Why would an American girl-child, born into a good, Irish-Catholic family in the thick of the McCarthy era—a girl who, when she came of age, entered a convent—morph into an atheist, feminist, and Marxist? The answer is in Helena Sheehan’s fascinating account of her journey from her 1940s and 1950s beginnings, into the turbulent 1960s, when the Vietnam War, black power, and women’s liberation rocked her bedrock assumptions and prompted a volley of life-upending questions… | more…

The book’s title poses a daunting question: Can the Working Class Change the World? Then, in a tidy volume of just over 200 pages, it proceeds to answer that question in the affirmative. When I was coming up as a young radical pup and asking that question, we were sat down in Marxist study groups where we pored over original Marxist classics like Capital or Anti-Duhring and later political tracts from Lenin and Mao like What is To Be Done and On Contradiction…. | more…

The two works considered here take on very different aspects of the general environmental crisis we face. In Climate Leviathan, Mann and Wainwright consider the political consequences of a continued failure to prevent catastrophic climate change, whereas Holt-Giménez’s Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism considers the food system’s role in and distortion by capitalism. This difference in approach makes it all the more notable that both start from the assumption that on their particular issue, the Left has failed… | more…

D’Mello’s tour de force is both a history of modern India and its ‘rotten liberal democracy,’ including the left’s challenge to it, and a fine-grained look at India’s Maoist movement. It combines a sharp historical account with critical analysis, along with some original theoretical insights… | more…

The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman—a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker—left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate—i.e., the Soviets—landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic…. | more…

Leo Panitch, editor, with Greg Albo, of the annual Socialist Register, joins Allen Ruff, host of “A Public Affair” on radio station WORT (89.9FM, Madison, WI) to talk about global capitalism and the state of our world today, as reflected in the latest SR 2019: The World Turned Upside Down? | more…

Michael Joseph Roberto’s recently published The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940, is generating lots of provocative conversations. Recently Roberto talked with Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report about how finance capitalism is the essence of U.S. fascism. | more…

Recently, Gerald Horne, renowned historian and prolific author, talked with Ka’Bu Maat Kheru, host of “The Africa Forum: Running African” about his book, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. They begin by discussing the importance of Jamaica in colonial history. | more…

There is a growing body of ecomarxist and ecosocialist literature in the English-speaking world, which signals the beginning of a significant turn in radical thinking. Some Marxist journals, such as Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, Monthly Review and Socialism and Democracy have been playing an important role in this process, which is becoming increasingly influential. The two books discussed here—very different in style content and purpose—are part of this “Red and Green” upsurge…. | more…

Plan to be in North Carolina for the next few weeks, when Michael Joseph Roberto, author of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940, will discuss the history of American fascism and its relationship to the Trump Era. | more…

Listen to Bruce E. Levine, author of Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti- Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and Models and Michael D. Yates, author of Can the Working Class Change the World? as they discuss the traditions of anarchism and Marxism, and how these philosophies might still be effective in today’s Trumpian dystopia. | more…

In the New York City area this weekend? You’re invited to hear Stephanie J. Urdang discuss her memoir, Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa | more…

In October 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that carbon emissions must be cut to zero by 2050, in order to limit the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.1 The current British (non-binding) target for 2050 is an 80% cut. … | more…