The conventional wisdom in the North Atlantic community nowadays is that the Cold War confrontation between the US and USSR was a disaster for an Africa that was squeezed by both sides. Actually, as this informative memoir cum history suggests, the reality was that – for example in apartheid South Africa – Washington was supportive of the white minority regime, while Moscow backed those fighting this illegal government.

On this episode, we talk with People's World labor editor, John Wojcik, about the coverage of labor and working class issues in that publication. When the corporate media is full of hype, you can get the facts at PeoplesWorld.org.

Psychologists today use the term alienation to refer to an extraordinary variety of psychological disorders, including loss of self, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalization, rootlessness, apathy, loneliness, atomization, powerlessness, isolation, pessimism and the loss of beliefs or values.

As the debate rages for President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care reform bill, Americans are gaining quite an education. The public now knows, for example, that health related industries, including insurance companies, do not operate for profit in other industrialized countries, and that accounts for the much higher cost of health care here.

When I found this story, it seemed almost the opposite of everything that my father had ever told me when I was growing up, and that in itself was compelling as well. It was the really the flip side, the hidden side of American history, especially of St. Louis history.

It seems clear that the prospects for a bipartisan health care bill are diminishing with each passing day. And as far as I'm concerned that is a good thing. Nothing good, nothing resembling "reform" could come from bipartisanship in this Congress.

On this episode, we play our recent interview with Teresa Albano, editor of the Peoples World, peoplesworld.org. Albano discussed the PW's editorial philosophy, it's role in reporting on labor and democratic struggles, and some of the big changes it is undergoing this fall.

wo days after taking office, on January 22nd of this year, President Barack Obama issued a remarkable executive order to address some of the worst civil liberties abuses of the Bush administration. The order, among other things, forbade the CIA from running prisons outside the United States or engaging in other practices that had brought the US government into such disrepute.

The art of rebellion is a tradition as old as dissent itself. Radical writers, musicians, painters, actors, dancers and other creative activists have long used their artwork as a tool in the fight for social justice. If the very nature of expressive freedom lends itself toward a revolutionary voice, then it is arguable that the arts gave birth to radicalism, or in the least offered a vision toward its path.

Communists were not the only ones calling for socialism or fighting for practical reforms to alleviate the crisis, but Communists were by far the most important and successful in their efforts. They created a new, more cohesive left, both more militant and more flexible in strategy and tactics.

Alice Neel was someone I was aware of for some time, specifically since 2002, when there was a large exhibit of her work at the Whitney Museum in New York. I knew her name, of course, but I really didn’t know her work very well. A friend of mine said you have to go and check this out, so I did, and it just knocked my socks off.

Considering all of the political complexities of the new era we have entered, President Obama has done a remarkable job in his short time in office. Those of us on the left need to look ahead and refuse to let differences with some of the President’s decisions keep us from seeing the historic and positive changes that are happening.

Linking the corporate-financed misinformation campaign behind the Republican's anti-health reform push to the "birther" conspiracy, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, encouraged the media to report the facts about health reform on a conference call with reporters last month.

In this episode, we play a portion of our recent interview with historian Gerald Meyer about his current article in the Columbia Journal of American Studies on radical painter Alice Neel.

It’s been a long nine days in the YCL School. We held classes on Marxist Methodology, Socialism, Strategy and Tactics, the fight against racism and more. It has been a lot and I hope speaking dialectically that each of us is a different person than we first started. It’s all about the negation of the negation and everything is dialectical.

All Lenin’s theoretical contributions to Marxist economics were meant as interventions in the struggle for correct revolutionary practice; they were not dissertations developing Marxist economics as such. The contributions are far-ranging, but are located within a common perspective that characterized Lenin, namely his view of the revolution as a concrete project.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his short essay “Madness and Society,” begins by assuming what needs to be proved: that the attitude towards "madmen" (his term) has not fundamentally changed from earlier, medieval society.

Historically, straight Marxists’ attitudes toward LGBT comrades and movements have ranged from the virulently homophobic (condemning homosexuality as a “bourgeois deviation”) to tolerance (Lenin decriminalized homosexual acts in the USSR, although Stalin later re-imposed Czarist-era repression), to wholehearted support.

The old craft union oriented conservative labor history taught in the first half of the 20th century was essentially narrow political history of trade unions separate from social struggles and the larger political context. Philip S. Foner and others pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s the development of an anti-capitalist history of American labor.

As Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, editors of the valuable new collection of essays Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Struggle, note, two pitfalls particularly afflict scholarship on post World War II struggles for African American freedom and equality.