Book Review

The Violent Story Of American Whiteness

December 26, 2020 Kim Kelly, In These Times. Educate! Book Review, Confederate Monuments, United States, White Supremacy

The United States of America is a white supremacist nation. It always has been. Its white founders, venerated and lionized though they are in textbooks and on courthouse lawns, explicitly intended the country to be this way. The country’s founding documents make that goal clear. Through the centuries, the predominantly white ruling class has worked overtime to uphold this status quo, even as the goalposts periodically shift. A trio of new books delve into this rotten heart of American whiteness and explore how its bloody footprints smudged the nation’s past and continue to influence its uncertain future. Connor Towne O’Neill’s Down Along with That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy...

Capitalism On A Ventilator

December 19, 2020 Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume, Counterpunch. Educate! Book Review, Capitalism, China, COVID-19

Asian countries have been far more successful than the US in responding to the COVID pandemic, but you’d never know that from the US media. Even most alternative media has been largely US- & Euro-centric. While our domestic issues here are important, we have been missing out on important lessons from other places. A partial remedy to this dearth of information is provided by the just released, “Capitalism on a Ventilator: The Impact of COVID-19 in China & the U.S.” The book is an anthology of writing by over fifty activists and independent journalists, edited by Sara Flounders & Lee Siu Hin. The first section, “Warnings from China,” details China’s response to the virus, which included quarantines, closing businesses and schools, and restricting travel right away.

The Origins Of Anti-Extractivism

December 10, 2020 Nick Serpe, Dissent Magazine. Educate! Book Review, Extraction, Indigenous Resistance, Latin America

In the social science literature, there’s this sense that countries or states that rely on mining or oil for their revenues are doomed to some kind of pathology: they’re going to be authoritarian, or stuck in underdevelopment. There’s a related notion that resource politics are an elite affair: that what governs the global oil economy is corporations, or the members of OPEC, or oil ministers—and likewise for mining. What I learned doing ethnographic research in Ecuador is that resource politics is much more contested and interesting. Focusing on resource politics as this vibrant field of contention gives a different view of the stakes of...

Book Review: ‘Capitalism On A Ventilator’

October 15, 2020 Ted Kelly, Workers.org. Educate! Book Review, Capitalism, China, COVID-19

The compilation of these works is an act of internationalism and working-class unity. The result demonstrates the successes and true potential of a socialist system and exposes the cruelty and injustice of the capitalist system. In reviewing this groundbreaking anthology, I had foremost in mind that many of our readers have lost a loved one to the novel coronavirus that broke out in late 2019 and quickly spread across the Earth. Some of you reading this may have contracted COVID-19 yourself.

How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars”

July 22, 2020 Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, Popular Resistance. Educate! Book Review, GI Resistance, US military, Wars and Militarism

When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.” In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about “ending an era of endless wars” as well as America’s role as “policeman of the world.” In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no reduction in the US military presence abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion.

A Decentralized Participatory Planning Proposal

July 7, 2019 MR Online. Create! Book Review, Decentralization, Participatory Democracy

Political scientist, author, and activist, Marta Harnecker devoted her life to collaborating in building radical democracy in Latin American communities where people have, for generations, experienced crushing poverty and a near complete loss of control over their lives. In South America and the Caribbean, but especially in Cuba and Venezuela, Harnecker has worked directly with disenfranchised workers and peasants. From the ground up, she has helped to build new structures and methods that bring to virtually unknown towns and provinces the full meaning of the Bolivarian revolution. In this latest work, Harnecker, with Spanish economist José Bartolomé, shares some of her wisdom on how this is being done, and how communities everywhere can gain empowerment.

Back To The Dark Ages

December 1, 2018 Jeremy Kuzmarov, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Book Review, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Russia Ukraine Video

On October 20th, 2018, fifty-one years to the day of the famous 1967 March on the Pentagon, antiwar activists again rallied for peace outside the headquarters of a now declining empire. Among the speakers was Jill Stein, the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate, who told the crowd: “There’s not a lot of democracy going on out there because they’ve got the new McCarthyism going …. The era of censorship, of warmongering and of political suppression is back big time.” Stein’s speech was given as the Trump administration announced that the U.S. was pulling out of the Inter-Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia that placed a moratorium on mid- and short-range nuclear missiles.

Demand The Impossible

December 3, 2017 Anne Cummings Jacopetti, www.popularresistance.org Strategize! Book Review, Climate Change, Education, Wildfires

By Anne Cummings Jacopetti for Popular Resistance. I read Ayers’ book last summer and was so impressed that I bought three more copies, one for each of my sons. Now, raw from my trial by fire and touched to the core by the suffering and losses in my community, wondering how we can influence the recovery process towards a new vision, one that takes into consideration the looming threat of climate change in its various guises - flood, drought and fire - I turned again to this manifesto, reading it out loud and savoring with Roland its spirit of hopeful resilience in the face of daunting challenge. He calls on us to imagine a different world – a world in which our resources are shared to provide for the basic needs of all people, a world that recovers our humanity from the soul-destroying grip of greed and allows us all to find a role in building a better, more just and hopeful world for our children.

