Literature

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Cover Art for the book Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions A few weeks ago the writer April Henry unearthed a sobering factoid buried in the tonnage of documents amassed in the case that blocked the merger of two giant publishing houses (Penguin and Simon and Schuster): over the last few years half of the newly published trade titles sold fewer than 12 copies. Most of them, I assume, were books about Donald Trump. Every political pundit seems to have written one. Some have written more than one. It’s hard to comprehend the mind that craves these books–not Trump’s MAGA-minions, surely. They seem content to snap up his super-hero NFTs at $99 a pop. Most likely they’re marketed at liberals, people who couldn’t wait for him to leave the scene and n...

BY EVAGGELOS VALLIANATOS Humanity at a crossroad In 2020, a UN report (Global Biodiversity Outlook 5) warned: “Humanity stands at a crossroads with regard to the legacy it leaves to future generations. Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, and the pressures driving this decline are intensifying. None of the… Biodiversity Targets will be fully met…The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the importance of the relationship between people and nature, and it reminds us all of the profound consequences to our own well-being and survival that can result from continued biodiversity loss and the degradation of ecosystems.” This partly garbled message is telling us that humans are dangerous and largely stupid creatures. They keep increasing in numbers while they ...

By Suad Amiry, Pantheon Books, 2022, hardcover, 344 pp. MEB $27 Reviewed by Ida Audeh SUAD AMIRY’S first work of fiction is nominally a story of thwarted teenage romance told against the backdrop of the fall of Jaffa and the surrounding villages in 1948, when Israel was created and Palestine was violently dismembered. The narrative covers a four-year period beginning in June 1947, as tensions were building in the period before the end of the British Mandate, and ending in 1951, with the Palestinians who remained in Jaffa corralled into a ghetto trying to find their way as an unwanted minority in a triumphalist Jewish state.  Mother of Strangers describes graphically one of the consequences of forcible exile during war—not only the (obvious) loss of home and town...

What is to be done? – presentation by Ella Rule of Lenin’s pamphlet to a CPGB-ML study school on 27 October 2022 The main thrust of Lenin’s pamphlet What is to be Done? is to define in broad terms how revolutionaries should do their work if they want to succeed in mobilising the masses of the people for proletarian revolution.  Most of the pamphlet is devoted to lambasting the variety of opportunism he called ‘Economism’, and contrasting the type of work that revolutionaries should be doing as opposed to what this type of opportunist considers appropriate.  He then goes on to explain how important a national newspaper is both for imparting information, raising class consciousness among the workers and helping to forge a centralised revolutionary organisation...

Fullerton As seen in: The Guardian, ZDNet, Lexology, BiometricUpdate.com, American Machinist, TabbFORUM, The Global Treasurer, Hi-Tech Security Solutions, Classic American Exposing Neo-conservatives (Neo-Trotskyites), Iranian Communist MEK (MKO, PMOI, NCRI, Rajavi Cult, or Pol Pot of Iran) terrorists, Zionists, Christian Zionists. Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work. Claim your profile BACK TO PAUL SHELDON FOOTE’S PROFILE ARTICLES BY PAUL SHELDON FOOTE Shelby Mustang - Classic American A YEAR AGO  |   By Paul Sheldon Foote   |  C...

BY PAUL STREET Recently The Nation published an interview with the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian that first appeared on TomDispatch.com.  Below I write up some critical reflections expanded from my notes in the margins of my print-off of this interview. They are I hope instructive on some of what distinguishes a modestly accomplished revolutionary Marxist (myself) from a legendary left thinker who identifies as a workerist left anarchist and tends towards social democratic reform in real world/real time politics. There is much in the interview that I agree with, of course, and I was struck (as always) by the precision and eloquence of Noam’s prose, reflections of a magnificent mind at work. For what’s it’s worth, it has l...

Following the pandemic, the whole world is finding itself in a situation of economic chaos.  Living standards of working people are falling precipitously almost everywhere in the world.  Countries such as Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Ghana are already bankrupt and unable to purchase essentials needed by their populations – medicine, food and energy especially. In Britain, things are also very bad, though not as bad as they are in most countries of the world.  Prices have gone through the roof, while wages, even in a time of relatively full employment are in no way keeping up with inflation.  The government is reducing expenditure on public services in order to reduce its borrowing requirements, while simultaneously increasing taxation on the working populat...