February 20, 2024
In a post-9/11 world, a “new normal” exists in the US. It tilts in no small way towards the power of government’s three branches. The trio focuses, almost obsessively, on national safety and security. Against that backdrop, Albert Ruben’s new book amplifies the strengths and weaknesses of a progressive institution involved in civil liberties and human rights struggles for nearly five decades.
February 20, 2024
Ecological degradation is the elephant in the room for many people; they are aware of its presence yet would prefer to ignore it rather than be forced to consider both its severity and possible remedies. This practiced ignorance occurs despite numerous problems, such as global climate change, species extinction, deforestation, overfishing, and dramatic disasters such as the recent oil “spill” from offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation releases from nuclear power plants in post-tsunami Japan. This elephant is enormous, destructive, and cannot be imagined away. John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York have been taking on the elephant for years.
February 20, 2024
In general, college professors are not particularly well-regarded as political analysts (the noun “academic” is a term of unvarnished contempt in precincts like FOX news). But there is a special circle of irrelevance reserved for English professors, who are not typically known for their quantitative acumen — or, for that matter, their ability to write in a language the rest of us understand. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up this book by John Marsh, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Amazingly, I encountered a work of deft econometrics. Even more amazing, it’s clear, lively, and realistic.
February 20, 2024
In this review I discuss one particular chapter of the book, entitled ‘Dialectics and systems theory’. Though prolific writers, these two famous research biologists and evolutionists, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, are mostly known for their classic, ‘The dialectical biologist’, a gem more relevant today than when written in 1985. The chapter I am investigating here was written by Levins. When Hegel, Marx or Engels wrote of ‘things’, they were commenting on the dynamics of everything: all things (matter-energy) are born or emerge (from other things); they live or exist, then decay and die. These things are all that exist – everything is in permanent flux and “all that is solid melts into air” (Communist manifesto).
February 20, 2024
In this provocative study, economist Ernesto Screpanti argues that imperialism—far from disappearing or mutating into a benign “globalization”—has in fact entered a new phase, which he terms “global imperialism.” This is a phase defined by multinational firms cut loose from the nation-state framework and free to chase profits over the entire surface of the globe. No longer dependent on nation-states for building a political consensus that accommodates capital accumulation, these firms seek to bend governments to their will and destroy barriers to the free movement of capital. And while military force continues to play an important role in imperial strategy, it is the discipline of the global market that keeps workers in check by pitting them against each other no matter what their national origin.
February 20, 2024
Join Alan Wieder, author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid, for two upcoming events in London, UK. He will be discussing the book at Housmans Bookshop and presenting at the launch of a special issue of the Review of African Political Economy dedicated to Ruth First.
February 20, 2024
This history of the Freedom Budget offers a challenge to the mainstream retelling of the story of the Civil Rights movement as well as the neoliberal economic agenda. It does this by being an inspiring history of the movement itself and its key characters in their aim to link ‘racial justice for African Americans with the goal of economic justice for all Americans’ (p.9). By understanding the movement without the diluting and sanitizing effects of mainstream historians, it offers an insight into victories, defeats and individuals, altogether acting as a siren song to call activists to action. At the same time, the authors offer a concrete vision of what a ‘different, more egalitarian and humane society’ would look like (p.241). As such, this is a book not just for the historian but for the activist as well. It would make excellent reading for a study or book group, especially the final chapter that suggests a framework for a new Freedom Budget for the neoliberal world.
February 20, 2024
Bruce Neuburger is the author of Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California, a memoir of the decade he spent as a farmworker and radical organizer. He was interviewed on Flashpoints, the investigative news program broadcast by KPFA, about the conditions of farmworkers today.
February 20, 2024
Walter Rodney was born in 1942 in colonial Guyana (then called British Guiana) and died in 1980 in postcolonial Guyana, almost certainly assassinated by the government of Guyana. In a short thirty-eight years, Rodney lived an amazing life, becoming at once a renowned scholar and a brave political activist. After finishing high school in Guyana, Rodney attended the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). He subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
February 20, 2024
Steve Early, author of Save Our Unions, is interviewed by Andrew Sernatinger and Tessa Echeverria for the Black Sheep Podcast. He discusses his new book, the state of the U.S. labor movement today, prospects for progressive organizing, and more. Click here for a transcript of the interview or follow the link and listen to the entire podcast.
