According to Udi Greenberg, many anti-Communist commentators in the early stages of the Cold War resurrected anti-Catholic tropes that had been deployed in the nineteenth century. Redirecting and adapting those tropes, Greenberg argues, played a crucial role in the effort to portray and vilify the Communist project.

Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War Princeton University Press, 2015

Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion

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How can we manage to think about, and move toward, a better world in the bleakest of times? Argentinean critical theorist Ana Cecelia Dinerstein talks about capitalism, the state, and our own collective power. She also discusses the tradition of Open Marxism and why we should be skeptical of a universal basic income, which has supporters on both left and right.

Resources:

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope Palgrave, 2015

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein ed., Open Marxism 4: Against a Closing World Pluto, 2019

The post Organizing Hope Against Capitalism appeared first on KPFA.

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

The post Capitalist and Socialist Trajectories appeared first on KPFA.

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

The post American Capitalism and Class Conflict appeared first on KPFA.

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

The post Epidemics, Elites, and Public Health appeared first on KPFA.

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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