Laurence H. Shoup, author of Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014, talks to German financial journalist Lars Schall about the history of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on LarsSchall.com.
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E.P. Thompson (1924–1993) wore several hats during his life. His magnum opus as a historian was The Making of the English Working Class, one of the greatest history books written in the twentieth century in any language. He fought tirelessly for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s, which almost surely took years off his life. He may well be least remembered for being a founder of the British New Left. For this reason, Cal Winslow’s selection of Thompson’s writings from the late 1950s to the early 1960s is especially welcome and timely—though not surprising, since Winslow was a student of Thompson’s at the University of Warwick and is a longtime activist and writer. | more…
Monthly Review Press author of America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth and America’s Addiction to Terrorism, Henry A. Giroux writes frequently for Truthout.org
“This week, Donald Trump lowered the bar even further by attacking the Muslim parents of US Army Captain Humayan Khan, who was killed in 2004 by a suicide bomber while he was trying to save the lives of the men in his unit…. ¶ I have recently returned to reading Leo Lowenthal, particularly his insightful essay, “Terror’s Atomization of Man,” first published in the January 1, 1946 issue of Commentary and reprinted in his book, False Prophets: Studies
Studs Terkel was an American icon who had no use for America’s cult of celebrity. He was a leftist who valued human beings over political dogma. In scores of books and thousands of radio and television broadcasts, Studs paid attention—and respect—to “ordinary” human beings of all classes and colors, as they talked about their lives as workers, dreamers, survivors. Alan Wieder’s Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation is the first comprehensive book about this man. | more…
July 2, 2016, London: John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, discusses the theoretical and programmatic challenges that the Anthropocene, a dangerous new epoch in planetary history, poses for socialists in the 21st century. | more…
Cushion is able to make a substantial case that the working-class contribution to the revolution has been severely underestimated, and that in fact Castro’s guerrilla movement would not have been able to take power without working-class militancy. The story is detailed and intricate, but full of interest, beginning with the defeat of the 1933 general strike, which first brought Batista to political leadership in Cuba, but concentrating on the years of the latter’s dictatorship proper, from March 1952, to the consolidation of Castro’s government in 1959 | more…
Facing the Anthropocene hits nails on their heads over and over again. It should transform the relationship between leftist ecological thought and Earth System science. It’s easy to praise it here, because Angus’s analysis is in many ways very similar to my own in The Birth of the Anthropocene…. I think that the great thing about Facing the Anthropocene—and this might sound like faint praise, but it isn’t—is just how sensible it is. It’s learned and principled and exciting and all of that. But most of all it’s wonderfully well-considered. | more…
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
280 pp, $19 pbk, ISBN 9781583676097
By Ian Angus
Reviewed by Seth Sandronsky
“Ian Angus’ informed and informing book about humanity and our planet is a must-read for concerned people. In Facing the Anthropocene, Angus makes clear what is happening, why, and where a sustainable alternative can be. ¶ The Anthropocene is not a word in common use. It is a proposed geological term to describe the destructive effects of capitalist industrialization. ¶ Its reliance upon fossil fuels and the environmental outcomes are not a pretty picture, folks. Angus delivers crisp accounts of recent scientific research
With the end of the Cold War and the victory of capitalism, and the seeming defeat of “Marxism-Leninism” in 1991, it appeared we could at last bury Lenin. And certainly, who will mourn for the death of a Lenin encased in granite monuments with his words turned into a dogmatic religion to legitimise the Eastern Bloc regimes? ¶ However, there is another Lenin who remains very much alive. This Lenin has been unearthed in recent years with the “Lenin renaissance”. Different scholars and political activists such as Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Anderson, to name just a few, have explored what remains very much alive in Lenin…. ¶ Now, to this distinguished list, we can add the name of Tamás Krausz with the release of his magnificent book… | more…
Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014
400 pp, $34 cloth, ISBN 9781583675519
By Laurence H. Shoup
Reviewed by Dominic Alexander
“…It is the argument of Laurence Shoup in Wall Street’s Think Tank that the American institution known as The Council on Foreign Relations is not just another right-wing institute, but is a key organisation for the co-ordination of the capitalist ruling class, particularly in the US, but also, to a significant degree, internationally. Through the CFR, whole networks of the ruling class are knit together, and come to common agreement about the policies and programmes that will sustain
The media is a fickle beast, so coverage of potential epidemics of diseases veers between the apocalyptic to nonexistence. As an outbreak occurs we hear about the potential terrifying consequences of the disease, combined with graphic details of the symptoms and frequently pictures of large numbers of dead animals. Rob Wallace‘s new book is an important polemic that argues that we, as a society, should be a lot more concerned about the potential for disease to decimate the human population | more…
Out of early twentieth-century Russia came the world’s first significant effort to build a modern revolutionary society. According to Marxist economist Samir Amin, the great upheaval that once produced the Soviet Union also produced a movement away from capitalism—a long transition that continues today. In seven concise, provocative chapters, Amin deftly examines the trajectory of Russian capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possible future of Russia—and, by extension, the future of socialism itself. | more…
Gerald Horne | more…