Wall Street’s Think Tank is a masterful work of critical scholarship. Using a well-trained historian’s lens, Laurence Shoup is able to document the workings of one of America’s most important elite policy planning groups. He establishes that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been at the forefront of a complex network of institutions, both public and private, which set the limits of debate on foreign policy issues. By carefully investigating the CFR’s machinations, Shoup brings out the role that it plays in anticipating the power elite’s short-term and long-term needs by defining research agendas, recommending policy positions, recruiting new intellectuals, and developing strategies which will ensure capitalist hegemony. He thus enables us to see how the US ruling class actually rules. | more…
This book underscores the depth of the environmental crisis and, with its thorough grounding in the scientific literature, situates the onset of the crisis in geological as well as historical time. These two time-scales now converge, signifying the end of the ecological conditions that allowed the human species to flourish. | more…
Samir Amin’s latest book on the revolutionary foments in the Arab world, The Reawakening of the Arab World, provides a timely voice in contrast to the obfuscated discourse of the Western media regarding the Arab Spring and its ensuing political developments. Such discourse is marked by a pronounced contradiction that at once emphasizes the urgency of confronting ISIS (Daesh) as a global terrorist threat while simultaneously decrying the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria…. Amin’s analysis cuts against ideological reactions of this kind with a detailed historical and social examination of the concrete situation in this region, and shows, primarily with regard to Egypt and Syria, how Western imperialism has throughout the 20th century aimed at stifling the modernization of the Arab world. | more…
In the current environment of ‘embedded’ journalists, the truth about our wars is difficult to discern, but the history of the Vietnam War is well-documented and certainly provides evidence of the deadly, viciously destructive mind set of America’s political and military leadership since World War II. It is difficult for a high school student to accept that his or her country would tell boldface lies to lure them into enlisting and deploying to areas devastated by almost fifteen years of desperate war. As Vietnam veterans, we have tried to suggest the truth for decades. Now we have a compact, well-documented, and most informative little book we can suggest they read before enlisting. I can’t help but imagine a lot of heavy, fact-based conversations will result. | more…
When Noam Chomsky recently told Amy Goodman that he would hold his nose and vote for Hillary Clinton if he lived in a swing state, it reminded me of Studs’ statements during the 2000 Gore-Bush election for the presidency. In 2000, Studs endorsed Ralph Nader, but like Chomsky at the present time, he suggested that it might be prudent in certain cases to vote for Gore. In 1970, when Chomsky appeared on Studs’ show to discuss his book, The New Mandarins, much of the conversation focused on conquest and corporate power. And the men agreed that grassroots movements, not heroes, changed history…. ¶ So each day when I hear Trump and Clinton speak, I long to hear Studs talking about the coming election. | more…
Alan Wieder, author of Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation, and Bill Nigut of Georgia Public Broadcasting, discuss the legendary author and raconteur Louis (Studs) Terkel
Go directly to GPB’s site or click below to listen: | more…
In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness. ¶ John Marciano’s recently published book, The American War in Vietnam, functions as such a Charon in reverse. It ferries readers back to the realm of remembering. This slim volume could not have come at a more opportune moment. American political culture is punch-drunk with the pursuit of war. The altered state is reaching the point of delirium tremens. Thwarted in the neocolonial scheme of annexing Syria by Russia’s legal intervention, the American elite are pushing for confrontation. | more…
The importance of revisiting past strikes lies not only in recovering the often hidden memory of working-class mobilisations, but also in revealing the dynamics of those strikes—whether victorious or not—so as to draw conclusions for future collective action. This is clearly the purpose of John Tully’s study of the great strike of labourers at the Silvertown rubber and electrical factory in London in 1889. Not only is this strike a forgotten chapter in the history of the New Unionism that ultimately gave rise to the modern British labour movement; in addition, the tactics first developed by the employers at Silvertown also ‘became a blueprint for British union busters to follow. | more…
This book is the best I have seen, from a Marxist point of view, on the issue of the Anthropocene and its implications for life on this planet. It combines a clear warning of the scale of the crisis we face with a well informed exposition of what the Anthropocene is and why we need to take it seriously. ¶ It is an unequivocal declaration the Anthropocene is here, at that its implications, in terms life on this planet, including our own, are dangerous in the extreme, and that it now determines the framework in which the struggle to save the biosphere of the planet as a habitable space now takes place. | more…
The significance of John Smith’s book lies in his powerful critique of mainstream economics and official statistics as he attempts a renewal of dependency theory. Mobilising Marxist value theory to this end he argues that the Global South’s formal independence masks an abiding economic and political subordination to the imperialist powers and powerful Northern capitals. The book’s impact is reflected in the critical commentary that it has provoked, including on Michael Roberts’s blog. | more…
A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory
By Steve Cushion
Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History
By Jane Franklin
The last year and a half have left no doubt that the history of the Cuban Revolution will need to be revisited and probably rewritten. From the moment that Raúl Castro and Barack Obama met, and the American president visited the island, everything changed. | more…
This book underscores the depth of the environmental crisis and, with its thorough grounding in the scientific literature, situates the onset of the crisis in geological as well as historical time. These two time-scales now converge, signifying the end of the ecological conditions that allowed the human species to flourish. ¶ Herein lies the drama—and, with it, the challenge—that we are now living…. | more…
Dhaka, April 24, 2013. On that day, the capital of Bangladesh hit the headlines around the world after the collapse of Rana Plaza, a monstrous eight-story building that housed several textile factories, a bank, and a few shops. It was one of the worst disasters ever seen in a workplace, causing the tragic death of 1,133 garment workers and injury of another 2,500. ¶ This crime is the starting point of the recently-published Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, in which John Smith presents the key pillars on which the current world capitalist system rests. | more…