The Activist As A Young Girl

July 10, 2016 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org Educate! Activism, Book Review, Peace, Tax Resister

By David Swanson for Let's Try Democracy. Clare Hanrahan's memoir The Half Life of a Free Radical: Growing Up Irish Catholic in Jim Crow Memphis is a remarkable feat: part Jack Kerouac, part Dorothy Day, part Howard Zinn, and a bit of Forest Gump. First and foremost this is an entertaining and irreverent tale of childhood and adolescence told with great humor, honesty, and empathy. But it's also told by someone who became a peace and justice and environmentalist activist in later life, someone able to look back on the poverty, racism, consumerism, militarism, sexism, and Catholicism of her youth with passion and perspective -- even appreciation for all the good that was mixed in with the bad. Hanrahan writes what in outline form would read like an endless tale of misfortune, and yet leaves you with the thought of how much riotous fun she and her eight siblings and other acquaintances had.

History: The Dignity Of Chartism

December 6, 2015 John Westmoreland, www.counterfire.org Strategize! Book Review, Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Poverty, Worker Rights and Jobs

By John Westmoreland for Counterfire.org. The Dignity of Chartism is a book of great relevance for today. In the years 1839-42, at the height of the Chartist struggle, capitalism was in its youth. Today it is in its dotage. The neoliberal free-market doctrine was and is the dogma of both eras. The mass eruptions we see today, as with Chartism then, are a result of the relentless pursuit of profit in a mad competition that generates poverty, war and environmental destruction. Read Dorothy Thompson’s marvellous book. Be inspired by the Chartists, and learn how they built a mass movement, through education, agitation and struggle. Then build a mass movement that finishes the job that the Chartists started.

Curbing Corruption With Civil Resistance

November 29, 2015 Elena Volkava, www.wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Accountability, Book Review, Corruption, Nonviolence

By Elena Volkava for Waging Nonviolence. Book review - Corruption is a widespread and global phenomenon, ranging from “narco-corruption” in Central America to “petty corruption” in Eastern Europe, such as candidates buying votes with buckwheat and sunflower oil before elections. Rather than focusing on the issue itself, Shaazka Beyerle explores how corruption is being curbed with civil resistance in her new book “Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice.” Beyerle documents and analyzes civic grassroots initiatives that have expressed clear demands, reached their objectives, employed an array of nonviolent actions, and were sustained over a period of time.

An Inspiring Life’s Work Continues To Inspire

November 6, 2015 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.popularresistance.org Educate! Book Review, Civil Rights, Nonviolence, Peace

Book Review by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers for Popular Resistance. On June 10th, David joined ten African American students from Howard and a white woman from another college in the heart of hatred and sat down at the lunch counter at the People’s Drug Store in Arlington. The owner told the police not to arrest them and closed the lunch counter. Shouts of racial hatred were heard, people threw things at them, spat on them, shoved lit cigarettes down their clothes and one threw a firecracker at them. American Nazi storm troopers showed up. They were punched and kicked to the floor. They stayed for 16 hours until the store closed for the day. Then, they came back for a second day. On the second day, David had a life changing experience confronting the reality of nonviolent protest.

Disaster Capitalism: Outsourcing Violence And Exploitation

September 27, 2015 Robert J. Burrowes, www.popularresistance.org Educate! Book Review, Capitalism, Corporatism, Democracy, Neoliberalism

By Robert J. Burrowes. In his just-released book, 'Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe', Antony Loewenstein offers us a superb description of the diminishing power of national governments and international organisations to exercise power in the modern world as multinational corporations consolidate their control over the political and economic life of the planet. While ostensibly a book about how national governments increasingly abrogate their duty to provide 'public' services to their domestic constituencies by paying corporations to provide a privatized version of the same service – which is invariably inferior and exploitative, and often explicitly violent as well – the book's subtext is easy to read: in order to maximize corporate profits, major corporations are engaged in a struggle to wrest all power from ordinary people and those institutions that supposedly represent them.

Equality Is Far Away: Conversation W/ Authors Of “Queer (In)Justice”

July 20, 2015 Joe Macaré, www.truth-out.org Educate! Book Review, Economic Justice, LGBTQ, Queer, Racial Justice

By Joe Macaré in Truthout - LGBTQ leadership has also had an impact on broader campaigns and movements around police accountability at both the national and local levels. It's well known that both #BlackLivesMatter and BYP 100 were launched by queer Black womenwho have consistently insisted on a framework for understanding state violence and anti-Black racism that centers on the lives of Black women, trans and queer folks. Of course, that insistence hasn't always been heeded - but Black queer women on the front lines in Ferguson, in the leadership of BYP 100, and in chapters of #BlackLivesMatter and BYP 100 across the country have made it clear that this is a nonnegotiable part of the current movement and moment.

The Miseducation Of Augie Merasty

July 20, 2015 Christine Smith, www.rabble.ca Educate! Book Review, Canada, Education, History, Indigenous Peoples

By Christine Smith in Rabble - The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir might be a small book, but it carries a punch to it that all Canadians need to read and understand: a firsthand account of the impact residential schools had on Indigenous children forced to attend, told by a young boy, Joseph (Augie) Merasty, and how this experience shaped his life. Indian Residential Schools have played a long, sad and harmful history in Canada since they first opened in the 1840s until the last one closed in 1996. Merasty, one of 150,000 children taken from their families during this era, was taught to be ashamed of his family and his culture, and experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse that no child should ever have to experience.

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