Portside

Socialist thought is re-emerging at the forefront of the movement for global ecological and social change. In the face of the planetary emergency, theorists have unearthed a powerful ecological critique of capitalism at the foundations of Marx's materialist conception of history. This has led to a more comprehensive conception of socialism rooted in Marx's analysis of the rift in "the universal metabolism of nature" and his vision of sustainable human development.

This ethnographic study of America's gun culture focuses on Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and it both confirms and challenges aspects of received wisdom about our country and our firearms.

Like the people within, immigrant detention centers are often invisible as well. Photos and drawings of these places are rarely public; access is even more limited. Canada has three designated immigrant prisons, and it also rents beds in government-run prisons to house over one-third of its detainees. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention begins to strip away at this invisibility.

Here is a necessary addition to the literature on FBI harassment of Americans and on U.S. social movements over the last century.

If you're looking for something special for the holiday table, Meg Favreau has some suggestions from her collection of 1970s and 1980s locally printed cookbooks. These books, she says, are "a window into what communities actually eat – not the idealized version of the area’s cuisine you see in a “real” regional cookbook." Recipes for eggless applesauce squares, the "ribsticker," and gumdrop bread can be found on the article's original website.

The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren't sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. M15 spied on Doris Lessing for 20 years, declassified documents reveal. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives.

Is contemporary altruism the new activism? Or is it what writer Teju Cole once called an iteration of a "White Savior Industrial Complex"? Ashley Karlin takes up these complicated questions in this review of Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, by scientist-turned-Buddhist philosopher Matthieu Ricard. The answers, she suggests, may have as much to do with questions of power as with the desire to do good.

Portside is proud to bring our readers a full chapter from the book Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Periodically Portside will be sharing with our readers chapters and excerpts from books we feel are noteworthy. What better way to launch, than a book about socialism-in the USA. Ron Reosti's chapter - A Democratically Run Economy Can Replace the Oligarchy - argues we can democratically design and control an economy that satisfies the needs and desires of the people.

This new book traces the antiwar work of visual artists in the United States over the last eighty years. Paul Buhle offers some useful context for understanding this widely varied scope of creative activity as it ranged from antifascist paintings and murals to the poster art of the Vietnam War years to the politically engaged art of the current era.

In any case, union contracts and the working conditions they codify are the current compromise between labor and capital in any given workplace. With or without a contract, workers will have to struggle. Staughton Lynd doesn't seem to consider the possibility that some workers may not be looking for constant class warfare on the job, and that settling a decent contract offers a much needed respite to lock-in gains.