Capital’s war against the commons continues today in the Global South, as does resistance to it. The removal of the people from the land to work in industrial cities is also part of the mechanism which creates the metabolic rift, one of the reasons for capitalism’s inherent environmental destructiveness. The route to overcoming this does not lie in individuals or communities returning to an idealised communal past. As Angus says, this has been the expectation of utopian communal groups since the Diggers established themselves on St George’s Hill in 1649… | more…
FOR ALMOST ALL OF HUMAN existence, almost all of us were self-provisioning. Together with our neighbors, we lived and worked on the land, obtained and prepared our own food, and made our own homes, tools and clothing. After our ancestors invented agriculture, most of us lived in small communities where the land was held and farmed in common, and most production was consumed locally.
Today, almost all of us have to work for others.
Our lives depend on, and are largely defined by, our jobs. All the productive wealth is owned by a tiny minority of individuals and corporations, and most of us cannot eat unless we sell them our ability to work.
That’s how capitalism works, and we are so used to it that it seems natural and obvious…. | more…
In his 1995 novel Radek, published in English translation for the first time last year by Monthly Review Press, Stefan Heym portrays Karl Radek as not only a man of the world but a perpetual outsider — a socially awkward contrarian with stereotypically Jewish features, thick glasses and a big mouth. In this, Heym likely saw in Karl Radek something of a kindred spirit. | more…
“Almost all HUAC witnesses with Communist connections were avoiding the jeopardy of contempt prosecution either by naming the names of others or declining to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment.,” explains biographer Dr. Steve Batterson. | more…
The American left has few heroes. We specialize in martyrs like Joe Hill, Albert Parsons, and Malcolm X, and masses like the thousands of young women in the 1909 Shirtwaist strike and the Black teenagers who defied the German Shepherds of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. But we also need to be reminded of those individual heroes who, like Chandler Davis, thrust themselves into history because of their intense commitment to a better world.
…In this all-too-timely exploration of Davis’s encounter with McCarthyism during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Steve Batterson shows us how one principled radical managed to stand up against the Cold War witchhunt. Today, as we confront an equally, if not more serious, threat to political dissent and free expression, perhaps Davis’s story can inspire similar resistance to the right’s current attack on our democratic polity. | more…
As Tim Beal and Gregory Elich tell us in their excellent introduction to the new 2023 edition of the book, by closely examining various sources, Stone found inconsistencies that challenged the official narrative of how and why the war started. Most prominently, Stone found considerable evidence suggesting that U.S. and South Korean officials had probable foreknowledge of the North Korean offensive, which they chose not to try to prevent… | more…
The authors write, “the failure to maintain the soil metabolism was central to Marx’s understanding of the extreme ecological degradation of colonial Ireland.” The peasant farmers, cottiers, lived on a substandard diet, mainly of potatoes. The combination of the economic and ecological system led to the famine that killed one million people and the social collapse that forced another million to emigrate. | more…
This year, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Dialectics of Dependency, Monthly Review Press released the first-ever English translation of Ruy Mauro Marini’s classic – one of the most important texts in the field of Latin American Dependency Theory. An event celebrating its release was held in mid September at The People’s Forum, featuring Cristóbal Reyes (representing his advisor Jaime Osorio), Phethani Madzivhandila, Chris Gilbert and Andy Higginbotham, and co-hosted by Joseph Mullen and Jaime Osorio’s coeditor, Amanda Latimer. | more…
Peace was very much an option…Reading Izzy Stone’s reporting today, it’s striking the extent to which these mechanisms of Cold War still exist and are being used to wage a New Cold War. The military bases, the troop deployments, the nuclear threats that aimed to contain socialism and prevent the emergence of a multipolar world in the 1950s continue to serve the same purposes in 2023. | more…
In 1990, reflecting on his CPUSA years, he wrote me that “I decided some time in the 70s that what I really ought to have been is a Shachtmanite . . . .” Afterward, he no longer identified himself as a “Marxist-Leninist” but told biographer Batterson that he was a “red-green eco-socialist.” | more…
Heinrich’s reading guide is the best that I have ever come across for volume 1 of Capital and I am certain it is a necessary edition for any person who takes their study of Marx’s ‘Capital’ seriously. Heinrich explains that “Capital provides crucial elements of the basic knowledge that is needed to fundamentally change social structures”. As such this volume, read in conjunction with Marx’s work, should prove valuable to anyone, inside or outside the academy, who is interested and invested in transforming capitalist social structures into something more beneficial to all. | more…
as Marx showed, while accumulation creates an ever greater mass of means of production, this in itself begins to throw up barriers to the profitable reproduction of such great quantities of capital. This contradiction results in the intensification of competition between capitals over labour, raw materials and markets, not the least consequence of which is imperialist tension and war… | more…
