Updated / Monday, 30 Nov 2020 19:38

A mural inspired by the Late Late Toy Show star Adam King and his virtual hug sign has appeared in Dublin city centre.

The mural, which appears off Richmond Street in the centre of the capital, is thework of visual artist Cerys Murphy who says Adam's virtual hug love heart sign is a "gesture of hope" for everyone.

Adam King'sstellar appearance on the Toy Show on Friday night where he talked about his dreams of space travel and introduced everyone to his handmade sign has attracted praise from all around the globe.

The Dublin-based artist Cerys explained Adam King's appearancemade her heart "skip a beat".

"I woke up the next morning at about 5am and I was still thinking of that little love heart he had done. And so I grabbed my spray paints, I got on my bike and I cycled down here.

"Human beings need hope. And to see something from a small child to remind all of us adults of this small gesture, it just takes my breath away every time to think," she explained.

Cerys is originally from London and is unable to spend Christmas with her family this year due to Covid-19 restrictions.

"I'm sure there are thousands and thousands of us in Ireland that aren't actually going to make it home for Christmas. It's the first time in my life I won't be spending it with my family.

"So when I saw Adam coping with his little sign I felt my heart skip a beat," she explained.

The mural appears on a wallnear where the George Bernard Shaw pub once stood. Cerys explained that the location of the mural was a deliberate choice.

"I just thought the metaphor of it being in ruins and it being such a beautiful message that you can see just from being on the street would speak volumes to everyone.

"It's a small gesture in a big world of chaos that a small child has told us to think!" explained Cerys.

Originally posted here:
Mural inspired by Toy Show's Adam is a gesture of hope - RTE.ie

Academy Award-winner Christopher Plummer is the focus of the Stratford Festival's next two Thursday night viewing parties, with two remarkable performances and two exclusive new pre-show interviews - all being added this month to Stratfest@Home, the Festival's new subscription streaming service.

"Christopher Plummer is perfect casting for both Prospero and Julius Caesar," says Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino. "As a theatre artist he has the brilliance, courage and strategic mind of Caesar. And anyone who has been fortunate enough to see him on stage will know he creates magic; he is a wizard like Prospero. For so many years the Festival has been blessed by his talent and unforgettable presence. From all of us: thank you, Chris!"

Thursday, December 3, sees the re-release of Shakespeare's The Tempest, directed by former artistic director Des McAnuff in 2010 and featuring Plummer as Prospero. Accompanying it is a brand new Stratfest@Home interview in which the iconic actor and Tony Award-winning director chat about bringing The Tempest to the stage and then on to the screen.

Thursday, December 10, brings the 2008 production of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, also directed by McAnuff and featuring Plummer as Julius Caesar and Nikki M. James as a young Cleopatra. James went on to win the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The Book of Mormon. An exclusive new interview with James and McAnuff is also being added to Stratfest@Home this month.

Both films were produced by Barry Avrich and Melbar Entertainment Group. They can be watched on the Stratford Festival's Youtube channel, beginning with the pre-show interview at 6:30 p.m. ET on December 3 and 10 respectively. The films remain available for free for 36 hours and are a featured part of Stratfest@Home.

For just $10 a month, Stratfest@Home offers a rich mine of content, including more than 20 Stratford Festival films, insightful interviews, and great new original content, including:

Days of Confinement, a specially commissioned translation of Wajdi Mouawad's Journal de confinement by Linda Gaboriau, presented in audio format by Antoine Yared and directed by Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino.

Leer Estates, a melodramatic, nail-biting, hair-swooshing, double-take mini soap opera of Dan Chameroy's devising, in which he gives new meaning to "tour de force."

Stratford Festival Ghost Tours, in which Roy Lewis shares spectral stories as he takes you behind the ghost light and through the streets of Stratford.

The Early Modern Cooking Show, offering the classics through a culinary lens with Stratford Festival executive chef Kendrick Prins and actors Qasim Khan, Alexis Gordon, Jessica B. Hill and Kevin Kruchkywich.

And Introducing, with host Beck Lloyd, who interviews a new generation of classical actors, including Brefny Caribou, Colton Curtis, Mikaela Davies, Djah Dixon-Green, Farhang Ghajar, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Jordan Mah and Jake Runeckles.

Up Close and Musical, a series of moving and entertaining concerts with some of the Festival's most beloved musical stars and emerging musical artists, including Robert Ball, Dan Chameroy, Cynthia Dale, Alexis Gordon, Chilina Kennedy, Robert Markus, Marcus Nance, Vanessa Sears and Kimberly-Ann Truong.

Undiscovered Sonnets, a clever twist on a game show in which two people in love share their story and three "sonneteers" compete to win their hearts with a perfect poem created on the spot. Created by Rebecca Northan with sonneteers Raoul Bhaneja, Ashley Botting, Ijeoma Emesowum, Bruce Horak, Kevin Kruchkywich, Ellis Lalonde and Lee Smart. (There will be a free sneak peek during the watch party on December 17!)

Viral Transmissions, a series of artistic experiments from a number of theatre makers commissioned through the Festival's Lab. These pieces experiment with performance on a digital platform in a variety of ways, including through illustration, poetry, audio, music, Zoom, dialogue and interviews. Artists include Carmen Aguirre, Keith Barker, Jody Chan, Jeff Ho, Marcia Johnson, Davis Plett & Gislina Patterson, Christine Quintana, Joseph Recinos, Andrea Scott and Norman Yeung.

