Abortion—The Real Irish Lessons
Tomás Mac Sheoin reviews Road to Repeal, which documents the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland, from its constitutional prohibition to the ban’s repeal in 2018. | more…
Strategies for Degrowth
Mariko Frame reviews The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to the World Beyond Capitalism, by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan (Verso, 2022) and its explorations of the policies, vision, and strategies for social change required for the burgeoning movement. | more…
A New Environmental History of Socialist States
Recent scholarship suggests that the widespread perception of Soviet states as uniquely ecologically disastrous is, at best, exaggerated, and that these environmental legacies must be re-examined. | more…
The Jakarta Method, Then and Now: U.S. Counterinsurgency and the Third World
Increasing numbers of left-wing activists around the world are turning to Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method to learn more about the horrific atrocities committed by the United States against peoples’ struggles for the right to self-determination in the so-called postcolonial era. In particular, the book describes how imperialist expansion destroyed revolutionary struggles in the third world. | more…
Histories of Racial Capitalism and the Dynamics of the Capitalist System
The term racial capitalism is a bit of a shibboleth. Those who invoke the phrase draw from a longstanding tradition of radical scholarship that brings attention to the material force of racialism in systems of capitalist domination. There is, however, a mounting critique that questions the term’s usefulness, casting doubt on the scholarly project initiated by Cedric Robinson. In the face of such concerns, Histories of Racial Capitalism is a much needed contribution. | more…
The Fight to Save San Francisco’s City College: An Organizer’s View
Free City! is a book for organizers, by organizers. Written from inside the struggle, it is a history of the five-year campaign to save San Francisco’s community college system from being shuttered by a highly politicized accreditation agency. The movement went on to win support and funding for the country’s most inclusive free college measure. | more…
Moving the Bar: Michael Ratner, Social Justice, and a Life Defending the Revolution
There are a thousand ways to be a radical lawyer. Michael Ratner’s magnificent Moving the Bar gives a tantalizing taste of how one person, with his increasing band of colleagues, defended movements for social justice and revolution during his lifetime. | more…
Keeping the Challenges Before Us
The Reissuing of 'Reluctant Reformers' and Its Contemporary Implications
The reissuing of Reluctant Reformers can inform our attempts to grapple with how the unity of the oppressed can be forged in such a way that the interests of the historically marginalized do not continue to get…well, marginalized. | more…
The Synthesizing Impulse: J. B. S. Haldane
By any standards, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964) was a fascinating man. An eminent scientist, prolific writer and speaker, fiery political activist, and all-round colorful character, he has been the subject of several full-length biographies and multiple biographical sketches. | more…
Building a Vision of the Good Life
The crux of Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living is simple: we need to redefine “the good life.” We need to move away from a culture that equates the good life with endless consumption and toward one that equates it with experiences that are not defined by the market. Not only is this transition ecologically necessary, but it will also lead to fairer, and far more pleasurable, experiences. | more…
Epidemic Response
The Legacy of Colonialism
The COVID-19 pandemic is at its root a crisis of globalization, racial capitalism, colonialism, the social organization of our public health system. It is a crisis of treatment and care versus demonization and wall building. And it is the latest pandemic in a long line of modern onesÑfrom SARS to swine flu to HIV to EbolaÑa predictable and predicted outcome, not the mysterious unforeseeable lightning strike as it is often portrayed. | more…
The Point Is to Change It
We who are engaged in the struggle for change might ask: “Through what lens of refraction is the evidence of events recalled and related?” If we are to resist the genocidal use of military force, and to oppose the environmental depredation that follows in its wake, we need to see the roots and laws of motion of colonialism and empire | more…
What Sort of Kinetic Materialism Did Marx Find in Epicurus?
In his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx suggests that the main flaw of all previous materialism has been to uncritically accept and champion a notion of matter that has its proper place in a dualistic framework, where matter is passive and the mind is active. If this is so, true materialism will conceive of matter as an active principle, and of material beings as perfectly capable of conscious sensation and agency. | more…