The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolitionism by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen is a thorough and engaging new history of Black struggle in the US. However, its central argument, that all historic anti-racist struggles fit under the umbrella of anti-fascism, is theoretically flawed, and leads to bad organizing strategy and political defeat.
Primitive accumulation is the historical process through which capitalists stole their wealth or took it by force. Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus has contributed an excellent new book on this history, covering the violent transition from feudalism to capitalism in depth while demonstrating its continuing relevance to the modern world.
Israeli expat historian Ilan Pappé’s 2017 work of popular history is a landmark in anti-Zionist literature and a valuable weapon in our arsenal for countering the lies and distortions about Palestine perpetuated by Israel and the US. In its analysis of the disastrous 1993 “peace process” and the entrenchment of Israel’s genocidal policy in the occupied territories, it is particularly relevant in the current moment.
Andor is a breath of fresh air for the Star Wars franchise, and for television in general. A prequel to 2016’s Rogue One, the Disney+ series is unexpectedly one of the most compelling and gripping in memory. Its combination of dark, dystopian mood, wrenching suspense,...
Every year I teach an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. In the section in which we focus on socioeconomic class, I ask my students to read and interpret the famous first pages of the Communist Manifesto. These are the pages in which Marx and Engels broadly...