February 20, 2024
Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx captures what most biographies reduce merely to a background mention: contemporary conflicts, struggles and disputes that engaged Marx at the time when he was writing as well as his complex relationships with a varied range of friends and opponents….
February 20, 2024
Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about capitalism’s destruction of the natural world, including river and urban pollution, and the degradation of the soil that all life depends on. For them, the word ‘socialism’ included those concerns and the need to overcome them. But in the 20th Century, most socialist organisations treated such matters as secondary...
February 20, 2024
Certainly, being a ‘jazz’ musician in the first decades of the 20th century was probably the most dangerous profession in the arts and, along with coal mining, one of the most dangerous jobs of all. Inhaling cigarette smoke in dank clubs, being plied with alcohol and other controlled substances by unscrupulous bosses of clubs and record labels alike, being attacked violently by racist ‘fans’
February 20, 2024
Gerald Coles’ Miseducating for the Global Economy takes a critical look at what we are told by people who hardly ever enter a classroom but are called educational experts or educational policy makers, and politicians, the corporate media, and state officials… And then there are right-wing think tanks, CEOs, businesspeople, and rafts of capitalism’s little helpers….
February 20, 2024
Winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy – Paul A. Baran Memorial Award for original work regarding the political economy of imperialism, Intan Suwandi’s Value Chains examines the exploitation of labor in the Global South. Focusing on the issue of labor within global value chains—vast networks of people, tools, and activities needed to deliver goods and services to the market and controlled by multinationals—Suwandi offers a deft empirical analysis of unit labor costs that is closely related to Marx’s own theory of exploitation.
February 20, 2024
One point to make about Helena Sheehan’s political odyssey—from a conservative Catholic upbringing, through the radicalism of the US left in the 1960s and early 70s, on to Official Sinn Fein and the Communist Party of Ireland, and then into the Irish Labour Party—is that it demonstrates the importance of the theory of state capitalism for revolutionary politics….
February 20, 2024
Sanders specifically advocated for the reinvigoration of an economic bill of rights, which would guarantee a livable wage, free health care, and affordable education. ¶ This latter program is honorable; however, the boldness of Roosevelt and Wallace’s platform rested as much with their foreign as their domestic policies….
February 20, 2024
Much of Harris’s early political history is obscure, but we do know that she was an unknown 29-year-old lawyer in the early 1990s when her career was kick-started through a romantic relationship with master politico Willie Brown...
February 20, 2024
Reading between the lines is a skill we all need. Justice, freedom, equality and other fine ideals are invoked daily, but what do they really mean? In the abstract, it is impossible to say, for it is only when they are used in concrete contexts that we can get some meaningful handle on them….
February 20, 2024
Last June, in a Town Meeting hosted by CCTV, via the Center for Media & Democracy, Fred spoke about what a just and ecologically sustainable society might look like–and if the current economic system can’t respond, what are the strategies to advance our struggle?
