Consistent with his characteristic jargon-free, readable style, Robert W. McChesney’s new collection, Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-first Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy, is a deep yet accessible primer for his decades of work on journalism, politics, and political economy. The volume showcases over a decade of McChesney’s work and provides overviews and additions to some of his most important contributions during the period, including The Death and Life of American Journalism, Digital Disconnect, and Dollarocracy.

In early 1917, as Britain was bogged down in a war it feared would never end, Alice Wheeldon, her two daughters, and her son were brought to trial and imprisoned for plotting the assassination of Prime Minister Lloyd George, who they believed had betrayed the suffrage movement. In this highly evocative and haunting play, British historian and feminist Sheila Rowbotham illuminates the lives and struggles of those who opposed the war…

There are conspiracies! Some are secret and others overt. The most important of them usually have a public and a private aspect. Yet even those with plenty of data in the full light of day are secret in one sense: they are barely known by the general public and mostly ignored by those who are supposed to be telling us what is going on and what makes things happen: scholars, journalists, and pundits. Thus the obscurity of the Council on Foreign Relations. It may surface as a tagline for the wise men and women of NPR and PBS forums, but its workings and impact remain largely unexamined.

Rather than the standard chronological approach Krausz outlines Lenin’s politics thematically. After a concise biographical sketch the book highlights the importance of Lenin’s analysis of Russian capitalism in the future development of his politics.

It would be an understatement to call Galeano’s stitching together of the South American colonial “project” in Open Veins of Latin America masterful. It is a visionary book that connects the dots between racism, pillaging, capitalism and white Eurocentric patriarchal dominance of peoples and nations. The indigenous populations and people of color have been treated as so much tinder for the fire that heats the homes and replaceable labor that fattens the pocket books of the conquerors.

Work sucks. Every day, workers go into jobs they hate, whether in a factory, office or on a checkout line. Workers are made to perform menial and demeaning tasks that have already been outlined for them, down to the smallest details, by management. Their job is so simple that anyone can do it. Ultimately, the worker possesses no control at the workplace.

No one seriously concerned with changing the world can avoid Lenin. As Hungarian Marxist Tamás Krausz puts it, ‘the discontented keep running into Lenin’s Marxism at every turn’ (p.316). This, Krausz points out, is above all because Lenin was so central to the Russian Revolution, the first, and up to now most important, anti-capitalist experiment aimed at a stateless society.… Krausz’s book is not an introduction to Lenin, for that you have to look elsewhere.[i] But it is much more than its billing as ‘an intellectual biography’. Krausz has set himself the ambitious task of examining the principles that motivated and guided Lenin and testing how they matched up against reality.

In these ten collected essays, Du Bois insistently calls for African Americans to take control their own lives through education – the means to understand both beauty and subversion. Though containing speeches written nearly one-hundred years ago, and on a subject that has seen more stormy debate than almost any other in recent history, The Education of Black People approaches education with a timelessness and timeliness, rooted in classical thought that reflects a remarkably fresh and contemporary relevance. Use the coupon code BOM815 and receive 35% off at check out.

“W.E.B. Du Bois knew that the liberation of his… | more |