Ben Debney The centenary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 represents a unique moment for historical remembrance and celebrated, the event in question a momentous episode in the history of working-class struggle and a beacon of hope for anyone who has ever dared to dream of a […]
By Matt Taibbi It is symptomatic of the underlying tenor of American life that vulgar terms for sexual intercourse also convey the sense of getting the better of someone, working him over, taking him in, imposing your will through guile, deception, or superior force. — Christopher Lasch, The […]
by Don Fitz Cuban blood left its stamp on the conscience of the world after the Angolan Wars of 1975-1988. Corporate politicians are united in their desire for us to ignore this reality. * * * Fed up with foreign wars, Portuguese officers overthrew Prime Minister Marcello Caetano […]
By Flint Taylor &Jeff Haas, Truthout In March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the families of slain […]
At no point in the last 50 years has there been as much political conflict in the US as there is today. And while the conflicts of the 1960s/1970s may have been just as intense, or more intense in some instances, the situation then was qualitatively different because […]
Stanley Payne is an expert on the Spanish Civil War and on 20th-century fascism. He describes the events leading to the Spanish Civil War. By Stanley G. Payne, First Things The classic theory of revolution was formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed in The Ancien Régime and […]
Listen here. Travel back to the very birth of fascism in this episode about the March on Rome. You’ll learn how the first trailblazing fascist dictator took power and destroyed a democracy. There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a […]
My general take on the Chicago Seven and anti-Vietnam War riots is that mob action in resistance to the Vietnam War was not extreme enough. If the US had been dissolved into, say, 50 independent nations in 1970 (like the independent nations of Latin America) we wouldn’t have […]
Deja vu! No one ever does anything different anymore. Tells the story of the hardhat riot, which no book has focused on before Draws from nearly two dozen boxes of NYPD records that were sealed for almost a half-century, effectively buried by city officials until now Combines archival […]
Listen here. On this edition of Parallax Views, C. Derick Varn of Zero Books makes his triumphant return to the program by providing a history lesson on the idea that “politics is downstream from culture” from the idea of cultural hegemony by the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci […]
From left: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey. by Don Fitz The May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked a civil rights explosion. It ignited pushes to demilitarize the police, reallocate police over-funding to necessary social services, end economic and power divides, and replace […]
An interesting interview with a former leader of the Weather Underground. The Ground Up United The GroundUp has a conversation with Mark Rudd, organizer, anti-war activist and counter-culture icon known for his involvement in the irregular military organization the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). TGU: What were the WUO’s […]
Dreher references a reader who draws an analogy between current events and the Spanish Civil War. It’s always possible to make comparisons between historical parallels that have some relation to each other, but I tend to think a “Civil War Two” in the USA would be more like […]
By Jordan Alexander Hill, Quillette In mid-November, just two weeks after one of the most contentious elections in American history, Democratic National Committee member David Atkins took to Twitter. “No seriously… how *do* you deprogram 75 million people?” he wondered, sounding more like a member of the Politburo […]
By Jean-Marie Rouart, TELOS In the face of a very real Islamist threat that has led to violence and which the proposed law on “separatism” attempts to address, it is interesting to try to raise the level of the debate. It is necessary to inquire calmly into a […]
This is the Wikipedia description of the Powell Memorandum described in the Sam Sedar video in the post adjacent to this one. It is particularly interesting to compare the Powell Memorandum with the Dutton Strategy that was developed at precisely the same time. In many ways, Powell defined […]
Some fairly interesting commentary on modern American cultural history in this. One thing I often find interesting is the way in which the rhetoric of the socially conservative “right” and the progressive liberal “left” frequently mirror each other. Social conservatives tend to be nostalgic for the social mores […]
By Jeff Groom, The American Conservative Over the holiday weekend the United States turned 244 years old. Time flies. But is this old for a nation? Do nations have lifespans like organisms? Aren’t ideas and principles immortal? It’s natural to speak of our nation as something that will […]
This is ridiculous. China is about a century behind the West in terms of its economic development. In the past few decades, they’ve merely gone from being a Fourth World country to a Third World one in terms of living standards for most people. The only thing “socialist” […]
Evidence shows that the globalization frenzy of the post-Cold War period is in the process of receding. US hegemony is declining due to 20 years of military defeats in imperial adventures. The percentage of US GDP devoted to military production has declined, along with the volume of US […]
It’s certainly not surprising that Israel and the USA have such a “special relationship” given that both have similar origins as settler states committed to expansion through genocide. Indian Country A time when Natives and ancestral homelands were under attack captured in images All of these images were […]
If Peter Zeihan’s analysis and forecasts concerning the future of the unipolar order are at all correct, my predictions about the future of geopolitics were even more accurate than I previously thought. I’ve generally thought that globalization would eventually produce a global state system, which would require a […]
A lot of people don’t realize how violent labor conflicts could be in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Rap Brown once said, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” By Loren Balhorn, The Jacobin On Christmas Eve in 1913, a pitched battle between organized labor and […]
By Iain MacSoarsa This article analyses Lysander Spooner’s ideas and their relationship to Libertarian capitalist ideas and libertarian socialist (ie anarchist) ideas. It is partly based on my own research and an article I found on a newsgroup. The article included in this essay was originally posted by […]
This is a pretty good overview of the interrelationship between the environment, economics, geopolitics, and technology.