To browse the subscription platform and subscribe, visit http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/AtHome.

See the article here:
Christopher Plummer Films and Interviews Coming To Stratfest@Home - Broadway World

History has not been kind to Marion Davies. The biggest female movie star of the early 1920s, she was crowned Queen of the Screen by theatre owners in a 1924 ceremony alongside the equivalent King: the number one male box office star, Rudolph Valentino.

Davies was the 13th movie star in history to make an imprint of her hands and feet in the cement outside of Graumans Chinese Theatre. She had enough range to attract rave reviews for dozens of slapstick turns, for the artful celebrity impersonations she did in King Vidors The Patsy (1923), and for the lavish Tudor blockbuster When Knighthood was in Flower (1922). She was billed above Clark Gable in Polly of the Circus, above Gary Cooper in Operator 13 (1934), and above Bing Crosby in Going Hollywood (1933).

She successfully transitioned to the sound era despite having a stutter: she even worked that speech impediment into her 1933 performance as a poor Irish lass who stands to inherit a fortune in Peg O My Heart.

For some decades, however, Davies has endured if at all as the inspiration for Susan Alexander, the vapid, talentless mistress of the media mogul at the centre of Citizen Kane (1941), a fictionalised version of Davies relationship with the tyrannical tycoonWilliam Randolph Hearst. In fact, younger generations are just as likely to be acquainted with her as a parody of that parody; Susan Alexander, in turn, served as the inspiration for Miss Springfield, the dim-witted extramarital squeeze of the Kennedy-alike Mayor Quimby in The Simpsons.

Davies relationship with Hearst has been dramatised many times. Virginia Madsen played her opposite Robert Mitchum in the 1985 ABC telefilm The Hearst and Davies Affair. Davies was essayed by Heather McNair in Chaplin (1992) and Gretchen Mol in Cradle Will Rock (1999). Director Peter Bogdanovich cast Kirsten Dunst in the role in 2001s The Cats Meow.

Few of these depictions have been flattering. Having conducted extensive research into Davies, Virginia Madsen expressed regret for her part in a project that was marketed as the scandalous love affair between one of the richest and most powerful men in America and the obscure Ziegfeld girl he promoted to stardom.

Mank, David Finchers new film chronicling the making of Citizen Kane, goes some way to restoring Marion Davies reputation. Mank is Herman J Mankiewicz, the prolific, hard-drinking screenwriter who contributed to such Golden Age classics as Duck Soup, The Wizard of Ozand Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz, who is played by Gary Oldman in Finchers film, shared the Oscar for screenplay with Citizen Kanes director and star, Orson Welles. But the authorship of the film has long been a bone of contention among film scholars.

Critic Pauline Kael, writing in her contested 1971 takedown of Welles, Raising Kane, maintained that Mankiewicz, not Welles, was the films true auteur. That hypothesis has been subsequently challenged in writings and testimonies from Welles himself, Andrew Sarris, Dorothy Comingore (who played Susan Alexander Kane), Joseph McBride, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Bernard Herrmann, and Welles secretary, Kathryn Trosper.

Marvelling at Kaels now discredited account, Trosper asked: Then Id like to know, what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr Welles?

Its Kaels line, however, that is taken by Manks screenwriter, Jack Fincher, the late journalist and editor of Life magazine and the father of director David Fincher.

Finchers new film explores Mankiewiczs ties to William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), and depicts both of those figures with rather more sympathy than previous screen representations.

People just connect Marion to the William Randolph Hearst relationship, says Seyfried. And thats unfortunate because she was misunderstood and that relationship was misunderstood as well. Ive come to learn that they were really well connected. Their bond was really unique. He was an older man when he went after her and she was so young. But they were good for each other. They brought out things from each other. And there was a loyalty that was really heartbreaking and beautiful. She took care of him until the end. I love that we get to show that in this movie.

That may be the case. But there are plenty of details about Davies and her affair with Hearst that lend themselves to that scandalous love affair between one of the richest and most powerful men in America and the obscure Ziegfeld girl he promoted to stardom narrative.

Charlie Chaplins second wife, Lita Grey, quoted Davies as saying: God, Id give everything I have to marry that silly old man. Not for the money and security hes given me more than Ill ever need. Not because hes such a cozy companion, eitherNo, you know what he gives me, sugar? He gives me the feeling Im worth something to him.

Marion Cecilia Elizabeth Brooklyn Douras was born in 1897 in Brooklyn. When Marion was a child, her father, Bernard J Douras, a lawyer, and her housewife mother, Rose Reilly, changed the family name to the British-sounding Davies after they read it on a real estate billboard. As a teenager, Davies dropped out of convent school to pursue a career as a chorus girl and fashion model.

In 1916, Davies was signed to the Ziegfeld Follies theatrical revue, where she met Hearst, then a 53-year-old newspaper mogul. Heimmediately took charge of Davies career, founding Cosmopolitan Pictures, a production company that existed primarily to promote Davies. She appeared in 29 silent and 17 talkies with the company. She was relentlessly plugged across Hearts publications. Marion never looked lovelier became a catchphrase for Hearsts celebrated gossip columnist, Louella Parsons.

