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
Born into a typical all-American and socially conservative family of Irish Catholic origin, it’s fair to say that Helena Sheehan’s eventual immersion in left politics would probably have come as much of a shock to her as it did to her immediate family...
February 20, 2024
Political scientist, author, and activist, Marta Harnecker devoted her life to collaborating in building radical democracy in Latin American communities where people have, for generations, experienced crushing poverty and a near complete loss of control over their lives. In South America and the Caribbean, but especially in Cuba and Venezuela, Harnecker has worked directly with disenfranchised workers and peasants. In this latest work, Harnecker, with Spanish economist José Bartolomé, shares some of her wisdom on how this is being done, and how communities everywhere can gain empowerment.
February 20, 2024
Why are US health-care costs far higher than elsewhere in the world? And why, if so much more is spent, are such critical outcomes as rates of infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy and treatments for serious diseases not significantly better – and often markedly worse – than in other economically comparable countries?...
February 20, 2024
“Kohei Saito’s book Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism is based on extensive and painstaking research. As well as Marx’s published works, Saito makes use of notebooks that Marx kept on science and agriculture and that have only recently been made available. He argues that ecological questions were central to Marx’s worldview and defends a version of ecosocialism based on the notion of metabolism, and using the Marxist tools of value theory, contradiction and alienation….
February 20, 2024
But there exists a different narrative, or at least there did in the 1930s, before it was buried under an avalanche of patriotic American propaganda and liberal historiography. According to this alternative understanding, the US was falling victim to fascism already in the 1920s — though a different sort of fascism than in Europe…
February 20, 2024
Zillah Eisenstein, author of recently published Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution, talks about the crises all humans face–of capitalism, of racism, of misogyny–and how these crises cannot be reformed individually, but must be understood and fought with revolutionary rethinking, on This is Hell!, WNUR-FM.
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….
