Billions of people around the world are drinking water contaminated with plastic…. We’ve been warned about the impact of capitalist production on natural processes for a long time. In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, insisted that the principal causes of ecological degradation, were ‘the gods of profit and production’ served by a cabal within industry, government and academia which betrayed the cause of scientific truth… | more…

‘Ecosocialism needs Marx,’ Kohei Saito once wrote. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito shows why. Saito is associate professor of political economy at Osaka City University in Japan. In 2015, he earned a PhD in philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin and spent time as a guest researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities where he contributes to the editing of Marx’s natural science notebooks…. | more…

Gerald Horne, author of the recently published The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks with Nellie Bailey of Black Agenda Report about the ways that Blacks and Native Americans share a history of enslavement at the hands of European settlers. | more…

Helena Sheehan, author of the recent The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left, and Seamus Sweeney, a “recovering academic,” who has written about the representation of Baltimore in the work of David Simon, recently collaborated on an article for Jacobin about how the decade-old TV series, The Wire, was a Marxist’s idea of what TV drama should be… | more…

Whether from early years experiments in painting, or from later, more mature experiences in art classes, one thing will most probably be clear to all of us—the result of mixing red and green pigments can only be called ‘sludge’… or, perhaps more prosaically, khaki… | more…

In 2001, as a Green Party candidate in the general election, I was invited onto local radio to debate with the Socialist Alliance candidate. The interviewer, as it turned out, was hoping for a no-holds-barred ideological battle and was most disappointed when we candidates found ourselves agreeing with each other on every question he put. ‘You’re a green and he’s a socialist,’ he complained. ‘You’re not supposed to be on the same side!’ ¶ In this, he was reflecting a view then some twenty years in the making, that socialism was inherently anti-ecological… | more…

These days, our health and well-being are sorted through an ever-expanding, profit-seeking financial complex that monitors, controls, and commodifies our very existence. Given that our access to competent, affordable health care grows more precarious each day, the arrival of Health Care Under the Knife could not be more timely. In this empowering book, noted health-care professionals, scholars, and activists—including coordinator Howard Waitzkin—impart their inside knowledge of the medical system: what’s wrong, how it got this way, and what we can do to heal it. | more…

Gerald Horne, author of well over thirty books, talks about his latest, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, with Wilmer Leon (@DrWLeon), host of “Inside the Issues,” on Urban View, SiriusXM 126 radio… | more…

In Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, John Bellamy Foster contextualizes the conditions that gave rise to the 45th US president. The author’s thesis is that this billionaire chief executive arrived after four decades of income and wealth shifting from the bottom and middle to the top. ¶ An economy of, by and for a tiny elite spawns a particular polity…. | more…

On February 15, 2018, in Toronto, editor Leo Panitch moderated a panel discussion with four of the contributors to Rethinking Democracy, the latest edition of the Socialist Register. This 2018 volume was conceived as a companion to the 2017 SR, Rethinking Revolution. Central to both volumes, and to this discussion, is the premise that no revival of socialist politics in the twenty-first century can occur apart from founding radical new democratic institutions and practices. | more…

Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some thirteen million Africans and some five million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. This is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors. | more…

At a time when capitalism is widely considered as the only and inevitable system, there are seldom critiques that go beyond understanding the inherent faults of the capitalist system to establishing the possibility of an alternative. This book is the latest contribution by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams in their lifelong commitment not only to elucidate the ecological crises entailed in capitalism, but to provide the basis and the possibilities for an alternate system: eco-socialism…. | more…

Monthly Review Press is offering a 40% discount on ten selected books about African and African-American history—paperback and e-book (when available)—starting February 20, and ending midnight February 27, EST. Just enter the coupon code: BlackHistory0208 to receive 40% off at checkout. | more…