Bakunin had it figured out 150 years ago.
An interesting critique of anarchism from a medievalist, throne and altar, Eastern Orthodox perspective. It’s always interesting and a good plan to see what “the other side” has to say. Btw, folks, this is what true conservatism looks like, not the know-nothing shit being dished out by FOX […]
This is a pretty good overview of what socialism actually is, its history, and what socialists actually believe. I agree with much of this (in terms of the article’s historical and factual accuracy) but disagree with certain parts. For example, I wouldn’t refer to the Soviet/Chinese model as […]
By Ruth Kinna It’s no surprise to discover that anarchist theorist Pyotr Kropotkin was interested in Christmas. In Russian culture, St. Nicholas (Николай Чудотворец) was revered as a defender of the oppressed, the weak and the disadvantaged. Kropotkin shared the sentiments. But there was also a family link. […]
This is a must-watch. On today’s episode, Joel Kotkin, Executive Director of Urban Reform Institute and author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, discusses how do we confront neo-feudalism today, in conversation with Andrew Keen on the Keen On podcast..
Being an anarchist, I have a natural morbid curiosity about the functioning of statecraft. I follow politics in the same way someone might drive very slowly past the scene of some horrific accident so as not to miss the sight of even one mangled limb. But perhaps even […]
The role of Maoism in the development of PC culture is often overlooked. Much of the blame is often laid at the feet of the Frankfurt School, particularly Marcuse’s idea of “repressive tolerance,” along with the “language as power” thesis of the postmodernists. Obviously, those have been influences […]
Todd Lewis is joined by Keith Preston, Swithun Dobson, and Terminal Philosophy to discuss the originals of the Neoliberal world order’s origins in the post-war era.
Anarchist Paul Goodman taking on the educationists in 1966.
An interview with William F. Buckley from 1967.
CWM’s interviews from 1971.
1970s interview.
The postwar West was a historically unique time of unprecedented economic expansion, technological development, and economic reforms that allowed the working class to live like an upper middle class. All of that is disappearing now, and we’re becoming “normal” societies once again with traditional levels of social stratification. […]
American partisanship and “culture war” psychology actually have very little to do with 20th century European and Asian totalitarianism, which has never had more than very marginal influence in the US, and everything to do with historic American traditions. The Red Tribe/Blue Tribe battle is reminiscent of conflicts […]
Does any of this seem familiar? Nothing new under the sun. “The Federalists favored a strong central government and close relations with Great Britain. The Democratic-Republicans favored decentralization to the state governments, and the party attacked the taxes imposed by the Federalists. The Democratic-Republicans also denounced the Alien […]
By John Lauritis In 2015, studies estimate that US renters paid $535 billion to landlords in residential rents. To put this in perspective, $535 billion is about enough to give $15,000 to every human being in the US state of California. It would also be enough to replace […]
Unlike many people, I do not lament the “divisiveness” and “polarization” we have in US politics today. I grew up in the USA where guys like Reagan and Nixon could get reelected with 49 of 50 states. Sorry, folks, but I don’t miss that. By Ethan Gach America’s […]
We need to get more rogueish. By Mark Bauerlein, The American Conservative “In America, you can be anything you want.” So a French friend of mine said when I asked how America looked to her and her friends in Paris. I was curious about the French attitude toward […]
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 counts as one of the most reprehensible laws in American history. But rather than wait for Congress to repeal it, or for the Supreme Court to strike it down, Northern States took action to nullify it in practice and effect.
An interesting discussion that challenges Branch Covidian orthodoxy. Tom Woods interview Jay Bhattacharya. Listen here. Jay Bhattacharya (MD, PhD, Stanford) is a professor of medicine at Stanford University who has been working both on the epidemiology of COVID-19 as well as the appropriate policy response. He is a […]
World War Two was a long way from being the “just war” or “good war” it is often claimed to be even by many who are otherwise antiwar. World War One was a catfight between the colonialist powers that left many colonialist countries in shambles and created the […]
This is what happens to folks the state regards as a genuine threat. By Courtney Kueppers, Bianca Martin WBEZ, Chicago Fifty-one years ago, Chicago police officers killed Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther party. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd this […]
Fraudci’s career of incompetence. By Ann Montague, Socialist Action Today Dr. Fauci is well known as a trusted scientist who is trying to guide the country through a pandemic. All the polls say over 80% of the people in this country see him as the most reliable spokesperson […]
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson
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