Throughout their 30-year affair, a relationship that was considered the worst kept secret in Hollywood, their lifestyle was absurdly lavish. Hearst purchased the Cameo Theatre in San Francisco in 1929, renamed it the Marion Davies Theatre and erected giant neon letters to that effect, so that he might see Davies name from his office.

When Davies cooed over photographs of St Donats Castle in Country Life magazine, the Welsh Vale of Glamorgan property was snapped up by Hearst and given to her as a gift in 1925. When George Bernard Shaw visited the castle he remarked that: This is what God would have built if he had had the money.

Across the Atlantic, the couple spent much of their time entertaining at their Beverly Hills estate, where frequent guests included Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and John F Kennedy.

That glamour was tainted by various troubling incidents. Charlie Chaplin, who stepped into a lions cage in a dress as Davies body double for Zander the Great, was suspected to be the intended target in the mysterious death of producer Thomas Ince aboard Hearsts yacht in 1924. Rumours held that Hearst had shot Ince in a jealous rage after mistaking him for Charlie Chaplin, until the coroner made the unlikely ruling that the producer had died from acute indigestion (despite multiple witnesses and a contemporaneous Los Angeles Times headline that read, Movie Producer Shot on Hearst Yacht).

Hearst was unquestionably ruthless. In Mank, in common with his Citizen Kane alter-ego, Hearst who is often credited with starting the Spanish-American War with a series of provocative, nativist articles is heard to say: You provide the pictures, well provide the war. He was equally cut throat when it came to Davies career. When MGM executive Irving Thalberg cast his own wife, Norma Shearer, instead of Davies in the title role in Marie Antoinette, Hearst pulled his newspapers support for MGM and moved Cosmopolitan Pictures distribution from MGM to Warner Brothers.

It was Gore Vidal who put forward the theory that Kanes infamous Rosebud was a reference to Hearsts pet name for Davies tender button. And that this annoyed Hearst most of all.

Either way, Citizen Kane infuriated him. He ordered his papers never to mention the film and to discredit Welles. He banned any reviews or advertising for the film across his media conglomerate. He promised to launch an anti-Semitic campaign against the (mostly Jewish) studio heads, a threat that spooked Louis B Mayer into organising a consortium of studio heads to buy the negative of Citizen Kane from RKO with the intention of destroying it. He used his influence with J Edgar Hoover to have Welles investigated by the FBI.

Davies, meanwhile, claimed she never saw the film, nor was she bothered by it. She would remain with Hearst until his death in 1951. Eleven weeks and one day after Hearsts death, she married Horace Brown in Las Vegas. He was, by his own account, an abusive husband and she filed for divorce on several occasions before her death, from stomach cancer, in 1961.

In the foreword to her 1975 memoir, Orson Welles wrote: Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screenshe would have been a star if Hearst had never happened.

The mistress was never one of Hearsts possessions, he added. He was always their suitor, and she was the precious treasure of his heart for more than 30 years, until his last breath of life.

Amanda Seyfried is inclined to agree: When I read the script for Mank, I felt like I really wanted to know this person. So I went back and watched all the movies I could find of her. She was so sharp. She was phenomenally talented. This is such a good chance to make her come to life in a different way. Hopefully a lot of people see this and see her completely differently.

Mank is on Netflix from December 4th

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Marion Davies was as big as Valentino. Then she had a scandalous affair - The Irish Times

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New Delhi:A biologist, botanist, physicist, author and an inventor Jagdish Chandra Bose was a man who had donned many hats in his life.

Born in 1858, in the district Mymensingh of the Bengal Presidency (present day Bangladesh), Bose was known most significantly for his research on radio development. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a New York-based international body, even called him the Father of Radio Science since the science behind radio technology was first explained by Bose.

His work in radio science was instrumental to another significant discovery he made. Bose was one of the first to employ an interdisciplinary approach combining botany with physics to prove that plants also had life. He invented the Crescograph, a device that measures tiny reactions and changes in plant cells in response to stimuli.

This invention led to a friendship between him and popular British playwright George Bernard Shaw. After Boses discovery about plants, Shaw reportedly shed tears for his dead cabbage. The playwright also gifted many of his plays to the former, with one inscription saying, From the least biotechnologist to the greatest biotechnologist of the world.

Aside from his scholarly achievements, he had anardent interest in science fiction literature and was among the few writers to author stories of the genre in India. He published several short stories in Bengali such as Niruddesher Kahini (The Story of the Missing One) in 1896andPalatak Tuphan (Runaway Cyclone) in 1921.

On his 162nd birth anniversary on 30 November,ThePrint looks at the polymath, his achievements and how he went on to establish the Bose Institute in 1917.

Also read: Legendary statistician CR Rao, credited with restructuring field of statistics, turns 100

Bose attended the University of Cambridge, the University of London and St Xaviers College in Kolkata for his higher studies. But before all this, his school life was spent in a village pathshaala(school).

Even though he belonged to a well-to-do family, Boses father believed it was important to know ones mother tongue and people before mastering English.

At a conference in 1915, Bose looked back on his time in the village pathshaala and said, At that time, sending children to English schools was an aristocratic status symbol. In the vernacular school, to which I was sent, the son of the Muslim attendant of my father sat on my right side, and the son of a fisherman sat on my left. They were my playmates.

He also credited the pathshaala as the place where he developed a keen interest in the workings of Nature.

He highlighted how as a student, he was unaware of any differences in caste or religion among his classmates.

