“When will work be over? This question, both urgent and plaintive, increasingly imposes itself as any fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of automation is indefinitely deferred and as work intensifies in both quality and quantity…. ¶ For Huws, the survival of capitalism through its most recent, still ongoing crisis is less a matter of ideological control and more a matter of the perpetuation of one of its fundamental dynamics: the need to continually open new fields of accumulation by bringing more areas of life
The word out of Hollywood is that Steven Spielberg plans to direct a film about famed television commentator Walter Cronkite. According to Variety, it will highlight Cronkite’s protest against the War in Vietnam—especially ‘the role that he played in turning public opinion against the increasingly un-winnable conflict.’ So goes the myth. In reality, Cronkite never opposed the war itself; rather, he only came to question it after the Tet Offensive made it clear that the U.S. policy in Vietnam was not working. | more…
Drawing on exceptionally rare, difficult-to-access collections of underground publications, pamphlets, and oral testimonies—more difficult to access that the author admits—Cushion pushes back against several traditions of argumentation that have tended to cast labor struggle in the 1950s to the historiographical margins. Importantly, these lacunae in explaining the Cuban Revolution’s origins have remained equally persistent among Cuban and non-Cuban historians, the Revolution’s admirers and its fiercest critics. | more…
This interview is part of the The Stone, a New York Times online forum for contemporary philosophers and critical theorists. It is the fifth in a series of dialogues on violence. Henry A. Giroux is a professor in the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of America’s Addiction to Terrorism. Brad Evans is a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol in England.
”Brad Evans: Throughout your work you have dealt with the dangers of ignorance and what you have called the violence of ‘organized forgetting.’ Can you explain what you mean by this and
It seems that on an almost daily basis we read reports that climate change is getting worse, faster than expected. Only a few months back in the aftermath of the Paris climate talks in December 2015, politicians were hailing the successes of the negotiations. They claimed it was a major step forward. Yet little concrete action has taken place, and many of those who protested and called for serious action from the politicians, will be asking ‘what has changed? | more…
“Why are hundreds of millions of people in nonwhite nations mired in dreadful poverty? Blame the world system, details John Smith in Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. ¶ His thesis flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that modern capitalism is a force for human development. According to Smith, the opposite is the case, as the Global North deindustrializes. ¶ As that process has unfolded since the 1970s, the Global South has industrialized without the broad-based prosperity that characterized the US in the
Social historian Eva Swidler, author of the June Monthly Review article, “Radical Leisure,” explores the radical potential of work resistance, explains how the labor movement of the 20th century traded the promise of less working hours for slightly more wages, and makes the case for collective action and working class solidarity as the only way individuals can reclaim their limited time from the unlimited demands of capitalism. On This is Hell: a weekly Chicago longform political interview program broadcast on WNUR. | more…
In this collection of dispatches, by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Rob Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. With a precise and radical wit, Wallace juxtaposes ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens with microbial time travel and neoliberal Ebola. While many books cover facets of food or outbreaks, Wallace’s collection is the first to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science into a new understanding of infections. | more…
Meet Rob Wallace and hear him talk about his new book, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science | more…
Michael A. Lebowitz is the author of Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted, and The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now. He was recently in Australia for the Socialism in the 21st Century conference, which was co-hosted by Links. In this interview, Lebowitz covers some of the topics he discussed during his visit regarding the opposition to neoliberalism and the prospects for a socialist alternative in Latin America today. | more…
“The idea that we are in the Anthropocene—a geological epoch defined by human activity—is now catching the interest of activists. It is becoming clear that human activity affects the Earth system in multiple, interconnected ways and potentially to such an extent as to be detectable in the geological record for years to come. ¶ Some on the left, including This Changes Everything author Naomi Klein, say that the Anthropocene concept is unhelpful as it suggests that humanity in general, rather than the capitalist system,
Science tells us that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun—the Anthropocene, a time of rising temperatures, extreme weather, rising oceans, and mass species extinctions. Humanity faces not just more pollution or warmer weather, but a crisis of the Earth System. If business as usual continues, this century will be marked by rapid deterioration of our physical, social, and economic environment. Large parts of Earth will become uninhabitable, and civilization itself will be threatened. Facing the Anthropocene shows what has caused this planetary emergency, and what we must do to meet the challenge. Bridging the gap between Earth System science and ecological Marxism, Ian Angus examines not only the latest scientific findings about the physical causes and consequences of the Anthropocene transition, but also the social and economic trends that underlie the crisis. | more…
Watch Ian Angus at the Socialism for the 21st Century conference in Sydney, Australia, May 13, 2013, as he launches his new book, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. | more…
