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
“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…
