February 20, 2024
The economic expansion just prior to the pandemic seemed to justify optimism about inequality. But Covid-19 showed just how little grounds there were for optimism. The pandemic demonstrated how poorly prepared for such a crisis a society could be that fails to provide universal, high-quality health care to a significant proportion of its population, as the case and death rates in the United States have demonstrated…
February 20, 2024
Marx’s reflections assume the existence of a money commodity, in this case gold. If a commodity functions as money, then the value of the money commodity is no more imaginary than the value of other commodities….
February 20, 2024
When I was still in a 401(k)-like plan and approaching age sixty-five after thirty-seven years of university teaching, I took stock of my future retirement income. I wanted to know what it would look like in terms of achieving the 70 percent of pre-retirement income that retirement experts state is necessary to maintain one’s standard of living…
February 20, 2024
In their new book “Extraordinary Threat,” Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur delve into the critical questions: What is the nature of Venezuela’s government? Is it a dictatorship? Are Venezuela’s problems due to misgovernment, or are they due to U.S. interference? What would happen if Venezuela fell to U.S. imperialism? How has the U.S. been able to get away with this? And above all: Taking Venezuela as a case study, how does regime change propaganda work?
February 20, 2024
“…In 2018, Venezuela was only able to import $11.7 billion in goods, according to Torino Capital. The impact on medicine imports was especially destructive. According to U.S. economist Mark Weisbrot, while its economy was still growing in 2013, Venezuela was importing about $2 billion per year in medicine. By 2018, that amount had fallen to an astonishing low of $140 million—an especially horrifying development because medicines are much more difficult to substitute with local production than food. It is impossible to deny that a collapse in medicine imports has killed thousands of people between 2017 and 2018, as Mark Weisbrot and U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs argued in a paper published in April 2019. Weisbrot and Sachs cite a 31 percent increase in general mortality in the 2017–2018 period, according to a survey by anti-Maduro Venezuelan academics. That increase works out to an extra forty thousand deaths….”
February 20, 2024
In a recent review of Rob Wallace’ latest work, we are reminded that “If the virus has a source it is not Yunnan but the boardrooms of giant corporations.” The review takes the time to name the culprits..
February 20, 2024
Educational Justice offers hope that there’s still time to take on corporatized schools and build democratic alternatives. Forcefully written by educator and journalist Howard Ryan, with contributing authors, the book deconstructs the corporate assault on schools, assesses the prevailing teachers union responses, and documents best teaching and organizing practices. Reports from various educational fronts include innovative union strategies against charter school expansion, as well as teaching visions drawn from the social justice and whole language traditions. Bold, informative, clearly reasoned, this book is an education in itself—a democratic one at that.
February 20, 2024
Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian revolution—positive and negative—on political, intellectual, and cultural life, and looks at consequent revolutions after 1917. Change needs to be understood in relation to the distinct trajectories of radical politics in different regions. But the main purpose of this Socialist Register edition—one century after “Red October”—is to look forward, to what might happen next.
February 20, 2024
Studs Terkel was an American icon who had no use for America’s cult of celebrity. He was a leftist who valued human beings over political dogma. In scores of books and thousands of radio and television broadcasts, Studs paid attention—and respect—to “ordinary” human beings of all classes and colors, as they talked about their lives as workers, dreamers, survivors. Alan Wieder’s Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation is the first comprehensive book about this man.
February 20, 2024
Out of early twentieth-century Russia came the world’s first significant effort to build a modern revolutionary society. According to Marxist economist Samir Amin, the great upheaval that once produced the Soviet Union also produced a movement away from capitalism—a long transition that continues today. In seven concise, provocative chapters, Amin deftly examines the trajectory of Russian capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possible future of Russia—and, by extension, the future of socialism itself.
