February 20, 2024
This book underscores the depth of the environmental crisis and, with its thorough grounding in the scientific literature, situates the onset of the crisis in geological as well as historical time. These two time-scales now converge, signifying the end of the ecological conditions that allowed the human species to flourish. ¶ Herein lies the drama—and, with it, the challenge—that we are now living....
February 20, 2024
Dhaka, April 24, 2013. On that day, the capital of Bangladesh hit the headlines around the world after the collapse of Rana Plaza, a monstrous eight-story building that housed several textile factories, a bank, and a few shops. It was one of the worst disasters ever seen in a workplace, causing the tragic death of 1,133 garment workers and injury of another 2,500. ¶ This crime is the starting point of the recently-published Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, in which John Smith presents the key pillars on which the current world capitalist system rests.
February 20, 2024
Professor John Marciano, long-time activist, campaigner and author, has been documenting this assault on the mind for decades. The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? is his latest work, a slim but estimable text that offers a wide-ranging history of the war, the lies told then and now to justify and palliate it, and current perceptions of the conflict. ¶ This book truly sets the record straight, and tells the story of Vietnam as it should have been told all along – and should be forevermore.
February 20, 2024
This seminal and original study of contemporary imperialism should be on every militant’s bookshelf, not least because it is tightly argued, exhaustively researched and unashamedly Marxist throughout. ¶ John Smith’s central argument is that the decline in manufacturing in the Western industrialised countries, and its rise in the so-called Third World, are part of a deliberate strategy by transnational corporations to exploit low wages, underpinned by appalling working conditions, in order to realise super profits….
February 20, 2024
One of three sons of immigrant jews from Bialystok, Poland, Louis “Studs” Terkel was born on May 16, 1912, in New York City. In 1922, Studs moved with his parents and his two brothers to Chicago, where he lived for the rest of his life. Actor, disc jockey, author, raconteur, husband and father, Studs is probably best known as host of the The Studs Terkel Show from 1952 to 1997 on Chicago’s WFMT. The program earned him the title of ‘Mr. Chicago’ and many people in the city have said they always knew it was between ten and eleven in the morning if they caught an earful of his radio program….
February 20, 2024
In 2002 Anne Daly produced a documentary called Race to the Bottom, provoked by a fire that killed fifty-two workers in a garment factory in Bangladesh. John Smith’s book begins with the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, when another garment factory collapsed and 1,131 workers died. Clearly, the race to the bottom continues…. ¶ Along with other examples of intensified exploitation, smartphone manufacture, and coffee-growing, John Smith connects the outsourcing of production to the lowest-wage economies with the nature of capitalism today.
February 20, 2024
“A growing number of scientists, environmentalists and other experts have come to the conclusion that the human race has had such a deep and fundamental impact on the planet that we have effectively entered into a new geological age in the history of the Earth. They argue that the changes that have been brought about by human activity over the past 200 years, but more specifically since the end of the Second World War, has had a permanent effect on our ecology. We have, they say, moved from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch, one which future scientists will be able to pinpoint just by studying these effects on our environment....¶ Ian Angus will hold a book launch for Facing the Anthropocene at Octopus Books, 251 Bank Street, 2nd floor, Ottawa, on September 27 at 7 pm.”
February 20, 2024
Alan Wieder talks about Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation with Dan Polletta of Cleveland’s WCPN/WCLV ideastream
February 20, 2024
This summer, a panel of geologists voted to recognize today as an age where human activities match or exceed natural forces and are globally significant. They named it the Anthropocene. On September 13, Ian Angus, an author and eco-socialist activist, spoke at a colloquium organized by UBC’s geography department, addressing this proposed geological epoch and introducing his new book, Facing the Anthropocene.
February 20, 2024
in which Ian Angus, author of Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, talks to Jennifer Estendorp of Inside Ottawa Valley
“What is the Anthropocene you ask?
‘Geologists divide the history of our world into increments, based on what they know about eras,’ explained Ian Angus, local author. ‘Currently, we’re in the Holocene epoch.’
