In the introduction to his latest book historian Gerald Horne makes clear the consequences of European settlement in the Americas:
“Though disease spread by these interlopers is often trotted out to explain the spectacular downturn in the fortunes of indigenous Americans, genocide – in virtually every meaning of the term, including volitional acts by invading settlers – is the proximate cause of this towering mountain of cadavers. Thus, even when enslaved Africans chose suicide, which they were often forced to do, it would be follow to suggest that enslavers were guiltless….” | more…

Allen Ruff, a host of A Public Affair on radio station WORT (89.9FM, Madison, WI), interviews the irrepressible African-American historian Gerald Horne, author of numerous titles exploring the centrality of race and class for understanding the contemporary world. His most recent book is The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean | more…

Ecosocialism is often seen as something of throwaway buzzword on the left, with some commenting that today’s left, which at least acknowledges that environmental concerns are essential part of the criticism of capitalism today, doesn’t even need it. Ian Angus, a writer of books such as Facing the Anthropocene and Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis (Haymarket Books 2011), with Simon Butler, and maintainer of the blog Climate and Capitalism, feels that it is a term that means much more than just a passing nod of one movement to another….  | more…

Unlike such obvious forms of oppression as feudalism or slavery, capitalism has been able to survive through its genius for disguising corporate profit imperatives as opportunities for individual human equality and advancement. But it was the genius of Karl Marx, in his masterwork, Capital, to discover the converse law of surplus value: behind the illusion of the democratic, supply-and-demand marketplace, lies the workplace, where people trying to earn a living are required to work way beyond the time it takes to pay their wages…. | more…

Billions of people around the world are drinking water contaminated with plastic…. We’ve been warned about the impact of capitalist production on natural processes for a long time. In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, insisted that the principal causes of ecological degradation, were ‘the gods of profit and production’ served by a cabal within industry, government and academia which betrayed the cause of scientific truth… | more…

‘Ecosocialism needs Marx,’ Kohei Saito once wrote. In Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Saito shows why. Saito is associate professor of political economy at Osaka City University in Japan. In 2015, he earned a PhD in philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin and spent time as a guest researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities where he contributes to the editing of Marx’s natural science notebooks…. | more…

Gerald Horne, author of the recently published The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, talks with Nellie Bailey of Black Agenda Report about the ways that Blacks and Native Americans share a history of enslavement at the hands of European settlers. | more…

Helena Sheehan, author of the recent The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left, and Seamus Sweeney, a “recovering academic,” who has written about the representation of Baltimore in the work of David Simon, recently collaborated on an article for Jacobin about how the decade-old TV series, The Wire, was a Marxist’s idea of what TV drama should be… | more…

Whether from early years experiments in painting, or from later, more mature experiences in art classes, one thing will most probably be clear to all of us—the result of mixing red and green pigments can only be called ‘sludge’… or, perhaps more prosaically, khaki… | more…

In 2001, as a Green Party candidate in the general election, I was invited onto local radio to debate with the Socialist Alliance candidate. The interviewer, as it turned out, was hoping for a no-holds-barred ideological battle and was most disappointed when we candidates found ourselves agreeing with each other on every question he put. ‘You’re a green and he’s a socialist,’ he complained. ‘You’re not supposed to be on the same side!’ ¶ In this, he was reflecting a view then some twenty years in the making, that socialism was inherently anti-ecological… | more…