He said: It was because of my childhood friendship with them that I could never feel that there were creatures who might be labeled low-caste. I never realized that there existed a problem common to the two communities, Hindus and Muslims.

Bose initially wanted to study medicine, however due to his sickly disposition he instead attended Christ College at the University of Cambridge and got a B.A. degree in Natural Sciences.

He returned to India in 1885 and took up a job as an Assistant Professor of Physics at Presidency College in Kolkata.

Bose was among the pioneers of research in radio technology anddemonstrated, for the first time ever, wireless communication using radio waves, almost two years before Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi, who is credited for developing the first proper system of radio communication in 1897.

Marconi is credited with the development of radio technology because Bose had an aversion to patenting. The latters scientific contribution was used by Marconi to send the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.

Bose was against patenting because he believed knowledge should be available to everyone and not constrained by patenting. As a result, despite his extensive scholarship, he is almost forgotten in the West and by many others.

Patenting was even discouraged at the Bose Institute a research institute which he founded in 1917. When asked by his nephew who the real inventor of the radio was, Bosesaid, It is not the inventor but the invention that matters.

Author Subrata Dasgupta, in his biography on Bose, wrote that the physicists three articles in The Electricianin December 1895 were the first scientific papers published by an Indian.

Dasgupta also refers to an incident when a proprietor of a famous telegraphy company told Bose not to reveal details of his work in his lecture at the Royal Institution in London but instead allow him to procure a patent on Boses behalf, so that they may share the profit.

In a letter to poet Rabindranath Tagore, Bose wrote, If only Tagore would witness the countrys (Englands) greed for money, adding, What a dreadful all-consuming disease it was.

Also read: Jamini Roy, one of Indias national treasures who never sold paintings for more than Rs 350

Inspired by nationalist ideals, in 1917, on his 60th birthday, Bose foundedthe Bose Institute.

For the inauguration of the Institute, Tagore wrote a special song for the occasion Matri mondiro punya angono. In Boses own words, he dedicated the institute to the nation and said that it was not merely a laboratory but a temple.

While inaugurating the institute, Bose said, The power of physical methods applies for the establishment of that truth which can be realised directly through our senses, or through the vast expansion of the perceptive range by means of artificially created organs.

In his ten-page long speech titled The Voice of Life, he alsonoted, It is my further wish that as far as the limited accommodation would permit, the facilities of this Institute should be available to workers from all countries. In this I am attempting to carry out the traditions of my country, which so far back as twenty-five centuries ago, welcomed all scholars from different parts of the world, within the precincts of its ancient seats of learning, at Nalanda and at Taxilla.

The Bose Institute is Asias first modern research centre which focuses on interdisciplinary research. It hasconducted research across the board, in the fields of plant sciences, biotechnology, structural biology, biomedical sciences and molecular biology. It also fosters research in interdisciplinary physics such as astroparticle physics and cosmic rays and foundations of quantum physics.

In 1971, it became an autonomous grant-in-aid institution of the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India.

To recognise his achievements in the field of wireless telecommunications, a crater on the moon has beennamed after Bose. The crater has a diameter of 91 km and is located near Crater Bhabha (named after Indian nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha) and Crater Adler (named after German chemist Kurt Adler).

Also read: AK Ramanujan writer who was averse to conventions & called out material-minded Indians

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J.C. Bose Father of Radio Science who was forgotten by West due to his aversion to patents - ThePrint

Ever since the horrific death of George Floyd, events seem to be spiraling out of control.The American public is bombarded, almost on a daily basis with reports of large protests, rioting, looting, burning, assaults, and even murders. Photo credit ShutterStock.com, licensed.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution. Havelock Ellis

BOYNTON BEACH, FL Ever since the horrific death of George Floyd, events seem to be spiraling out of control.The American public is being bombarded, almost on a daily basis with reports of large protests in major cities; accompanied by rioting, looting, burning, assaults, and even murders.

Observing these events unfold, the average U.S. citizen watching tv from the purported safety of their home, might seem bewildered by these transformative events, the purpose of which is nothing less than a re-imagining of America.In order to better understand exactly what is happening, it is necessary to take a cue from the Revolutionary Handbook. There are approximately ten rules; which if you know and understand them, will help the reader to comprehend what is happening.

What does a great white shark have in common with a Revolutionary Movement?Both must continue to move forward or die.Those of you old enough to remember, might recall what was happening in the late 1960s.The overtures of that movement are eerily similar to what is happening today.The problem was that back then, the revolution was centered around the anti-Vietnam War Movement.Once peace came, the impetus of the revolution died out.

In more modern times we had the Occupy Wall Street Movement after the 2008 financial debacle. Protesters occupied an area of downtown Manhattan in close proximity to Wall Street.The civil authorities initially left them alone as long as there was no rioting or wanton destruction. However, as reports of widespread drug abuse began to trickle in, coupled with accusations of rape; the authorities had to act and cleared them out. Many of the occupiers had already left, not out of a lack of revolutionary zeal, but for another cogent reason; it was getting cold outside. Apparently, the winter months are not conducive to this type of protest.

