Hugo Blanco is an inspiration to revolutionary ecosocialists. Born in Cusco, once capital of Tawantinsuyuand now in Peru, in 1934, his first struggles were school protests. He travelled to Argentina, where he abandoned university to work in a meat-packing factory in La Plata, and his encounter with the Fourth International eventually led him back to Peru where he became a factory and then peasant organiser.
Returns of Marxism: Marxist Theory in a Time of Crisis
18 July 2018, byThis rich collection was initially published in 2014 by the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE), which opened in Amsterdam in 1982. One of the founding Fellows of IIRE was Ernest Mandel. The book is edited by Sara R. Farris, who teaches sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Political education: someone’s done it better
11 July 2018, byReview of David Camfield, We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society, Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017, 168 pp., $25 Canadian
Transnational Solidarity on the Gay and Lesbian Left: An Interview With Emily Hobson
1 June 2018, by ,Aaron Lecklider: The title of your book is Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Could you tell us a bit about what the book is about and in particular what the relationship is between liberation, solidarity, and sexuality?
Merry Month of May: A Firsthand History of ’68 France
23 May 2018, byWhere are the riots of yesteryear?
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the wave of radical revolts and revolutionary uprisings that startled the world in 1968 and which, although ultimately crushed by the forces of reaction that dominate the world to this day, left in its wake rights so fundamental that we tend to take them for granted — sexual freedom, civil rights, women’s’ equality. Yet a half-century later these hard-won liberties are under attack and people are once again rising to defend them.
A guide for a future 68
22 May 2018, byThe 1968 political events did not last just a few months as some commentators want us to believe in an attempt to strip them of any relationship with what happened before or after. The Hot Autumn was not an improvised explosion but the result of a combination of structural factors and the rise of a new consciousness. It was linked to the social and cultural transformations caused by the modernising processes of a society that was rapidly changing, from an economic structure that was prevalently agricultural to an industrial one. It resulted in a deep-going mixing of the population due to the internal migration of millions of people from the south to the north of Italy.
Is Fascism Inevitable?
20 May 2018, bySince the global financial crisis in 2007-8, and the consequent anti-capitalist mobilisations like the Occupy! movement and the struggle against austerity in Greece, there have been a series of books arguing for major reforms to capitalism.
Making Gaza “Uninhabitable”: A Requiem
9 April 2018, byNorman Finkelstein’s lifetime of scholar-activism includes a long record of skewering highly acclaimed pundits and propagandists of the “pro-Israel” and media establishments. His first target was the fraudulent “demographic study” of Mandate Palestine by Joan Peters, purporting that the Arab population were newcomers attracted by Zionist economic development. Finkelstein’s demonstration of this fakery was published in his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
History From Below
7 April 2018, byLeon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution remains a singular work of Marxist historiography. Written by one of its leading participants, Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution was completed in 1930, with Trotsky recently exiled from Russia and living in Turkey.
This Land Is Our Land
6 April 2018, byBetween 1922 and 1925 my great-uncle, the journalist Najib Nassar, rode on horseback throughout Mandate Palestine and the newly created country of Transjordan. He published his observations as a series of letters in Al-Karmil, the weekly newspaper he edited in Haifa. In a number of these letters Najib voiced his fears about the fate of Palestinian farmers, especially in the north of the country, where absentee Arab landowners were selling their large estates to new institutions of the burgeoning Zionist movement.
