February 20, 2024
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.
February 20, 2024
Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project
by Chris Gilbert
$23.00 / 208 pages / 978-1-68590-023-6
Karl Marx wrote that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses. He should have added that theory usually grips the masses because it connects with ideas, projects, and dreams they have developed themselves. This is what generally happens in revolutions, and it is certainly the case for the idea of the communal project in Venezuela.
In 2009, ten years after the Bolivarian Process began, Hugo Chávez proposed the communal path to socialism in a historic television program. That project had solid bases in the thought of Marx and István Mészáros, yet it would have been dead in the water if the idea of replacing a society dominated by the logic of capital with one based on communal relations had not connected with aspirations and values already alive and operating in Venezuelan society.
As it turned out, self-organized communities around the country seized on the communal project, which resonated both with values shaped over the longue durée in Venezuela—through its enduring campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Venezuelan traditions of self-governance
February 20, 2024
As usual Rob Wallace has made the media rounds, this time with his latest book, The Fault in Our SARS. Listen and watch!
February 20, 2024
Listen to Chris Gilbert, author of 'Commune or Nothing!' as he details how Venezuela’s communards have plowed ahead with the construction of socialism even under the most difficult circumstances.
February 20, 2024
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...
February 20, 2024
“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.
February 20, 2024
Horne’s book is primarily a synthesis of information found in secondary sources, but it is a masterful blend of the interrelated events happening in Europe, Africa, West Asia, North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean in the critical centuries before and after 1492.
February 20, 2024
Book of the year? A very bold “yes!” But it is also the book of the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.
February 20, 2024
Rather than believe in Santa Claus or fairy tales, far better that the dynamics of capitalism be grasped in their full dimensions. Only by understanding how and why, and drawing appropriate conclusions, rather than simply observing, can the world’s exploited — the vast majority of humanity — hope to see a better world come into being, a world that will have put capitalism into the history books.
February 20, 2024
To this day, memories of cities flattened by U.S. bombers—a scale of technological devastation almost unthinkable even after the atomic bombs of 1945—resonate among Koreans on both sides of the border.
