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Tidbits - Jan. 2, 2020 - Reader Comments: Finnish Govt Calls for 4-Day-Week; 2020 elections; Medicare for All; Britain's Labour Party; Du Bois and Marxist Schools; Jews in Iran; Watchmen; Renewable Energy; Anti-War Films On-line; Today in History;

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Reader Comments: Finnish Govt Calls for 4-Day-Week; 2020 elections; Medicare for All; Britain's Labour Party; Du Bois and the Jefferson School; Racism 2019; Jews in Iran; Watchmen; Renewable Energy; Anti-War Films On-line; Today in History; more...

Du Bois and the Jefferson School of Social Science

Denise Lynn Marxist Sociology Blog
At the Jefferson School students were expected to study Marxism and to take that education into the street in mass actions including protests, and political organizing. This mission resonated with Du Bois’ goal to create inter-racial solidarity.

A Letter to Intellectuals Who Deride Revolutions in the Name of Purity

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Ana Maldonado, Pilar Troya Fernández, and Vijay Prashad MR Online
Revolutions do not happen suddenly, nor do they immediately transform a society. A revolution is a process, which moves at different speeds whose tempo can change rapidly if the motor of history is accelerated by intensified class conflict.

Noel Ignatiev, Scholar Who Called For Abolishing Whiteness, Dies at 78

Sewell Chan Los Angeles Times
Noel Ignatiev, a provocative scholar who argued that the idea of a white race is a false construct that society would be better off without, died Saturday in Tucson. His best-known book, “How the Irish Became White,” was influential and controversial

Women’s Unpaid Labor in Political Economy* Revisited

Carol Hanisch and Kathy Scarbrough Meeting Ground
cover of Women's Liberation newspaper At a time when women’s crucial and unresolved unpaid labor in the home is largely overshadowed by #MeToo, loss of abortion rights, and an upsurge of violence against women, it is good to be reminded of this core oppression.

books

Immanuel Wallerstein: An Obituary

Boaventura de Sousa Santos Roar Magazine
Acclaimed Marxist sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, author of numerous works on capitalism as a world-system, including a sterling four volume study completed in 2011, died on August 31 at the age of 88. A fulsome remembrance appears below.

books

A World to Win: A Utopian Vision of Communism's Techno-future

Sarah Jaffe Bookforum
Fascism may be resurging, but so is socialism. Yet what would a genuine post-scarcity, egalitarian, democratic, communist society look like? The author thinks he knows, offering tantalizing if evanescent glimpses that tweak the imagination.

Karl Marx Still Tells Us What to Fight For and How

Arnau Barquer Jacobin
The financial crash didn’t kill off neoliberalism — it actually embedded its logic ever deeper in our lives. Marxist geographer David Harvey says the only way to end this system for good is to change how we fight it.
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