Recently, Michael Joseph Roberto, author of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 spoke to Mitch Jeserich of radio station KPFA’s “Letters and Politics” about the history of fascism in the United States during the New Deal era and its connection to corporate America…. | more…
Warren Buffett, the much-admired genius investor and one of the world’s richest men said, ‘There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ And who are the losers? The working class, people who work for an hourly wage or are salaried…. Can the working class, long taken for granted by the Democratic Party, be a force for positive progressive change? How might it overcome its own internal divisions and contradictions? | more…
Arriving on a book tour for his newly published “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee” on April 23rd, Victor Grossman is a testament to Bertolt Brecht’s oft-quoted lyrics. At the age of 91, he has never ceded an inch to capitalism and imperialism…. | more…
Political analysis, alas, is no less immune to what has been called the ‘fashion system’ than any other segment of human consumption habits since the end of the Great War bequeathed the industrial form of indoctrination that prevails—now in digital form—today…. Yet the misery to which the vast majority of humanity is subjected has been altered only minimally since 1492 gave the Roman Catholic and later Protestant elites in Europe the impetus to seize the rest of the planet, dominating the world’s population and the rest of nature… | more…
Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism initially appears to be a straightforward account of the role of ‘slavery, colonialism, and the shards of emerging capitalism’ in the rise of England as the first planetary superpower by the eighteenth century. In fact, it is the continuation of the thesis Horne first presented in his 2014 work The Counter-Revolution of 1776… | more…
In this second volume of his memoirs, Samir Amin takes us on a journey to a dizzying array of countries, primarily in the Arab World, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, recounting in detail the stages of his ongoing dialogue over several decades with popular movements struggling for a better future. Along the way, we meet government leaders, activists in popular movements, and working people, both rural and urban. As in his many works over the years, The Long Revolution of the Global South combines Amin’s astute theoretical analyses of the challenges confronting the world’s oppressed peoples with militant action…. | more…
Stephanie Urdang didn’t leave South Africa at the age of 23 because she was forced into exile. She left because she ‘hated Apartheid.’ It was the late 1960s—mid-hiatus between the Rivonia Trial, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and other anti-Apartheid leaders (in 1964), the burgeoning of Black Consciousness (from the late 1960s onwards), the resurgent trade union movement (1973), and the Soweto uprising (1976). Avenues for fighting Apartheid had narrowed; the comforts of whiteness expanded…. | more…
It would certainly seem natural for leftists to support the right to migrate. After all, the socialist movement’s historic slogan has been ‘Workers of all lands unite,’ and its anthem is ‘The Internationale.’ But in the past few years, a number of people on the left have come out against the concept…. | more…
Michael D Yates, author of Why Unions Matter (1998), dedicated most of his academic and professional career to studying labour and social movements in the US. Through his latest work, Yates contends that the working class must change the world or humanity will succumb to the barbarity of capitalism. His warning must be taken seriously because we live in a world prone to wars and global economic crises, among other evils… | more…
Reviewing this book in the wake of the Mueller report’s findings, in which no evidence was found that Russia and the Trump presidential campaign colluded to influence the 2016 US election, it is tempting to hope that 2019 will see some self-reflection on the part of the US liberal establishment. This should entail a turning away from the tendency to look to outside actors for the answers to the crisis; specifically, how and why Trump won, and not Hillary Clinton…. | more…
The book captures the voices indigenous activists, fighting oil drilling in their homelands; mothers from favelas seeking justice for their children killed by police; opponents of large-scale mining projects; independent journalists working, at great personal risk, to expose corruption and human rights violations; women and LGBT people confronting violence and discrimination; and students demanding their right to a free, universal and high-quality education system…. | more…
The New York Times headline said it all: Mueller Finds No Trump Russia Conspiracy. ¶ After two years of investigation and $25 million in taxpayer dollars, the special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that President Donald J. Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian government in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election…. | more…
In the 21st century, we live in a world wholly dominated by the US empire and its allies, and capitalism maintains its stranglehold on the lives of working class people across the entire globe, all the while destroying the environment, posing an existential threat not only to humanity but all life on Earth…. | more…