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Movie | The Young Karl Marx

Haitian Raoul Peck ('I Am Not Your Negro') directs an indie biopic that narrates the early stormy development of communism through the prism of the Marx-Engels partnership. In select theaters.

The Forgotten World of Communist Bookstores

Joshua Clark Davis Jacobin
Communist bookstores provided a critical public space for radicals, operating in virtually every major American city. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had several apiece. Smaller and ostensibly less radical locales such as Birmingham, Houston, and Omaha, had communist bookstores, too. Some radical bookstores operate today. Venture into one of these shops in which left bookstores helped customers envision radical worlds that were often otherwise unimaginable in America

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Memories of Struggle and Despair in the Philippines

Alex de Jong New Politics
For three decades, eight members of the Quimpo family dedicated themselves to the anti-Marcos resistance in the Philippines, sometimes at profound personal cost. In this memoir, they tell stories that comprise a family saga of revolution, persistence, and, ultimately, vindication, even as easy resolution eluded them. The authors are also critical of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its rural-based strategy of protracted people’s war.

Xi, Trump and Rising China in the World

Duncan McFarland Portside
This fall the Chinese Communist Party holds its Nineteenth Party Congress. The US-China relationship is one of considerable global importance on several levels: political, economic and the situation of socialism and the international working class. Trump in his presidential campaign adopted a very hostile anti-China tone. However, after Trump assumed power, he changed; his actions towards China proved largely a continuation of established policy. Why did this happen?

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Red Dawn: On China Miéville’s Urgent Retelling of the Russian Revolution

Alci Rengifo Los Angeles Review of Books
China Miéville looks at the Revolution as a hopeful flashpoint that briefly showed the promise of socialist transformation, before descending first into an authoritarian nightmare and then today's corrupt capitalism. Written with an urgency designed for our era of struggle absent clear political ideologies or unified mass socialist organizations, Mieville focuses on the revolutionary moment, using his skill as a story teller to see the participants in real time.

The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism

Sarah Jaffe New York Times
The Communist Party U.S.A. had its greatest successes as the country reeled from the Depression. Today, as we are still picking our way out of the rubble left by the crash of 2008, left-wing ideas have gained new purchase.

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Antonio Gramsci Jr: On Remembering His Grandfather

Antonio Gramsci, Jr. New Left Review
Through the use of family archives and other new sources, the grandson of Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci seeks to reconstruct the cultural and political saliance of his grandfather's contributions to building and defending the Italian working class movement and international socialism in the face of Stalinist distortions, capitalist enmity and today's reactionary Russian regime.

The Life and Times of Karl Marx, in the words of Ronnie Kasrils

Ronnie Kasrils Daily Maverick (South Africa)
What fashioned Marx, Marxist theories and challenges faced in South Africa. Essential today is an international solidarity movement uniting the broad masses of people of all lands under the leadership of organized labor, of hand and brain, to stop the perfidious transnational corporations, their government tools, and capitalism's imperialist wars - towards a new internationalism of the working class, labor masses, and freedom loving people everywhere.

Tidbits - May 12, 2016 - Reader Comments: Contested Convention Needed; #BernieorBust" Dead End; Left and 2016; Baldwin; Shakespeare; Israel and BDS; Panama Papers Database....

Portside
Reader Comments: Contested Convention is Needed; and "#BernieorBust" Dead End; The Left in 2016; Stopping Israel's Occupation and BDS; Israel as the Last Remaining, Active Settler-Colonialist Project; Who's Afraid of Communism - Paul Buhle comments; Teamster and Other Multi-Employer Pension Plans; Teacher Challenges Low Evaluation in Court and Wins; Baldwin; Shakespeare; James Connolly - appreciated today; Just Released - Panama Papers Database...

Whatever Happened to Eastern European Communism?

Joan Roelofs Counterpunch
“[In Bulgaria] after 1989 there was [a] group of British experts who came to give advice on democracy. . . . There was a man in this delegation who warned me about the baby in the bath. He saw what was going to happen. There were a lot of good things that were achieved by socialism, but we threw the baby out in the water.” “Veneta”
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