Tidbits - April 20, 2017 - Reader Comments: Syria Catastrophe; Day Without Immigrants; Montana Special Election; Trump, McCarthyism, and Russian Hacking; Combating climate change resources; Journey to Palestine and Israel; and more...

Portside
Reader Comments: Syria Catastrophe - Who Benefits?; A Day Without Immigrants - Hundreds Of Thousands Will Strike May 1; Montana Special Election; Trump, McCarthyism, and Russian Hacking; Portside's Culture posts; Resources: Combating climate change; New book - In the Fields of the North; Announcements: Rana Plaza film showings; Sarah Jaffe on American Activists; Women Fight the Islamic State; Marx's Capital-after 150 Years; Journey to Palestine and Israel; and more...

Hopsopoly. Global beer mergers reach a new level.

Rob Larson Dollars and Sense
Raising consciousness about capitalism’s predations, even in beer, could encourage a movement to socialize brewing. In a democratically managed economic system, the freewheeling ethos of the microbrew movement would be free to flourish without being blackballed out of the market by the majors, or bought out if they manage to succeed. Now that would be a happy hour!

film

Marx on the Silver Screen

Bruno Leopold Jacobin
Raol Peck's attention to historical detail characterizes the film as a whole, and testifies to the clearly loving amount of research that went into making it. The result is an entertaining and surprisingly funny portrait of the young Karl Marx as the film follows Marx and Friedrich Engels and their joint struggle against various other contemporary socialist leaders, culminating in their collaboration on the Communist Manifesto.

books

Does Gareth Stedman Jones Inflate or Deflate Marx's Heritage?

Alex Callinicos International Socialism
The reviewer faults the book's author for deflating both Marx's and the author's own earlier stance as a creative British Marxist historian of the working class. While the reviewer grants that Jones offers solid accounts of developments in the British working class movement and in European radical politics that made the First International possible, he faults Jones for relying on a narrow reading of Marx's political economy at the expense of its revolutionary core.

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.

books

The Radicalism of Shelley

Matthew Cookson rs21 - revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.

F*** a Wage, Take Over the Business: A How-To with Economist Richard Wolff

Andrew Smolski / Richard D. Wolff Counterpunch
This interview discusses wages, the struggle for $15/hr, stagnating worker incomes, and TPP’s attack on wages in the US and develops into a much broader critique of the current system’s political economy, a way to fundamentally alter the way we produce, distribute, and consume. It is not enough to bargain with capitalists. We must instead look to how workers can take over the means of production and employ them for the benefit and wellbeing of all.

books

They Stormed Heaven - Review of John Merriman's Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune

Ron Briley History News Network
Marx called it "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and its militants those who "stormed heaven." For 76 days in 1871, this first experiment in workers self-government and armed defense against troops of the old order also made costly mistakes leading to its slaughter. The author chronicles not only Commune governance and the role of women as leaders and fighters, but the intricacies of a counter-revolution that sought nothing less than crushing Paris' working class.

books

‘Eleanor Marx,’ a life of an early feminist and Karl Marx’s daughter

Rachel Holmes The Washington Post
Eleanor Marx Aveling, the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, was renowned in her time as a revolutionary activist and champion of modern culture and literature. Julia M. Klein takes a look at a new biography of this once famous, but now little-known, figure.
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