Archive | Interview

CounterSpin interview with Carol Anderson on voter suppression.

The coordinator of a media platform that works with social movements talks to VA about the history and challenges of popular communication.

Two things seem certain at this point: (1) The Trump administration will continue to extend its heavy handed neofascist tactics in the next three months, seeking to expand its political base by these means, and (2) the White House and the Republican Party will try to engineer another set of stimulus payments/tax cuts in early September with Trump’s name all over it.

Janine Jackson interviewed legal scholar Marjorie Cohn about secret police in Portland for the July 24, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

A recording of our panel discussion on the Black Lives Matter movement. Featuring Elizabeth Hinton, Robin D. G. Kelley, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Brandon M. Terry, and Cornel West.

“If the small economy of Cuba can improve the health of millions of the world’s people, imagine what could be accomplished if America’s enormous productive capacity changed from creating useless and destructive junk to producing what people throughout the world actually need.”

O’Brien should really read up on Marxist-Leninist works. The people’s position is the fundamental political position of Marxist parties. People are the creators of history and the true driving force behind historical progress.

The Marxist theorist emphasizes that socialism involves people transforming themselves.

This book sets out to challenge some of the assumptions that undergird what I call the competitive society—that is, a society marked by winners and losers, a world in which Black people are routinely expected to bear the burden of loss and defeat.

Canadian Dimension in conversation with essayist, researcher and historian Max Ajl

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to writer, teacher and activist Victor Wallis about the prospect and need for ecosocialism. Wallis’ book is entitled ‘Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism’.

“Neofascism has its source in monopoly-finance capital, at the apex of the system, but depends for its existence on the ability to mobilize, with the help of a führer-like figure such as Trump, a very considerable part of the overall population.”

My sense, while reading this book, was of a twentieth century tradition now ripe to be reclaimed and revived, since, like Du Bois and his generation, we will surely need now to grasp the deep roots of our multiple crises if we are to be free of them and deliver a world to our children that is fit to inherit.

If “everything affects and is affected by every other thing,” we must respond to the dangers to human existence in the 21st century by changing the system, creating a different form of social metabolic reproduction. There is no other way.

We ourselves live in a pretty sick society that seems incapable of feelings of sisterhood, brotherhood, solidarity.

ÖŞK: In an interview with Michael D. Yates (“Trump, neo-fascism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic,”April 11, 2020, MR Online) you mentioned that “Capitalism is in its biggest crisis this century.” What makes this crisis the “biggest”? What will the outcome of this crisis look like? Will this crisis and failure lead to a major change in […]

Toussaint stressed that freedom was something that had to be fought for and taken from below by the masses themselves.

Venezuela is confronting COVID-19 amid foreign sanctions and mercenary incursions. Complicating matters further is the explosive combination of deep recession and a nationwide lockdown, which has triggered incidents of looting and riots.

Mass deforestation, industrialised animal agriculture and reductions in biodiversity are among a number of factors which increase the likelihood of the emergence and spread of dangerous pathogens such as the coronavirus disease 2019, explains scientist Dr Rob Wallace in an exclusive interview with Sputnik.

‘Another, probably more severe pandemic has been predicted. Scientists know how to prepare, but someone must act. If we choose not to learn the lessons that are right before our eyes, the consequences will be dire.”