Most Americans are fair-minded by nature and want to do the right thing.Terms such as Socialist, Communist or Marxist generally have a negative connotation and would not be well received by the populace at large.Do not look to antagonize them any more than is necessary.The revolution will need its army of useful idiots for the future.Instead, use terms such as progressive or social justice warrior to describe ones self.Other terms, such as environmental justice, racial/income inequality, redistribution of wealth, globalism, undocumented worker, and reimagine the police are also useful.These are far less threatening to the average American.When Fidel Castro ousted the unpopular dictator Batista, Castro initially identified himself as a humanist.Only after he felt safe and secure in his new position did he announce to the world: I am a Marxist Leninist.

It is a historic fact that once in power every single Communist or Fascist dictatorship closed down all oppositional voices.Truth is defined by whatever the revolution says it is, and anyone who dare speak out is immediately silenced.The only information that is heard and taught is that which advances the revolutionary cause.This was true in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.It is just as true today in Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. This point cannot be stressed enough.Once the revolution gains control over mass media, it controls all the information that is disseminated, and once the revolution gains control over the education system, it controls the future.Currently, we are seeing big tech, mainstream media, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and academia censor and suppress free speech.

This rule is simple to understand.Whatever the revolution cannot control could eventually be used against it.Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all dealt with the problem of supposed anti-revolutionary activists by instituting a series of purges aimed at crushing all potential opposition, which even extended to family members.Stalin himself is alleged to have remarked, that it was fine if innocents were punished along with the guilty, because that sends an even stronger message.

In the late 1950s, Mao unleashed the cultural revolution on China.It was based on a repudiation of what Mao called the four olds: old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.Estimates vary as to the number of people killed but it was most certainly in the millions.Coming as it did after the disastrous policies of the Great Leap Forward, it left China an economic and cultural wasteland.

Absolute loyalty to the revolution must come first.This extends even to members of ones own family.Children are encouraged to inform on their own parents if they hear anything that can be interpreted as counter-revolutionary; organized religion must also go.The revolution cannot have loyalty to God supersede loyalty to the state.

This is a very important point.A generally content, gainfully employed, and prosperous populace is not likely to support a revolutionary movement aimed at overthrowing the government, party or individual that has provided them with these benefits.In order for the revolution to be successful the population must be brought low and kept in a state of abject misery.Years ago, former White House Chief of Staff and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stated: Never let a good crisis go to waste.Recently, activist/actress Jane Fonda brought this concept up to modern times when she noted: Covid is Gods gift to the left.

A revolutionary movement can be composed of a number of seemingly divergent groups; each of which has a peeve with the central government. In our own country we have among others, minorities, LGBTQ, and feminists all rubbing shoulders with idealists, liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, Islamists, and hardcore Marxist revolutionaries. The last group is unquestionably the best organized and funded. They are completely devoted to the righteousness of their ideology and even have their own para-military group Antifa.Their ultimate goal is the complete destruction of the American political and economic system.They will settle for nothing less than total and complete power, which they will use to impose their will on all aspects of life.The second best organized and funded revolutionary group are the Islamists.Marxism and Islamism are in an alliance of convenience, and for now, intersectionality is in both of their best interests; until the revolution succeeds in overthrowing the system.In the end, they have nothing in common; least of which is religion.

A minority may be right; a majority is always wrong. Henrik Ibsen

This is often the most difficult point for the lay person to grasp.Most people automatically assume that any revolution must have popular support in order to succeed.This may have been true in some cases, but not all.People might be unaware that in 1917 there were two Russian revolutions.The first in Feb/March, did away with the Czar; establishing a provisional government.The second in Oct/Nov, did away with the provisional government and established a Communist regime that lasted for the next 73 years.The provisional government made the mistake of keeping Russia in the first world war; a source of widespread dissatisfaction among the people (See Rule #7).The Bolsheviks then swept into power with a simple slogan: Peace, Land, Bread.Although one cannot be certain of the number of hardcore committed Communists among the masses of disaffected citizenry in the Oct/Nov revolution, their numbers would have been comparatively small.It is interesting to speculate that had the provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky managed to extricate Russia from WWI, whether or not the November 1917 Communist Revolution would have succeeded.

In addition to exacting revenge on their opponents, revolutions usually turn on many of the very people who were its most ardent supporters.One only has to look at Hitlers Night of the Long Knives, Stalins Gulag Archipeligo, and Maos Cultural Revolution, for examples.French revolutionary, Pierre Vergniaud, best expressed this idea when he noted, There was reason to fear that the revolution, like Saturn, might devour in turn, each one of her children.Revolutionaries also speak in lofty terms about justice and equality, promising a true classless society, but in reality, wind up creating an entirely new class of elites based on party loyalty and affiliation.

Here then are the Rules for Revolutionaries. Hopefully, they will enable the reader to have a better understanding of what is happening in the America of today.One important point is that regardless of who is in the White House, what is happening on the streets will not stop (See Rule #1).The radical left is already looking to extract major concessions from the incoming Biden administration.They want something for their support and if they dont get it, are prepared to take to the streets. That will leave the new administration with two choices.Either put down the insurrection by the use of force; or by appeasement: offering bribes and concessions in the hope they will be placated.The problem with the latter approach is that appeasement as policy generally does not work and only prolongs the inevitable confrontation.Winston Churchill summed it up best when he said, An appeaser is someone who feeds a crocodile in the hope it will eat him last.

Where then does this leave us as a nation?There is no doubt that as a society we have made enormous strides in the last half century, yet we are still struggling to come to grips with our past.Sixty years ago, the election of an African-American with the unlikely name of Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office of the land would have been impossible.So too, the election of a number of minorities and women to seats in the House, Senate, and even the new VP Elect. We now have a large and expanding Black and Hispanic middle class and women have made their mark on the boards of some of the largest corporations.

