From the perspective of 2019, it’s often difficult to recall the cold war hysteria over East Germany. It was called a secret police state. Everyone there was said to be oppressively monitored if not actively harassed by the Stasi. For Americans, it epitomized communist tyranny. Then along comes Victor Grossman’s memoir, A Socialist Defector–he fled US anticommunism to East Germany in 1952–and the distortions about East Germany (GDR) go right out the window… | more…

Rather than carry out conventional war, over recent months US officials have sought to promote internal divisions, sabotage, and economic collapse within Venezuela. Here’s the full story of Washington’s hybrid war on the country…. | more…

Health Care Under the Knife, composed of 13 incisive chapters by 16 distinguished authors, addresses the gross inequities, blaming capitalism-run-amok as the root cause…. | more…

Jeb Sprague, author of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti has appeared twice recently on The Real News Network, talking about current events in the Caribbean, and focusing on the Trump administration’s new aggressive policies toward Cuba and its attempts to divide CARICOM. | more…

In the popular imagination, the German Democratic Republic is indelibly linked with ideas of authoritarianism, poverty, secret police, stuffy bureaucracy and a generalised absence of democracy. ¶ Victor Grossman is uniquely well placed to challenge this McCarthyite narrative. Born in New York in 1928, he joined the Communist Party while studying at Harvard in the late 1940s…. | more…

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…