Metabolic rift theory can deepen our understanding of the human microbiota—organisms living on and inside of humans—and the ways that capitalism has disrupted these microbial ecosystems, with serious consequences for our health. | more…
During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and antiwar protests in the United States. While activists, workers, and students in western Europe and the United States confronted existing institutions of capitalism and imperialism, Cuba faced the even greater challenge of building a new society. | more…
In October 2016, cities across Poland were seized by massive demonstrations against proposals for a total ban on abortion. Whatever their ultimate outcome, the protests prove that mass mobilizations are possible in today’s Poland, and that the right’s political and cultural hegemony may yet be more fragile than it appears. | more…
Building on Marx’s own open-ended critique, three revolutionary new developments have recently arisen in Marxist theory, addressing social reproduction, the expropriation of nature, and racial capitalism. | more…
From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans and Native Americans were enslaved and traded by European settlers in the Americas. This story of slavery, colonialism, and emerging capitalism—and their handmaiden, white supremacy—is integral to that of modernity itself. | more…
Forthcoming in March 2018
“I’ve still got my health so what do I care?” goes a lyric in an old Cole Porter song. Most of us, in fact, assume we can’t live full lives, or take on life’s challenges, without also assuming that we’re basically healthy and will be for the foreseeable future. But these days, our health and well-being are sorted through an ever-expanding, profit-seeking financial complex that monitors, controls, and commodifies our very existence. Given that our access to competent, affordable health care grows more precarious each day, the arrival of Health Care Under the Knife could not be more timely. In this empowering book, noted health-care professionals, scholars, and activists—including coordinator Howard Waitzkin—impart their inside knowledge of the medical system: what’s wrong, how it got this way, and what we can do to heal it. | more…
The pharmaceutical industry has been enormously profitable for many decades. The myth is that these windfalls are warranted by the therapeutic advances made by pharmaceutical companies—but the reality is far different. | more…
Virtually no part of the modern United States—the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements—can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” | more…
Sara Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights is a brave monograph that analyzes the way that the discourses of Europe’s right-wing nationalists, government agencies, and liberal feminists converge in their representations of Muslim and non-western immigrant women, relegating these communities to commodified spheres of social reproductive work. | more…
Amid deep disparities between states, the act of moving across borders becomes a way of re-politicizing the very idea of states, borders, and nations—concepts that have for centuries been taken for granted and excluded from debate. | more…
is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit. | more…
Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality—as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump’s moral and political emergency—and to resist it. | more…
The groups fighting white supremacy in Charlottesville and elsewhere represent a cross-section of the U.S. left, from socialists to communists to anarchists. Together, they affirm that to combat the new right-wing resurgence, it is necessary to combat capitalism itself. | more…
The neoliberal export-oriented strategy has done enormous damage to Africa’s human development, gender equity, and natural environment. Reversing this project is the major challenge for Africans who resist injustice, through which they can build solidarity with the rest of the world’s oppressed peoples. | more…
Class conflict, from both below and above, has long shaped the history of housing in Britain. These struggles continue today, as the ravages of neoliberalism have forced public housing once again onto the agenda in the United Kingdom. | more…
Gaining Independence in 1975, Mozambique’s government proclaimed a progressive approach toward women’s liberation, seeing it as essential for the continued success of the revolution. Stephanie J. Urdang, who traveled often to Mozambique, examines women’s status there ten years later, talking with women in factories and fields, village co-operatives, and state farms. Urdang produces an inspiring yet sobering picture of how African women continued to struggle for their survival and their liberation. Drawing on scholarly research as well as first-hand investigation, And Still They Dance says much about the daily lives of women living in independent Mozambique after the revolution. | more…
Consider the child with curly brown / hair sleeping with her dog in the back / of an old SUV while her parents doze / in scruffy front seats tilted back.…
U.S. immigration has been the subject of furious debates for decades. On one side, politicians and the media talk about aliens and criminals, with calls to “deport them all.” On the other side, some advocates idealize immigrants and gloss over problems associated with immigration. Dialogue becomes possible when we dig deeper and ask tough questions: Why are people in other countries leaving their homes and coming here? What does it mean to be “illegal”? How do immigration raids, prisons, and border walls impact communities? Who suffers and who profits from our current system—and what would happen if we transformed it? | more…
The fact that alt-right figures are playing key roles in the Trump administration, while circumventing the Senate confirmation process, is an ominous indication of the wider effort by the administration to construct a new political order, further concentrating power in the White House and bringing the rest of the state into line. | more…
In an idyllic canyon near Santiago, a group of twelve women were electric with emotion from sharing personal stories and experiences, and, of course, from singing. Deep bonds were forged among participants, few of whom knew each other prior to the workshop. They were there to compose women-identified songs in a setting that alternated between individual and group composition. | more…