Do we now throw all that away and adopt the failed economic and political system of our former Cold War adversaries?There is no perfect economic or political system, but there are systems that generally work better for more people than others. As imperfect as it is, Capitalism works better than Communism.Capitalist systems encourage innovation, individualism, personal responsibility, and independence.Marxist systems mandate conformity of ideas, conformity of thought, conformity of belief, and conformity of speech.Whatever our many problems, a revolution aimed at the overthrow of the entire system is not the answer.

Neo-Marxist ideologues in the U.S. would disagree with this conclusion. They will continue to extol the virtues of the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Chinese systems, but they themselves recoil at the suggestion that they relocate there.When confronted with the fact that at its height, more than 60% of the world embraced that system; that it failed everywhere, they invariably say something to the effect that Well get it right this time.As always, they admit nothing, deny everything, make counter charges, and in the final analysis: double down on their ideology.

As for the revolution itself, George Bernard Shaw probably stated it best when he wrote: Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Caren Besner is a retired teacher who has written articles published by American Thinker, Sun-Sentinel, Jewish Journal, The Algemeiner, Jerusalem Post, IsraPost, The Jewish Voice, Independent Sentinel, San Diego Jewish World, The Times of Israel, Jewish Press, The Front Page, The Florida Veteran, Jootube, and The Moderate Voice.

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Op-Ed: Rules For Revolutionaries: Understanding The Transformative Events That Are Reshaping America - The Published Reporter

Dear Reader, we make this and other articles available for free online to serve those unable to afford or access the print edition of Monthly Review. If you read the magazine online and can afford a print subscription, we hope you will consider purchasing one. Please visit the MR store for subscription options. Thank you very much. Eds.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Alejandro Pedregal is a writer, filmmaker, and lecturer at Aalto University, Finland.

This interview first appeared in Viento Sur 172 (OctoberNovember 2020), in Spain. The present English-language version is being published simultaneously in Monthly Review and Rab Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art 6, in Finland.

John Bellamy Foster writes me before leaving Eugene, Oregon: We had to evacuate. And we have to travel a long ways. But I will try to send the interview by the morning. The massive fires on the West Coast of the United States had triggered the air quality index up to values of 450, and in some cases over the maximum of 500an extremely dangerous health situation. Forty thousand people in Oregon had left their homes and another half a million were waiting to flee if the threat grew. Such is the world of climate change, Foster states. Professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review, twenty years ago Foster revolutionized Marxist ecosocialism with Marxs Ecology. This book, together with Marx and Nature by Paul Burkett, opened Marxism to a second wave of ecosocialist critique that confronted all kinds of entrenched assumptions about Karl Marx himself in order to elaborate an ecosocialist method and program for our time. The great development of Marxist ecological thought in recent yearswhich has shown how, despite writing in the nineteenth century, Marx is essential for reflecting on our contemporary ecological degradationis in part the product of a turn carried out by Foster and others linked to Monthly Review.His current, which came to be known as the school of the metabolic rift due to the central notion Foster rescued from volume 3 of Marxs Capital, has developed numerous ecomaterialist lines of research in the social and natural sciencesfrom imperialism and the study of the exploitation of the oceans, to social segregation and epidemiology. On the occasion of the release of his latest book, The Return of Nature, a monumental genealogy of great ecosocialist thinkers that has taken him twenty years to complete, Foster tells us about the path these key figures traveled, from the death of Marx to the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s and 70s, as well as about the relationship of his new book to Marxs Ecology and the most prominent debates of current Marxist ecological thought. His reflections thus serve to help us rethink the significance of this legacy, in view of the urgent need for a project that transcends the conditions that threaten the existence of our planet today.

Alejandro Pedregal: In Marxs Ecology, you refuted some very established assumptions about the relationship between Marx and ecology, both within and outside of Marxismnamely, that the ecological thought in Marxs oeuvre was marginal; that his few ecological insights were mostly (if not solely) found in his early work; that he held Promethean views on progress; that he saw in technology and the development of the productive forces the solution to the contradictions of society with nature; and that he did not show a genuine scientific interest in the anthropogenic effects on the environment. Your work, along with that of others, disputed these assumptions and shifted many paradigms associated with them. Do you think that these ideas persist in current debates?

John Bellamy Foster: Within socialist and ecological circles in English-speaking countries, and indeed I think in most of the world, these early criticisms of Marx on ecology are all now recognized as disproven. They not only have no basis in fact, but are entirely contradicted by Marxs very powerful ecological treatment, which has been fundamental to the development of ecosocialism and increasingly to all social-scientific treatments of the ecological ruptures generated by capitalism. This is particularly evident in the widespread and growing influence of Marxs theory of the metabolic rift, the understanding of which keeps expanding and which has been applied now to nearly all of our current ecological problems. Outside the English-speaking world, one still occasionally encounters some of the earlier misconceptions, no doubt because the most important works so far have been in English, and much of this has not yet been translated. Nevertheless, I think we can treat those earlier criticisms as now almost universally understood as invalid, not simply due to my work, but also that of Paul Burkett in Marx and Nature, Kohei Saito in Karl Marxs Ecosocialism, and many others. Hardly anyone on the left is so simplistic today as to see Marx as a Promethean thinker in the sense of promoting industrialization over all else. There is now a widespread understanding of how science and the materialist conception of nature entered his thought, a perception reinforced by the publication of some of his scientific/ecological extract notebooks in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe project. Thus, I dont think the view that Marxs ecological analysis is somehow marginal in his thought is given much credence among socialists in the English-speaking world today, and it is rapidly receding everywhere else. Ecological Marxism is a very big topic in Europe, Latin America, China, South Africa, the Middle Eastin fact, nearly everywhere. The only way in which Marxs ecological analysis can be seen as marginal is if one were to adopt an extremely narrow and self-defeating definition of what constitutes ecology. Moreover, in science, it is often the most marginal insights of a thinker that prove most revolutionary and cutting edge.

