February 20, 2024
“Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela poses a unique dilemma for some on the left. They have criticisms of it, but decided against voicing them too obstreperously now, for the obvious reason that that could aid and comfort a mortal enemy–the most powerful military empire of all time, namely the United States…
February 20, 2024
In 2019, Michael Heinrich published Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society: The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work. It was the first installment of a biography slated to stretch across three volumes. Kathrin Witter interviewed Heinrich about his book for the Journal of the History of Ideas…
February 20, 2024
The Right to Live in Health and Cuban Health Care, when read together, historicize Cuba’s pathbreaking medical system. … While observers often focus on Cuba’s health infrastructure and policies, Rodríguez and Fitz instead emphasize consciousness and ideology. These two books show that throughout the twentieth century, Cubans voiced new demands and prioritized specific values, and, as a result, crafted a revolutionary healthcare system…
February 20, 2024
“John Bellamy Foster is a U.S.-based writer and lecturer whose works are essential reading for all revolutionaries and environmentalists. Over two decades, Foster has produced an immensely important body of work, and alongside a small number of others (like Ian Angus), has clarified and rescued Marxist thinking on key environmental issues in the age of climate catastrophe…”
February 20, 2024
Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog. In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London gravesite—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity…
February 20, 2024
With the advent of COVID-19, India’s rulers imposed the world’s most stringent lockdown on an already depressed economy, dealing a body blow to the majority of India’s billion-plus population. Yet the Indian government’s spending to cushion the lockdown’s economic impact ranked among the world’s lowest in GDP terms, resulting in unprecedented unemployment and hardship. Crisis and Predation shows how this tight-fistedness stems from the opposition of global financial interests to any expansion of public spending by India, and that Indian rulers readily adhere to their guidance…
February 20, 2024
New Year’s Eve 2019: 5,000 people on the beach at Mallacoota, Victoria, watch pitch-black skies turn a deep red as the bushfire approaches. They huddle, powerless against the fury of this climate change-fuelled nightmare. By March 2020, 33 people, one billion animals, 3,094 houses and over 17 million hectares of land had been destroyed in fires across Australia…
February 20, 2024
Gerald Horne, author of several books, including The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century, talked a few days ago to Brian Becker, host of The Socialist Program, about the story of the creation of Thanksgiving. This isn the first installment of an ongoing series where The Socialist Program examines the real origins of U.S. society…
February 20, 2024
“History continuously reminds us that racism and capitalism are two peas from the same pod. Those of a predominantly European descent wreak worldwide havoc, carrying out the much-fabled white man’s burden, imposing themselves as ruling elites. Black lives still don’t matter in many societies because the miserable claim of ‘white supremacy’ has been effortlessly intertwined with the neoreligion; capitalism….”
February 20, 2024
“’A man dressed like Karl Marx’ Michael Heinrich observes ‘would hardly arouse attention walking through the streets of Paris of London today.’ Some biographers assert that Marx was a product of a past epoch, the early 19th century ‘increasingly distant from our age.’ (Jonathan Sperber 2013) By contrast the first volume of a projected account of Marx’s life sees his reflections on the ‘epochal rupture’ that created modern capitalism, to be, if more arresting than his clothing, recognisably part of today’s world….”
