Harriet Fraad spoke at Left Forum about trends in family, gender, and relationship dynamics under capitalism. And Paul Sweezy gave a talk in the early 1990s about the historical trajectory of the socialist project and the viability of socialism as idea and practice.

Capitalism Hits Home, with Harriet Fraad

John Bellamy Foster, “The Commitment of an Intellectual: Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004)” Monthly Review

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These are anxious times for all of us, but even more so for those whose labor is deemed essential during a pandemic: delivery drivers, grocery workers, those working in Amazon warehouses, and of course health care workers. Labor Notes writer Chris Brooks discusses the challenge for labor under these unprecedented circumstances — and how we can still organize our collective strength.

Resources:

Organizing in a Pandemic: Labor Notes Resources

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Insights into race, history, capitalist dynamics, and U.S. exceptionalism were shared by Kimberly Westcott, Danny Haiphong, Glen Ford, and Dan Kovalik at last year’s Left Forum conference.

Resources:

Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror Skyhorse, 2019

Black Agenda Report

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While entrepreneurship figures into most histories of the US, the centrality of capitalism and class struggle tend to be missing. Hence as a population, we often have no idea about the enormous conflicts that have taken place in this country. Historian Steve Fraser discusses the glaring absences in histories of the US without class struggle.

Resources:

Steve Fraser, Mongrel Firebugs and Men of Property: Capitalism and Class Conflict in American History Verso, 2020

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How are race and ethnicity represented in U.S. news coverage of health and medicine? Charles Briggs argues that whiteness tends to be portrayed as an aspirational state of well-being, while people of color are far too often depicted as deficient, as trapped by culture and thus to be blamed for their own health problems. (Encore presentation.)

Charles Briggs and Daniel Hallin, Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life Routledge, 2016

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Pandemics and other public health crises often require exceptional measures — some of them voluntary and some imposed from above.  Historical geographer Graham Mooney reflects on the history of measures like isolation and quarantines — as well as elite indifference to the plight of the poor and working classes during infectious disease outbreaks.

Resources:

Graham Mooney, Intrusive Interventions: Public Health, Domestic Space, and Infectious Disease Surveillance in England 1840-1914 University of Rochester Press, 2015

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If a loved one of yours were murdered, the grief might be overwhelming – but what if you also found the police biased and disrespectful, the detectives dismissive, the investigation ineffective, and support services inadequate? Roxanna Altholz has produced a report detailing the lived experiences of mostly African American family members of unsolved homicide victims in Oakland.

“Living with Impunity: Unsolved Murders in Oakland and the Human Rights Impact on Victims’ Family Members” (pdf)

International Human Rights Law Clinic at Berkeley Law

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When looking back at pandemics in modern history, the 1918 Spanish influenza stands out.  It took the lives of somewhere between 50 and 100 million people — and while it devastated the countries of the Global North, it took its greatest toll in the Global South.  Science writer Laura Spinney reflects on the similarities — and significant differences — between the Spanish flu and Covid-19.  She discusses how the pandemic took hold at the end of WW1 and struck down the young, and how many of the affected countries adopted universal healthcare in its wake.

Resources:

Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World PublicAffairs, 2017

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We hear a lot about immigrant farmworkers toiling in the fields, but some of them go on to start their own farms in the U.S. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern asserts that although many immigrant farmers of color are committed to alternative food practices, they tend to be overlooked in the story of local and alternative food. The ideals and practices of these farmers, she says, align in certain ways with the push for a more democratically controlled and less exploitative food system.

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability MIT Press, 2019

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The struggle for abortion rights has been foundering for decades and, with an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court, the future of abortion in the United States looks grim. Organizer Jenny Brown argues that the timidity of the abortion rights movement has patently failed to slow the anti-abortion assault. She argues that a bolder, unapologetic approach could lead to significant victories.

Resources:

Jenny Brown, Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now, 2019

National Women’s Liberation

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