I had high hopes for Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism for a couple of reasons…. ¶ My hopes were not only met, they were exceeded. Horne has written both a scholarly treatment enriched by primary sources excavated from archives three hundred years old but also a fierce polemic that hearkens back to those of CLR James and WEB Dubois…. | more…
Internationally renowned human rights attorney Michael Tigar, author of the forthcoming Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power, talks to Law & Disorder host Michael Steven Smith and attorney Jim Lafferty about the growth of the national security state and the (further) decline of justice. | more…
As a lifelong activist, Howard Waitzkin has worked for single-payer national health programs in the United States and Latin America; local community and worker control for accessible health services; civilian health and mental health services for active duty military personnel in the struggle for peace; and policies to improve the social, political, and economic determinants of illness and early death…. | more…
The eighteenth century was the slavers’ century. At least six million Africans were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas—with far more killed resisting capture—making the trade in enslaved Africans the most valuable in the world. ¶ Yet it was the tumult of the 1600s that put the pieces in place for what was to come and in this fascinating new book Gerald Horne shows just how pivotal that century was for the trade itself, as well as capitalism and white supremacy, its economic and ideological corollaries… | more…
The US mainstream media had two competing events to cover the night of April 28: the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC, and a Trump rally in Macomb County, Michigan, a predominantly white working-class suburb of Detroit. Journalists mainly focused on the dinner, but the more important story may have been a remark President Trump made in the course of his 80-minute speech at the rally… | more…
Jeremy Kuzmarov talks with Black Agenda Radio host Glen Ford about how Democrats and war-hawks are reaching for ever-higher heights of anti-Russian hysteria, ascribing near super-powers to Moscow and Vladimir Putin. All this is déjà vu for many older Americans, who remember the Cold War days when Russians were thought to be under every bed… | more…
Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano: Our book provides a historical perspective on contemporary affairs by showing how the Russo-phobia that has been prevalent in our political discourse over the last four to five years has deep and long historical roots, and has often been used by government leaders to turn public attention away from domestic inequalities…” | more…
Jeremy Kuzmarov, author, with John Marciano, of The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce, talks with Paul DeRienzo about the little-remembered history of Russia-United States relations. | more…
A Redder Shade of Green is a very welcome compilation of posts from Ian Angus’ website “Climate and Capitalism,” some original, others updated and revised. Ian Angus is a Canadian ecosocialist activist and scholar. This book follows two other earlier ones, the excellent critique of populationism/neoMalthusianism (with Simon Butler), Too Many People (Haymarket, 2011), and Facing the Anthropocene (Monthly Review Press, 2016), a splendid introduction to this subject…. | more…
During the past two decades, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written a number of books, proposing to build socialism as a practical alternative. Lebowitz’s new book, The Socialist Imperative from Gotha to Now, is a continued project about proposing the building of socialism in the 21st century…. Lebowitz’s book attempts to establish a theoretical vision of socialism and the lessons from the experience of ‘real socialism’… | more…
In the early 1980s, China dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. Mainstream history argues that this “decollectivization campaign” greatly improved agricultural productivity and the lives of the peasants. A closer examination suggests a much different and more nuanced story…. | more…
Like Saddam Hussein a decade and a half ago, Russia and its President Vladimir Putin have been repeatedly vilified in the Western media over the last five years, helping to mobilize popular support for the reemergence of a new Cold War… | more…
“Ecosocialism needs Marx,” Kohei Saito once wrote. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito shows why…. This work and Saito’s familiarity with a range of international debates regarding Marxist theory and practice make possible his beautiful analysis of Marx’s ecosocialism, an analysis that should inform our struggle for revolutionary socioecological change…. | more…