Literature Archives - Page 15 of 55

“Reading Capital with Comrades” podcast: a fresh, accessible, interactive, and revolutionary reading of Marx’s great work

2May

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, Politics

“Reading Capital with Comrades” podcast: a fresh, accessible, interactive, and revolutionary reading of Marx’s great work

Jeremy Algate Download PDF flyer Listen to the podcast on Liberation School, Spotify or Soundcloud! Marx published the first volume of Capital in 1867 after pouring over a decade of his life into writing it and another decade researching political economy. The book is more than an endurance challenge or a purely intellectual milestone. “Reading Capital with Comrades,” a new podcast from Liberation School, demonstrates that understanding the theoretical basis of Marxism is crucial for organizers and revolutionaries who want to move beyond isolated struggles and reforms within capitalism. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution. “The point of the series is to make Capital accessible to broad numbers of workers...

Leading Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti dies aged 77

26Apr

By Shoah - The Palestinian HolocaustNo Comments

Literature, Palestine Affairs

Leading Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti dies aged 77

Mourid Barghouti was a long-serving representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He was born four years before the state of Israel was created in a village near Ramallah. He spent much of his life in one form or other of exile - which he recounted in the memoir I Saw Ramallah that won him an international audience. The memoir was described by his fellow Palestinian writer Edward Said as one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement. Born in 1944, Barghouti was studying in the Egyptian capital Cairo when the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out. He did not return to his birthplace for another 30 years. His sense of being forever uprooted was examined in I Saw Ramallah but also in many of the poems he published in 12 collections as he moved bet...

Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial CapitalismThe rentier resurgence and takeover

8Feb

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Politics

Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial CapitalismThe rentier resurgence and takeover

MICHAEL HUDSON Summary[1a] Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism – the landlords, bankers and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. But that reform movement failed. Today, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies. The aim of this post-industrial finance capitalism is the opposite of that of industrial capitalism as known to 19th-century economists: It seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent not industrial capital formation. Tax favoritism for real estate, privatization of oil and mineral extraction, banking and infrastructure monopol...

Insulting Islam: an Encore for Charlie Hebdo

13Dec

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature

Insulting Islam: an Encore for Charlie Hebdo

BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON Photograph Source: Pk4wp – CC BY-SA 4.0 In mid-October 2020 a French schoolteacher, 47-year-old Samuel Paty, decided to show his Freedom of Speech class cartoons demeaning Islam’s founding prophet, Mohammed. The cartoons were the same ones originally published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) in 2014-2015. At that time, the magazine’s actions resulted in the murder of twelve of its staff, including the editor, Stephane Charbonnier. The murders were committed by Muslim extremists associated with al-Qaeda. Samuel Paty’s fate turned out to be similar. Shortly after having shown the caricatures of the founder of Islam, the teacher was murdered by an 18-year-old Muslim immigrant. Other attacks have followed. In all of these c...

Guardian-Friendly Omissions – ‘This Land’

8Nov

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Politics, United Kingdom

Guardian-Friendly Omissions – ‘This Land’

In his latest book, ‘This Land – The Story of a Movement’ (Penguin, ebook version, 2020), the Guardian’s Owen Jones charts the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn. Jones depicts Corbyn as a ‘scruffy,’ (p.8), ‘unkempt’ (p.50), thoroughly shambolic backbench MP, ‘the most unlikely’ (p.50) of contenders for the Labour leadership. In May 2015, Corbyn reluctantly dipped his toe in the water of the leadership contest, saying: ‘You better make fucking sure I don’t get elected’ (p.54), only to be swept away on a tide of popular support. As this suggests, Jones argues that while Corbyn was indeed relentlessly savaged by forces both inside and outside the Labour Party – including the ‘mainstream’ media, with ‘profound hostility’ from ‘the publicly funded, professedly impartial’ BBC (p.68) – he wa...

16Oct

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Palestine Affairs

I Found Myself in Palestine

Book Editor(s) :Nora Lester MuradPublished Date :April 2020Publisher :Olive Branch Press (Imprint of Interlink Publishing)Paperback :174 pagesISBN-13 :9781623719159 Ramona Wadi walzerscent It is rare that we come across writings of how people identify with Palestine. Zionist colonisation has created both a displaced population and a contradiction in terms of affinity and belonging. I Found Myself in Palestine (Olive Branch Press, 2020) is a collection of narratives that explores the concept of being a foreigner in relation to Palestine, juxtaposed against the creation of the Palestinian people depicted as foreigners in their own land, as far as Israel’s colonial narrative is concerned. For Palestinians, the concept of foreignness has different meanings. As Mariam Bargho...

Housing and architecture in the Soviet Union

11Sep

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Russia

Housing and architecture in the Soviet Union

A variety of housing was built for working people designed to reflect the varied character, climate and context of the vast territories of the USSR. Katt Cremer View of Lenin Avenue in Sverdlovsk, 1936, showing the scale of the new town and the incorporation of public spaces lined with trees. This article is the second of two presentations to the Stalin Society. This contribution follows from my previous presentation, which looked at the sheer scale of the housing problem that the Bolsheviks faced after taking power in the October Revolution of 1917. We looked at how the Soviet Union embarked on tackling the problem, taking the task seriously from the first days of the revolution – nationalising large homes, redistributing living space to ...

11Sep

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Politics

Marxism in the 21st century: is it still relevant?

‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ -- Karl Marx Ranjeet Brar https://youtu.be/v8sqNwPUbB0 In this short video, leading communist Dr Ranjeet Brar speaks to a meeting held in 2018 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. It’s generally agreed, he says, that Karl Marx had a profound effect on the thinking of humanity. Even a BBC poll at the turn of the century pronounced Marx to be the greatest thinker of the millennium. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, workers were drowned in a deluge of capitalist triumphalism. In Germany, we watched Chancellor Cole hold up a copy of VI Lenin‘s Imperialism and Marx’s Capital before dramat...

Why Capitalism is in Constant Conflict With Democracy

28Aug

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Politics

Why Capitalism is in Constant Conflict With Democracy

by RICHARD D. WOLFF Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms. The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and opera...

Book: The Rise and Fall of Project Corbyn

23Aug

By SHOAHNo Comments

Literature, Politics, United Kingdom

Book: The Rise and Fall of Project Corbyn

What should British workers conclude from this four-year experiment in ‘reclaiming the Labour party for socialism’? Proletarian writers Download a digital copy of this pamphlet. Preorder a copy from our shop. Jeremy Corbyn was only included on the Labour party’s 2015 leadership election ballot to liven up the contest a little, but his insistence on championing the needs of workers and the marginalised at a time of deepening austerity, widening inequality and war sent a message of hope to the disenfranchised. A burst of socialist enthusiasm attracted a mass influx of members into his declining party and swept him to a thumping victory on a wave of ‘Corbynmania’. Initially struck dumb at this unexpected turn of events, the Labour party grandee...