Why were so many convinced earlier on that Marx had neglected ecology? I think the most straightforward answer is that most socialists simply overlooked the ecological analysis present in Marx. Everyone read the same things in Marx in the prescribed manner, skipping over what was then designated as secondary and of little importance. I remember talking to someone years ago who said there were no ecological discussions in Marx. I asked if he had ever read the chapters on agriculture and rent in volume 3 of Capital. It turned out that he hadnt. I asked: If you havent read the parts of Capital where Marx examines agriculture and the soil, how can you be so sure that Marx did not deal with ecological questions? He had no answer. Other problems were due to translation. In the original English translation of Capital, Marxs early usage of Stoffwechsel, or metabolism, was translated as material exchange or interchange, which hindered rather than helped understanding. But there were also deeper reasons, such as the tendency to overlook what Marx meant by materialism itself, which encompassed not just the materialist conception of history, but also, more deeply, the materialist conception of nature.

The important thing about Marxs ecological critique is that it is unified with his political-economic critique of capitalism. Indeed, it can be argued that neither makes any sense without the other. Marxs critique of exchange value under capitalism has no significance outside of his critique of use value, which related to natural-material conditions. The materialist conception of history has no meaning unless it is seen in relation to the materialist conception of nature. The alienation of labor cannot be seen apart from the alienation of nature. The exploitation of nature is based on capitals expropriation of the free gifts of nature. Marxs very definition of human beings as the self-mediating beings of nature, as Istvn Mszros explained in Marxs Theory of Alienation, is based on a conception of the labor process as the metabolism of human beings and nature. Science as a means of enhancing the exploitation of labor cant be separated from science conceived as the domination of nature. Marxs notion of social metabolism cannot be divided off from the question of the metabolic rift. And so on. These things were not actually separated in Marx, but were removed from each other by later left thinkers, who generally ignored ecological questions, or who employed idealist, mechanist, or dualist perspectives and thus robbed the critique of political economy of its real material basis.

AP: In regard to Prometheanism, you have shown in your work how Marxs reflections on Prometheus are to be read in relation to his own scholarly research on Epicurus (as well as to the Roman poet Lucretius), and thus need to be interpreted as linked to the secular knowledge of the Enlightenment, rather than as a blind advocacy for progress. However, the dominant use of the term Prometheanism remains quite common, also in Marxist literature, which gives room to certain accelerationist and techno-fetishist trends that reclaim Marx for their aims. Should this notion be challenged more effectively, at least in relation to Marx and his materialist thought?

JBF: This is a very complicated issue. Everyone knows that Marx praised Prometheus. He was a devotee, of course, of Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound, which he reread frequently. In his dissertation he compared Epicurus to Prometheus. And Marx himself was even caricatured as Prometheus in the context of the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung in a famous image that appears in volume 1 of Marx and Fredrick Engelss Collected Works. It thus became common for various critics within and without Marxism to characterize Marxs views as Promethean, particularly in such a way as to suggest that he saw extreme productivism as the chief aim of society. Not having any proof that Marx put industrialization before human social (and ecological) relations, his critics simply employed the term Promethean as a way of making their point without evidence, merely taking advantage of this common association with Marx.

Yet, this was a distortion in quite a number of ways. In the Greek myth, Prometheus, a Titan, defied Zeus by giving fire to humanity. Fire of course has two manifest qualities. One is light, the other is energy or power. In the interpretation of the Greek myth in Lucretius, Epicurus was treated as the bringer of light or knowledge in the sense of Prometheus, and it was from this that Voltaire took the notion of Enlightenment. It was in this same sense that Marx himself praised Epicurus as Prometheus, the giver of light, celebrating him as the Enlightenment figure of antiquity. Moreover, Marxs references to Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound always emphasized Prometheus role as a revolutionary protagonist in defiance of the Olympian gods.

In the age of the Enlightenment itself, the Prometheus myth was seen, not surprisingly, as all about Enlightenment, not about energy or production. Walt Sheasby, a great ecosocialist with whom I worked in the early days of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and while I was also editor of Organization and Environment, wrote an extraordinary piece for the latter journal in March 1999, establishing conclusively that the notion of Prometheanism and the Promethean myth was used until the nineteenth century primarily in this sense of Enlightenment. I am not sure when the usage changed. But, certainly, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and Pierre-Joseph Proudhons The Philosophy of Poverty represented a shift where Prometheanism came to mean industrialism and machinery, symbolizing the Industrial Revolution. Here, Prometheus was seen as standing for mechanical power. It is interesting that Marx took on Proudhons mechanistic Prometheanism directly, attacking all such notions in The Poverty of Philosophy. Yet, the Promethean myth became reified as a story of industrialization, something the ancient Greeks themselves could never possibly have imagined, and the common identification of Marx with Prometheus in peoples minds became a way therefore of faulting him on ecological grounds. Interestingly, the charge that Marx was Promethean, which you find in such figures such as Leszek Kolakowski, Anthony Giddens, Ted Benton, and Joel Kovel, was directed against Marx exclusively and at no other thinker, which points to its ideological character.

