Tag: History

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor – Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?

Link to an article by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:

“Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?”

 

This article raises some excellent points and identifies many key issues (for instance, aptly referencing Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”), though its analysis is often vague and occasionally superficial (that vagueness and superficiality being explainable in political terms)

Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and Crowds and Party and The State and Revolution and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (the gist of Taylor’s theoretical framework is more thoroughly stated in this book) and …And the Poor Get Prison and “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People” and “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State”

Jacques Pauwels – The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939

Link to an article by Jacques Pauwels:

“The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality”

 

This article makes some dubious assertions about the USSR, namely that Stalin knew approximately when Hitler would invade the USSR (when actually Stalin was paralyzed with shock and indecision — see Moshe Lewin’s The Soviet Century) and that the Red Army was knowledgeable and ready, when it suffered a defeat at the hands of tiny Finland and was greatly weakened by Stalin’s purges (again see Lewin’s book).  But the parts about appeasement by Western powers is good.

George Martin Fell Brown – Marxism and the Philosophy of Science

Link to a review by George Martin Fell Brown of Helena Sheehan’s book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (1985/2018):

“Book Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science”

 

This review does suffer from a bit of a Trotskyist (anti-Stalinist) bias, but it still provides a useful historical overview.

Paul Le Blanc – Today’s Struggle for a Green New Deal

Link to an article by Paul Le Blanc:

“Today’s Struggle for a Green New Deal: Lessons from the Freedom Budget of the 1960s”

Bonus links: “What the New Deal Can Teach us About Winning a Green New Deal: Part I” and “What the New Deal Can Teach Us About Winning a Green New Deal: Part III—the First New Deal” and “System Change, Class War, and the WW2 Economic Conversion Experience” and “When the FBI Targeted the Poor People’s Campaign”

Philip Alcabes – No Peace of Mind in Psychiatry

Link to a review by Philip Alcabes of the book Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (2019) by Anne Harrington:

“No Peace of Mind in Psychiatry”

 

Bonus links: “Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris” (takes an implicitly anti-Freudian perspective, ignoring Lacan) and “Élisabeth Roudinesco Interviewed on the 30th Anniversary of Jacques Lacan’s Death”

Michael Hudson – Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom

Link to an interview of Michael Hudson summarizing his essential books Super Imperialism and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, conducted by Bonnie Faulkner:

“Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom” and

“De-Dollarizing the American Financial Empire”

 

This interview provides an excellent summary of many of the main points of Hudson’s books.  For a latter-day treatment of a portion of these topics, see also The Global Minotaur and “Imperialism in a Coffee Cup.”