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…
“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…
“…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…
From the time the current rightist government in Hungary came into power, the archive of Georg Lukács–a preeminent Marxist of the 20th century–has been under a brutal attack. It has been gradually deprived of its subvention from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of its ability to pay its staff. Now, the government threatens to sell the property on which it is located and disperse the archive. | more…
Gerald Horne, author of Race to Revolution and Confronting Black Jacobins, explains why he disagrees with President Obama about the Dallas shooting, the latest police killings of African Americans, and the United-ness of our States:
“It’s going to be very difficult to solve this crisis, for a number of reasons…”
Henry A. Giroux, author of America’s Addiction to Terrorism, comments on America’s latest onslaught of white supremacy, fueled by the war on terror and this country’s embedded, festering racism:
“The killing machine has become spectacularized, endlessly looped through the mainstream cultural apparatuses both as a way to increase ratings and as an unconscious testimony to the ruthlessness of the violence waged by a racist state. Once again, Americans and the rest of the world are witness to a brutal killing machine, a form of domestic terrorism, responsible for the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling who were shot point blank by white
