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Colonialism: a cancer on the planet
The acuity of Hunton’s insights, seen in retrospect so many decades later, offers astounding reading. Throughout, he has one clear aim: to let the peoples of the struggling masses in the emerging nations seize their own destiny.
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Book Review: Mumia Abu-Jamal’s ‘Have Black Lives Ever Mattered’
Though he’s spent the last 35 years incarcerated—and at least thirty of those years in isolation on death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal has remained steadfast in his activism, especially in regards to police brutality, criminal punishment, and black liberation.
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Gregory T. Cushman – ‘Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History’
In the last two decades it has been common, in Marxist books on ecology, to find discussions of how capitalist agriculture developed an urgent need for fertilisers to solve the crisis of soil fertility in the 19th century.
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‘The Dawn of Everything’ gets human history wrong
Is inequality inevitable? Is freedom just a choice? Two materialist critiques of a widely-praised book.
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Revisiting Marx on Alienation and Communism
A review of Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, edited and introduced by Marcello Musto.
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ACT-UP and Win: a riveting account of NYC activism during the AIDS crisis
Sarah Schulman’s recently released political history shines light on AIDS activism that often goes unrecognized.
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“Ten crises: The political economy of China’s development,” by Wen Tiejun
Wen’s vision is of a China which would be increasingly self-reliant, delinking from the American dominated global capitalism and developing its own key technologies and productive capacities, while at the same time continuing to engage with other emerging economies which share a desire to be free of Western neo-imperial control.
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Stories of resistance
Fighting back against extractivism, false solutions, and social and climate abuse around the world.
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‘Why are you acting the Marxist?’ Frédéric Lordon on Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology’
On 31 January, at the Bourse du travail in Paris, Frédéric Lordon debated with Thomas Piketty on his book ‘Capital and Ideology’, at the invitation of Les Amis de L’Humanité. The following text is Frédéric Lordon’s opening speech, with minimal revisions.
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‘Any bystander is a coward or a traitor’ – Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary challenge
From the end of May until a few days before Remembrance Day (November 11) flags at Canadian public buildings were flown at half-mast. This unusual occurrence was in recognition of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves containing the remains of Indigenous children on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools.
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Debunking the “Eco-Fortress Nationalism” of the AOC/Markey Green New Deal
Max Ajl’s ‘People’s Green New Deal’ is a brutal reminder for the American left that even the most celebrated and progressive developments in American politics are still simply American politics, in other words they are a politics for America, and America first.
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‘From what present are we historicizing the left?’ Arab Lefts: Histories and Silences — Alina Sajed
There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings.
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‘Karl Radek on China: Documents from the Former Secret Soviet Archives’ – a review
Sometimes, the greatest theoretical works come to us in the form of lectures rather than systemic books. This is the case with Karl Radek, whose lectures on the Chinese Revolution have recently been published by the Historical Materialism book series.
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Philosophers with no clothes: A Review of ‘The War Against Marxism’
Tony McKenna’s new book is an important defence of Marxism, against thinkers who have confused and obscured its revolutionary core, argues Chris Nineham
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‘Scandalize My Name: Stories From the Blacklist’
Documentary about the impact of the McCarthy era on African Americans in the film industry.
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Review: ‘The Great Climate Cop Out’
The 25 page pamphlet lays out concisely and effectively why we cannot look to heads of government under a capitalist system to come to an agreement on phasing out fossils fuels, cutting emissions and creating a more sustainable economy.
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Review: The Alienation of Love
More than just bear it, capitalists today demand we love our exploitation. Sara Bennett reviews a new book on the new emotional demands on workers, arguing it aid us in our understanding of modern class relations.
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The New Dangerous Class? The PMC and Virtue Hoarding
In a review of a new book about the ‘Professional Managerial Class’, James Foley says middle-class activists dress up conformity as a war on cultural backwardness.
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Who owns our data?
We need a model of ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, avoids the costs of private exploitation by individual firms, and does not slip into authoritarian forms of state control.
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Book Review: ‘A People’s Green New Deal’
In this book Ajl covers most of the big questions facing rational, ecosocialist design: nationalization vs localism, modernization vs degrowth, techno-scientific solutions vs indigenous knowledge.