Portside

Perry Anderson based his early Antonio Gramsci work on a reading of ruling class political hegemony based on consent. Now he insists that coercion is at history’s heart, a reading he also ascribes to Gramsci. Both propositions are overstated.

This poet's sixth collection offers aims helping us reflect on our difficult times. Hayes, an African American poet, wrote this new collection during the first 200 days of the Trump administration.

Reports of the forcible separation of parents and children at the border by U.S. immigration authorities tell only part of the story of the violence now being directed against hard-won norms of civil society.

This book describes the cultural wreckage that accompanied the rise of Christianity, thereby adding nuance to our inherited understanding of the origins of Europe's "dark ages."

Two Marxists associated with the left journal Monthly Review correspond in the years leading up to the publication of their magisterial Monopoly Capital. The reviewer calls the collection "fascinating for its details and quiet wisdom," grappling with a reconfigured empire that persists today.

This book shows how California recovered from the grim, racist 1990s by creating community and labor political coalitions that revitalized the state and put it on a problem-solving oriented, progressive path.

Situated in modern India, an Indian writer reflects on the still extant disparate roles of masters and slaves as parts of a vestigial system of imperial and racial capitalism, where to be a master was alleged to be a total provider, and to be a servant was not a job but a total identity.

Search engines aren't the innocent, objective tools they pretend to be. Instead, as author Safiya Umoja Noble argues: “They include decision-making protocols that favor corporate elites and the powerful, and they are implicated in global economic and social inequality.”

Tariq Ali, a key figure in the British New Left of the 1960s and a well-regarded Marxist writer and activist, offers an extended take on the politics and culture of the1968 anticapitalist movements and their echoes in today’s resistance worldwide.

The simple story of Cortés's evisceration of the the Aztecs is not so simple. In letters to Spain's King Carlos I, justifying morally Mexico’s occupation, Cortés distorted what was in fact a messy and confusing war involving several armies from already competing European nations. His lies linger.