Archive | December, 2018

Even in a comic-book movie, black American men are relegated to the lowest rung of political regard. So low that the sole white leading character in the movie, the CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), gets to be a hero who helps save Wakanda.

The decline in the payroll share of output is class power at work: unfortunately theirs, not ours.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley explores the radical Black politics of scholar Cedric J. Robinson—from his historical understanding of race and capitalism as inherently inseparable systems, to his vision of the possibilities of politics, rooted deep in struggles past and present.

Every great historical epoch in the freedom struggle raises the question: what is a human? The answer changes, to quote Askia Muhammad Toure of the Revolutionary Action Movement, with “the Gong of History.” Amid all the confusing din of history, a note may sound that makes it audible and intelligible.

Written and directed by Raoul Peck, “The Young Karl Marx” follows a 26-year-old writer, researcher and radical named Karl Marx as he embarks, with his wife Jenny, on the road to exile in an age that has created both new prosperity and new problems.

Economic inequality is arguably the crucial issue facing contemporary capitalism—especially in the United States but also across the entire world economy.

Over the last decade, a number of cases attacking the rights of public-sector union members have been quietly working their way through the courts and, finally, up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The story goes that Einstein’s theory of relativity began with a simple question: What if a person could sit on a beam of light? A single inquiry led to an entire field of study, and perhaps the world’s most famous scientific breakthrough.

The late Ed Herman’s questions were less playful. They were about war and death, lies and power politics, but they too created entire areas of study. If properly considered, they can even guide us through the perilous age in which we’re living.

How does the rate of school shootings in the U.S. compare with countries where is more difficult to obtain guns?

The British conservative media and party establishment are renewing their attempts to paint Jeremy Corbyn as a traitor. But given the failure of this approach in the past, why would they attempt it again?

The top 29 books, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Colonialism & Imperialism” book lists are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 200+ titles, as well as the sources we used to make the list are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action.

Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, the “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China” was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.

Unlike liberal economists, Marxists explore the primary role of internal contradictions within the capitalist economy. The MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY explains why.

In 2010 the oil and gas geopolitics of the Mediterranean changed profoundly. That was when a Texas oil company, Noble Energy, discovered a huge deposit of natural gas offshore Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, the so-called Leviathan Field, one of the world’s largest gas field discoveries in over a decade.

Armed with a budget of over $700 billion for the coming year – which will likely continue to grow over the course of Trump’s Pentagon-controlled presidency — the Pentagon’s dystopian vision for the future of the military is quickly becoming a question not of if but when.

Marxism is not simply a form of anti-capitalism, but is a theory of the social and historical nature of humanity. Capitalism was understood by Marx to be a specific historical phase, in which the cycles and tendencies of human activity are qualitatively different than in previous periods, each of which had their own specificity.

Let us slightly modify the question “who teaches the teacher?” and ask this of Marxism: If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?

In parts one and two of this series I’ve talked about the fact that there are two conflicting versions of intersectionality, one employed by some honest to god leftists who reach backward across decades to ventriloquize the term into the mouths of the Cohambee comrades, of Audre Lord, even of Claudia Jones and Sojourner Truth, and how this exists alongside another, hegemonic version of intersectionality deployed by the corporate funded lawyers, media and the nonprofit sector which invented the term in the first place for reasons Cohambee or Claudia Jones would never touch.

Venezuelanalysis republishes this analysis of the current conditions in Venezuela from Lucha de Clases, in which they call for deeper revolutionary measures as a way out of the current economic crisis.