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I’m old enough to remember, just barely, the Great Depression: lines of shabby men waiting for free soup, better-dressed men selling apples on streetcorners, miles of evil-smelling, self-made shacks in a Hooverville near Newark.… In February 1937 I recall the movie newsreel with happy, unshaven sit-down strikers at GM in Flint, waving from the factory windows in a dramatic (Communist-led) victory which changed the USA.

Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease. 

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. 

Liberal opinion holds that the international monetary and financial system is a device for promoting the interests of all participating countries by providing a convenient payments arrangement within which trade can be carried on. The reality however is altogether different: the international system is founded upon the hegemony of western imperialism, and in turn sustains this hegemony.

On November 6 and 7, fascist goons from Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli professional football club, descended on the streets of Amsterdam, chanting proudly about murdered children in Gaza while assaulting local houses, passers-by, and taxi drivers that appeared pro-Palestinian or Arab.

John Bellamy Foster describes Einstein’s radical political commitments, including his efforts in relation to the founding of Brandeis University, his role in the Henry Wallace campaign, and his seminal essay “Why Socialism?”

In Africa, the leading forces of capitalism have ruthlessly wielded a neoliberal conception of corruption to undermine states’ sovereignty and open the continent to plunder at the hands of Western multinational corporations.

In this republished essay from 1996, Samir Amin gives his view of Samuel Huntington’s theory of “clash of civilizations.” His demonstration of why culturalism and imperialism reinforce each other, and how victims can be led to accept “difference” in place of equality and liberation, is today of potential utility everywhere.

This year, Brazil and China celebrate fifty years of official diplomatic relations. The importance of the Sino-Brazilian relationship cannot be underestimated in the context of the rise of the Global South, the decline of U.S. hegemony, and the emergence of a New Cold War. With a look back into the history of bilateral relations, how can we understand the importance of these two countries in the current conjuncture in pushing forward changes unseen in a century?

Deborah Veneziale provides a useful analysis of the 2024 US elections.

Billions were spent both on aid to the Zelensky government…as an urgent defense necessity to counter “the Russian threat.” This threat has appeared and reappeared in Germany in 1914, the 1930s, after 1945 and now again, louder than ever, with similar barked Prussian commands: “Achtung! Die Russen kommen!” as dangerously false as ever, and often followed by eastward expansion, invasion and, far too often, catastrophe, with atomic annihilation an added danger this time around.

The BRICS declaration presumes that the international institutions in their current state are flawed because they are dominated by imperialist countries and are not representative enough; but they are flawed because their very essence is flawed, no matter how they are governed.

Unearthing the chapter on fascism from Paul Sweezy’s The Theory of Capitalist Development (Monthly Review Press, January 1942).

Steve Ellner: “The basic contradiction of capitalism is at the point of production, the contradiction between the interests of the working class and those of capitalists.”

While so many in the world hold their breath for Harris or Trump it would also be wise to keep an eye on Germany. A sharp eye!

Book Launch: “The Dialectics of Ecology”

Professor Saibaba’s life, or rather, Sai’s life, for that is what his friends called him, cannot be adequately understood without situating him in an authentic history and “present as history” of the Indian society of which he was a part.

Chinese scholar Wang Hui looks back at the twentieth century, which was born out of the multiple revolutions in the peripheral areas of the world, including China.

Forty years later, Lehlohonolo Kennedy Mahlatsi looks back on the Vaal Uprising in South Africa, which marked a turning point in the growth of mass-based organizations throughout the country and the mass rejection of apartheid colonial rule.

This month we are re-publishing our conversation with Steven Attewell along with a new written transcript and episode graphic. Attewell is author of the incredible book, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America from FDR to Reagan, published in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The book examines the history of job creation programs in the United States from the Great Depression to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.