Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy—and at the historical conditions in which that critique was formed. | more…

Gerald Horne, historian and author of the upcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks to Nellie Bailey on the Black Agenda Report | more…

‘In order to replace capitalism with an ecological society we need a revolution.’ That modest sentence is how Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams begin the last chapter of their new book. Although the chapter is the end of the book, it is also an opening to a new direction, a new movement. It is also the essence of the entire text. Capitalism is the reason our biosphere is collapsing and the only way humanity and the rest of earth’s species can survive is by ending capitalism…. | more…

Thinking of going to Missouri? Think again. Gerald Horne, author of several books on the history of racism and injustice in the Americas, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks to Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network about the NAACP’s first statewide travel advisory, for the state of Missouri. ¶ “Not only may we be returning to the bad old days of Jim Crow and US apartheid, but we may be going beyond that to the era of 1857 Dred Scott…” | more…

Ian Angus, author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System and, more recently, A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism, speaks at the Marxism 2017 Festival in central London, July 8, 2017. (Questions and answers follow.) | more…

Historian Gerald Horne, author of over 30 books, including the forthcoming “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean,” talks to veteran news anchor and analyst, Utrice Leid about some of the major trouble spots in the world today and their connections to U.S. globalist agendas. | more…

A long-standing critique of the writings of Marx and Engels has been their supposed lack of concern for the environmental damage caused by capitalism. Worse, even as they envisaged and fought for a world of human freedom, their conception of socialism showed a comprehensive disregard for how humans interact with nature. ¶ Marx has been viewed as Promethean: as soon as the proletariat had taken over the factories, its job would be simply to build more factories, in ever-expanding spheres of production. Given that the regimes claiming the mantle of Marx in the twentieth century took exactly that pathway, it’s not hard to understand why this charge gained such credence. ¶ However, that position has become wholly untenable thanks to two decades of scholarship by John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett…. | more…

“ONE of the best books published on the recent fortunes of the Greek left, Helena Sheehan’s blend of the personal and political draws on her visits to Greece before and after Syriza’s dramatic rise to power. ¶ Her discussions with a wide variety of people from the left and on the street feature prominently as do her attendance at demonstrations, meetings and conferences in what is a lively, detailed and memorable account….” | more…

We live in a time of increasing peril and dizzying contradiction. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of Donald Trump – a billionaire born with a gold-plated silver spoon in his mouth who was able to present himself as a man of the people, appealing, it seems, to a base of white workers who felt excluded from the “new economy” and abandoned amidst what he described in his inaugural address as “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” | more…

How can we save the planet and stop catastrophic climate change? Recently, Ian Angus, author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System and the recently released A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism, talked to Socialist Worker‘s Dave Sewell about just that. | more…

James Young serves up the pulse of workplace democracy in Union Power. His focus is on UE locals 506 and 618 that represent electrical manufacturing workers for General Electric, a global corporation. ¶ His narrative begins in 1937. Winds of global war rise, the Great Depression endures and the UE is born in a domestic landscape of labor dissent. ¶ In seven chapters of Young’s book, we discover the hows and whys of UE’s participatory democracy…. | more…

It is 2017 and the critique of corporate school reform has been around for some time. Beginning with Pauline Lipman’s critique of the Chicago Commercial Club’s role in remaking Chicago’s public schools (2004, 2011), Mike Fabricant and Michelle Fine’s critique of charter schools (2012), Ken Saltman’s critique of privatization (2007), and Sarah LeBlanc Goff’s exposé of the move of New Orleans from a public to a privatized school system (2009), they exposed the shortcomings of corporate or neoliberal reform efforts… | more…

On July 7, 2017, a group of the world’s biggest economic powers, known as the G20, met in Hamburg, Germany. What happened at the event? What kinds of realignments happened among governments? How did the U.S. emerge the meetings? Margaret Prescod of SojournerTruthradio/KPFK discussed this on July 11 with Gerald Horne, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston and author of more than thirty books, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism | more…