February 20, 2024
David L. Wilson, author, with Jane Guskin, of the second edition of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers talks to Kansas City’s Heartland Radio Forum about Workers Across Borders, and Workers Who Cross Borders
February 20, 2024
So many put their puts hopes into Syriza; so many were bitterly disappointed. Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left proved wholly unable to resist the enormous pressures put on it and it is Greek working people who are paying the price, not excepting those who voted for Syriza. ¶ How should we analyze the depressing spectacle of what had been a genuinely Left party, indeed a coalition of leftist forces from a variety of socialist perspectives, self-destructing so rapidly? The simplistic response would be to wash our hands and condemn Syriza as “opportunists,” but we’ll learn exactly nothing with such an attitude…
February 20, 2024
Anti-capitalism needs a viable political party. Whether it’s a big one, like the Democratic Party—which Bernie Sanders’ supporters are hoping to influence and dreaming, perhaps, of taking over—or a robust third party that’s openly socialist, it’s clear that without a party that operates in conjunction with left movements, it will be difficult to achieve goals like Medicare for All, free higher education, student loan forgiveness, environmental and climate protection, and substantially shrinking the military and the vast prison system…. ¶ That is precisely what several essays in Rethinking Revolution advocate.
February 20, 2024
A new influenza pandemic is quite possible, according to a study by researchers at the University of NSW’s School of Public Health. The study notes that 19 different influenza strains have affected humans in the last 100 years, but the speed with which new strains have emerged has increased over the past 15 years. There have been seven new strains in the past five years alone. ¶ In Big Farms Make Big Flu, published last year by Monthly Review Press, Rob Wallace agreed a pandemic is not just more than likely, it is probable, and echoes the necessity to prepare. But his focus is to identify why the rate of new virus strains has increased, which he sees as basic to how to effectively plan containment.
February 20, 2024
Come to Central London, UK, to join organizers, intellectuals, and activists in a 4-day political festival of ideas, discussions, debates, art, films, and music! Speakers will include Ian Angus, author of “Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System”…
February 20, 2024
Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science, is heard, along with other scientists, on CBCradio‘s ‘The 180 with Jim Brown,’ considering the question: Why do we name diseases the way we do?
February 20, 2024
The leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, 1922-1991) used the terms ‘real socialism’ and ‘actually existing socialism’ to ‘distinguish their real experience from merely theoretical socialist ideas.’ Lebowitz asks how that system actually functioned, how it reproduced itself, and why it ‘yield[ed] to capitalism without resistance from the working classes who were presumably its beneficiaries’. (p. 7) ¶ Interesting questions. Especially to those of us who want to construct a more humane system than the capitalism that defeated the USSR….
February 20, 2024
John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review magazine and author of the forthcoming Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, talks to Don Shafer of Roundhouse Radio 98.3 Vancouver on climate change, the fate of the earth, and how we can’t give up…
February 20, 2024
On July 7, 2017, a group of the world’s biggest economic powers, known as the G20, met in Hamburg, Germany. What happened at the event? What kinds of realignments happened among governments? How did the U.S. emerge the meetings? Margaret Prescod of SojournerTruthradio/KPFK discussed this on July 11 with Gerald Horne, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston and author of more than thirty books, including the forthcoming The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
February 20, 2024
It is 2017 and the critique of corporate school reform has been around for some time. Beginning with Pauline Lipman’s critique of the Chicago Commercial Club’s role in remaking Chicago’s public schools (2004, 2011), Mike Fabricant and Michelle Fine’s critique of charter schools (2012), Ken Saltman’s critique of privatization (2007), and Sarah LeBlanc Goff’s exposé of the move of New Orleans from a public to a privatized school system (2009), they exposed the shortcomings of corporate or neoliberal reform efforts…
