There is no evidence that Vietnam veterans were spat on. Nor could they have been, at least not in the manner described in the most often told stories. Those stories tell of landing at San Francisco Airport and being met by groups of spitters, often hippies. But flights from Vietnam landed at military airbases like Travis outside San Francisco; protesters could not have gotten on the airbase, much less near deplaning troops. | more…
Watch an incredible community of radical thinkers and doers come together as they convene around “The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era,” a new book by Rob Wallace and co-authors…. | more…
Cuba’s continuing economic crisis has produced a social malaise that manifests itself in many ways. One of them has been a political detachment including a decrease in political and electoral participation. Ross’s account of Cuba’s survival is at the same time an inspiration to everyone struggling for socialism, and a warning of the challenges to be faced in building it… | more…
Admittedly he was Lenin’s man rather than Stalin’s. He was a passenger on Lenin’s famous sealed train. He made the mistake, however, of aligning himself for ideological reasons with Trotsky after Lenin died, a decision he never really recovered from. I got the impression, from Heym’s telling, that Stalin played cat to Radek’s mouse ever afterward. | more…
Ron Jacobs, of Counterpunch: “David Michael Smith and Monthly Review Press have done us a favor by publishing this book. Not only is it honestly refreshing, it is perhaps the most important history of the United States published in recent years. There are no excuses here, no rationales; just an accounting of the essential truth in the making and maintenance of the US empire. It is harsh. It is relentless. It cannot be any other way. The endless death described in its pages does not allow another interpretation.” | more…
“What a contrast to Cuba’s bossy northern neighbor, where the main priority is enriching oligarchs and using a class of corporate warlords to extract profits from the Global South!” | more…
The persistent chasm in capitalist societies between those who have to consider whether they can afford to take a bath and those who have to consider which house to have a bath in is the subject of Eric Schutz’s book. | more…
The state cannot be ‘reformed’ since it is not, despite what liberal theory would insist, a neutral institution. The state historically developed in order to enshrine class power, and so traps us ‘within the paralyzing confines of the hierarchical and antagonistic framework of the political/military domain’. This can only be broken through a ‘radical transformation’ in ‘our social metabolism’, that is in the relations of production of capitalism. | more…
‘Work Work Work’ sounds similar for working boys in many countries. Anyone can find them at any hub of exploitation and profit making. A visit to the Tipu Sultan Road or the Dolaai Khaal or Taatee Bazaar area in the capital city of Dhaka, a visit to automobile repair shops around Dhaka or to the marine vessel making yards along the Buriganga near Dhaka will find them. Boys picking torn papers, discarded plastic pieces of innumerable shapes and sizes from street sides, tearing down old posters from walls of the city buildings, looking for whatever is saleable in garbage heaps, selling kitchen items or flowers from morning to night, until may be 10 or 11 PM…. | more…
Foster explains that “in general we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways hat are equally ecological and economic”. | more…
The Caribbean Philosophical Association has announced that the 2023 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award will has gone to Professor Gerald Horne. | more…
The podcast Mechanical Freak, recently welcomed esteemed sociologist Jerry Lembcke to talk about how the memory of the Vietnam War was both recreated and used in the 1980s and 1990s to unify public sentiment against the liberatory movements of the 1960s. Lembcke reminded the audience that even in the creation of memory, there is a political struggle for the future that needs to be waged. | more…
The 59th annual volume of the “Socialist Register” examines the growth of corporate power and other important organizational trends in global capitalism. Rejecting such notions as “stakeholder capitalism,” it reviews the organization and strategies of unions and the left as it searches for new routes to socialism. Read on for excerpts from the likes of Adam Hanieh, Patrick Bond, Charmaine Chua and Spencer Cox… | more…
