good and progressive acts of the once-socialist part of Germany… | more…
Samir Amin, who was a leading Marxist analyst of African underdevelopment, capitalism and globalisation, passed away in August 2018. The Long Revolution of the Global South is the second volume of his memoirs and was published in English in 2019. The book provides fascinating insight into Amin’s take on global events and the role he played in various initiatives to confront the grotesque levels of inequality engendered by global capitalism…. | more…
Saito exhaustively combs through Marx’s published works, as well as his excerpt notebooks. The book draws out the dialogue between Marx and natural scientists of his epoch. It successfully explains the influence of natural science on Marx, but also how Marx developed new innovations as a result of this reading. Saito convincingly demonstrates the origins of Marx’s metabolic theory… | more…
