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Big Farms Make Big Flu

Corporate farming and the new flu: Green Left Weekly reviews Rob Wallace’s book

A new influenza pandemic is quite possible, according to a study by researchers at the University of NSW’s School of Public Health. The study notes that 19 different influenza strains have affected humans in the last 100 years, but the speed with which new strains have emerged has increased over the past 15 years. There have been seven new strains in the past five years alone. ¶ In Big Farms Make Big Flu, published last year by Monthly Review Press, Rob Wallace agreed a pandemic is not just more than likely, it is probable, and echoes the necessity to prepare. But his focus is to identify why the rate of new virus strains has increased, which he sees as basic to how to effectively plan containment. | more…

A Redder Shade of Green : Intersections of Science and Socialism

New! A Redder Shade of Green by Ian Angus

As the Anthropocene advances, people across the red-green political spectrum seek to understand and halt our deepening ecological crisis. Environmentalists, scientists, and ecosocialists share concerns about the misuse of natural resources, but often differ on explanations and solutions. Some blame environmental disasters on overpopulation. Some ask if all this worry about climate change and the ecosystem might lead to a “catastrophism” that weakens efforts to heal the planet. Ian Angus responds to these concerns in A Redder Shade of Green, with a fresh, insightful clarity, bringing socialist values to science, and scientific rigor to socialism. | more…

The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left

Can the European Left Save Itself? The Laura Flanders Show asks Helena Sheehan and Natalie Jeffers…

Irish author Helena Sheehan recently traveled to the United States for a tour of her new book, The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. There, she appeared, with Natalie Jeffers, Black Lives Matter UK activist, on The Laura Flanders Show to discuss whether social movements can actually stick to their promises after they’re elected to power—and what might be learned from Greece’s current government of Syriza, which ran against austerity and ended up imposing it. | more…

And the winners are …

Large congratulations for their fine work go to:
Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, who won the 2017 Paul M. Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award from the American Sociological Association for their book, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture, which was based on their 2014 article in MR magazine, “Capitalism and the Commodification of Salmon”… | more…

At least 484 Syrian and Iraqi civilians killed in air strikes, admits Cent Com: Gerald Horne weighs in

On June 3, The Independent and other media reported that the U.S.-led coalition (or Central Command) admitted killing at least 484 civilians in air strikes against Isis in Syria and Iraq. Gerald Horne, historian and author of several books, including the upcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, appeared on RT International to discuss this report and its “scandalous understatement” of the loss of innocent lives. | more…

BLACK PERSPECTIVES: Online Roundtable: Gerald Horne’s Black Radical History, June 5-10

Black Perspectives is hosting an online roundtable on Gerald Horne’s wide-ranging scholarly contributions to African American history and the black radical tradition. “Gerald Horne’s Black Radical History” will assemble a diverse group of scholars to reflect on pressing themes in black history’s global reach. It begins on Monday, June 5, 2017 and concludes on Saturday, June 10, 2017. During this week-long forum, each scholar will address various aspects of Horne’s scholarship, including his books on slavery, Caribbean history, and transpacific black history, along with his biographies, and works on W. E. B. Du Bois.

The forum will feature essays by Yuichiro Onishi (University of Minnesota,

EP Thompson and the Making of the New Left by Cal Winslow

“E.P. Thompson’s Socialist Humanism” in Against the Current

“The English working class ‘did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’ In frequently quoted lines from the preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1780-1832), E.P. Thompson endeavored to ‘rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ ¶ More broadly, Thompson sought to elucidate class as a historical phenomenon that involved changing human relationships over time, rather than being a static structure or simple category of analysis….” | more…

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook

“Ragpicking Through History,” we discover, via Salvage, Jimmy Boggs

Salvage, a startling new quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters, brings us “Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists,” an article by Tithi Bhattacharya, in which James Boggs’s The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook receives notice… | more…

Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania

Jim Young’s Union Power reviewed by Labor Notes

For unions in corporate America, it’s always been hard times. Even in labor’s heyday—the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—unions had to struggle for everything. Plus, back then organizers risked being tarred as stooges for Moscow. ¶ Historian James Young makes those points clear in his readable new book Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania. But the book offers more than history—it’s instructive, showing how a progressive union can survive in the incredibly hostile and toxic environment of corporate America. | more…

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (2nd Ed.)

New! The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers

U.S. immigration has been the subject of furious debates for decades. On one side, politicians and the media talk about aliens and criminals, with calls to “deport them all.” On the other side, some advocates idealize immigrants and gloss over problems associated with immigration. Dialogue becomes possible when we dig deeper and ask tough questions: Why are people in other countries leaving their homes and coming here? What does it mean to be “illegal”? How do immigration raids, prisons, and border walls impact communities? Who suffers and who profits from our current system—and what would happen if we transformed it? | more…

Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut

Oakland, May 30: Against the Corporate Juggernaut – Howard Ryan on Educational Justice

Tuesday, May 30
5:00-7:00pm
2027 42nd Ave.
Oakland, CA 94601
With Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the helm, teachers, parents, and students have every reason to organize! But what exactly are we up against? Let’s talk about that with Howard Ryan, author of Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut, who will offer an analysis and organizing stories that can help our work. | more…

Big Farms Make Big Flu

Aeon: “Who Names Diseases?” – in which Rob Wallace figures prominently

In his book Big Farms Make Big Flu, the evolutionary ecologist Rob Wallace draws a direct link between the growing threat of zoonotic diseases, and the agricultural practices that neoliberalism has encouraged—notably, the expansion and consolidation of agribusinesses, and the vertical integration of different stages of food production. The food we eat is produced by an ever-shrinking number of ever-growing mass-production units, in which vast herds or flocks of hybrid animals are packed into megabarns, forced to mature in a matter of months, and then slaughtered, processed and transported around the world. | more…

Helena Sheehan Arrives in the U.S. to discuss The Syriza Wave + New Greek Austerity Measures

As the Greek Parliament approves fresh austerity measures and protests rock Athens and Thessaloniki, author Helena Sheehan arrives on the East Coast, just in time to discuss this explosive situation and her new book, The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. Over the next two weeks, Sheehan will appear in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, then back to NYC for the Left Forum. Here is a short summary of her tour… | more…