Gramsci’s “Jacobin Prince” and Leading Light Communism -Jacob Brown Part 2/3 of a series on Leading Light Communism and the Writings of Antonio Gramsci (llco.org) In Greek Mythology, there is a story about how humanity received fire. The Titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give it to humans. Prometheus went the home of …
Comments on Agriculture and Food in Crisis (2010, Monthly Review Press) ed. by Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar. (llco.org) In the period between 2006 and 2008, a world food crisis emerged. Agriculture and Food in Crisis (2010, Monthly Review Press) is an anthology of articles describing the causes and effects of this crisis. The collection …
MIM: Review of the “Black Book of Communism” (llco.org) [Before MIM’s crackpot degeneration and despite their errors, MIM made some outstanding contributions to the proletarian struggle.] The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press) is the bible of the anti-communist movement. The book is often cited as an academic work proving the barbarism of communism. …
Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2005) by Gotz Aly review by Prairie Fire (llco.org) Gotz Aly’s book Hitler’s Beneficiaries (2005) is a groundbreaking book. Aly breaks with the dogmatic view held by many myth-makers on the “left” that the German working class despised Hitler’s tyranny. It dispenses with the shared mythology found among almost all First Worldists, be …
Molotov, MIM, Dogma, and Stalin’s support for Israel (llco.org) Stalin was a great socialist leader, but it is important to tell the truth about his mistakes. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a high-ranking, important member of Stalin’s regime. Today’s Stalinists occasionally choose him as their favorite candidate to have succeeded Stalin in “what if” fantasy histories. …
Review of André Gunder Frank’s Lupenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment (llco.org) André Gunder Frank’s Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopement, written in 1972, is a short summary of the evolution of dependency in Latin America from the colonial period through the neocolonial period up to the 1970s. Frank shows how the class structure of Latin American countries evolved in connection with changes …
Book review of Malcolm Caldwell’s The Wealth of Some Nations (llco.org) Malcolm Caldwell was one of the only Westerners to visit Kampuchea (Cambodia) under the “Khmer Rouge” regime. He is mostly remembered as the academic activist who was assassinated in Democratic Kampuchea on December 23rd, 1978, shortly after interviewing Pol Pot. The Western media, …
The Slum within the Global Countryside: Reflections inspired by Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums (llco.org) “The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic process that shaped a ‘Third World’ in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870-1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation …
Book review part 2 of 2 of Teresa Hayter’s The Creation of World Poverty by Prairie Fire (llco.org) Teresa Hayter’s The Creation of World Poverty was first published in 1981 as a response to the World Bank’s Brandt Report. Even today, decades after it was first published, Hayter’s book is more accurate than not in …
Book review part 1 of 2 of Teresa Hayter’s The Creation of World Poverty by Prairie Fire (llco.org) The most glaring fact about our world today is the tremendous gap between the wealthy countries and the poor countries. This division of global society is sometimes referred to as the First World versus the Third World, …