In any society, police forces and other agents of organized repression do their work on behalf of that society’s ruling class. In capitalism, the police are the reserve army of capital, protecting bourgeois property and society from working people and… Read More ›
Literature
Review of “The Theory of the Leisure Class”
“The history of all hitherto society is a history of class struggle.” These words, from Marx’s Manifesto of the Communist Party, assert an essential truth about the organization of human civilization through exploitative modes of production. From slave economies to… Read More ›
Review of “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”
A Glimpse at the Perpetrators of Genocide When we think about the various atrocities of history, something in our nature wants us to think of the perpetrators as being different from normal people. We envision brutes and sadists; stereotypical villains… Read More ›
Review of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”
Slog through the murky depths of scandal, controversy, and murder in Jeremy Scahill’s chilling account of Blackwater Worldwide’s ascension to prominence as the world’s most powerful private military company (PMC). Jeremy Scahill earns his keep as an accomplished investigative journalist… Read More ›
Review of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”
The Theory of “Shock Therapy” Every once in a while, a book comes along that sets the liberals on fire. The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein is one such book. This volume has been hawked… Read More ›
Review: Genocide, War Crimes and the West
Adam Jones’ book Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity is an incredibly revealing anthology containing accounts of atrocities carried out by Western imperial capitalism and those who serve its interests abroad. Articles describing the little-known and little-understood… Read More ›
Review of “This Land is Their Land”
In a world where the grossest forms of capitalist exploitation are ignored or rendered mundane by a bourgeois media machine fueled on free market fetishism and “news” about as enlightening as a lobotomy, it is refreshing to see a decent… Read More ›
Review of “The Road to Serfdom”
Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a popular book from the Austrian School of economics. It is the scripture of classical liberalism and the right, much more so than Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The thesis of… Read More ›
Celebrating the Manifesto
On this day in the year 1848, the Communist Manifesto was published. The book shook the society of the bourgeoisie to its very foundations and raised the consciousness of proletarians across the world. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels exposed the… Read More ›
Review of “Fast Food Nation”
What Is the Error of this Book? This book will doubtlessly go down in history as the favorite palm book of the elitist, petty-bourgeois American social democrats and liberals. If you are looking for a manual on how to look… Read More ›
Book Review of “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”
Today is Thanksgiving, and nothing would mark the occasion better than to check out 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, a 2005 book by Charles C. Mann. The work serves as a challenge to the arguments presented to… Read More ›