The closest anyone could come to finding evidence that Marx was Promethean in the sense of glorifying industrialization as its own end was in his panegyric to the bourgeoisie in the first part of The Communist Manifesto, but this was simply a prelude to his critique of the same bourgeoisie. Thus, he turned around a few pages later, ushering in all the contradictions of the bourgeois order, referring to the sorcerers apprentice, ecological conditions (town and country), the business cycles, and of course the proletariat as the grave digger of capitalism. In fact, there is nowhere that Marx promotes industrialization as an objective in itself as opposed to free, sustainable human development.

Explaining all of this, though, takes time and, while I have brought up all of these points at various occasions in my work, it is usually sufficient simply to show that Marx was not at all a Promethean thinker, if what is meant by this is the worship of industry, technology, and productivism as ends in themselves, or a belief in an extreme mechanistic approach to the environment. In these concrete terms, setting aside the confusions borne of myth, there can be no doubt.

AP: Twenty years after Marxs Ecology, the extensive work of the metabolic rift school has transformed todays debates about Marxism and ecology. What are the continuities and changes between that context and the current one?

JBF: There are several different strands of discussion and debate. One, the most important, as I indicated, is a vast amount of research into the metabolic rift as a way of understanding the current planetary ecological crisis and how to build a revolutionary ecosocialist movement in response. Basically, what has changed things is the spectacular rise of Marxian ecology itself, throwing light on so many different areas, not only in the social sciences, but in the natural sciences as well. For example, Mauricio Betancourt has recently written a marvelous study for Global Environmental Change on The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift. Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark have applied Marxs method to the analysis of the oceanic rift in The Tragedy of the Commodity. Hannah Holleman has used it to explore dust bowls past and present in Dust Bowls of Empire. A considerable number of works have utilized the metabolic rift conception to understand the problem of climate change, including Brett Clark, Richard York, and myself in our book The Ecological Rift and Ian Angus in Facing the Anthropocene. These works, as well as contributions by others, such as Andreas Malm, Eamonn Slater, Del Weston, Michael Friedman, Brian Napoletano, and a growing number of scholars and activists too numerous to name, can all be seen basically in this light. An important organization is the Global Ecosocialist Network in which John Molyneux has played a leading role, along with System Change Not Climate Change in the United States. Naomi Kleins work has drawn on the metabolic rift concept. It has played a role in the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and in discussions around the question of ecological civilization in China.

Another issue concerns the relations between Marxian ecology and both Marxist feminist social reproduction theory and the new analyses of racial capitalism. All three of these perspectives have drawn in recent years on Marxs concept of expropriation as integral to his overall critique, extending beyond exploitation. It is these connections that motivated Brett Clark and myself to write our recent book The Robbery of Nature on the relation between robbery and the rift, that is, the expropriation of land, use values, and human bodies, and how this is related to the metabolic rift. An important area is the whole realm of ecological imperialism and unequal ecological exchange on which I have worked with Brett Clark and Hannah Holleman.

Today, there are some new criticisms of Marx on ecology aimed at the metabolic rift theory itself, saying it is dualistic rather than dialectical. But this of course is a misconception, since for Marx the social metabolism between humanity and (extra-human) nature through the labor and production process is by definition the mediation of nature and society. In the case of capitalism, this manifests itself as an alienated mediation in the form of the metabolic rift. Such an approach, focusing on labor/metabolism as the dialectical mediation of totality, could not be more opposed to dualism.

Others have said that if classical Marxism addressed ecological questions, they would have appeared in subsequent socialist analyses after Marx, but did not. That position too is wrong. In fact, that is the question taken up in The Return of Nature, which was expressly intended to explore the dialectic of continuity and change in socialist and materialist ecology in the century after the deaths of Charles Darwin and Marx, in 1882 and 1883 respectively.

AP: Indeed, in Marxs Ecology you focused on the emergence and formation of Marxs materialism in correlation to that of Darwins and Alfred Russell Wallaces theory of evolution, ending precisely with the deaths of the first two. Now, in your new book, you start from this point to trace an intellectual genealogy of key ecosocialist thinkers until the appearance of the ecological movement in the 1960s and 70s. For a long time, some of these stories did not receive enough attention. Why did it take so long to recover them? And how does the rediscovery of these links help us understand the emergence of the ecologist movement differently?

JBF: The Return of Nature continues the method of Marxs Ecology. This can be seen by comparing the epilogue of the earlier book to the argument of the later one. Marxs Ecology (apart from its epilogue) ends with the deaths of Darwin and Marx; The Return of Nature begins with their funerals and with the one person who was known to be present at both funerals, E. Ray Lankester, the great British zoologist who was Darwins and Thomas Huxleys protege and Marxs close friend. The Return of Nature is not directed simply at the development of Marxist ideas, but at the socialists and materialists who developed what we today call ecology as a critical form of analysis. Moreover, we can see how these ideas were passed on in a genealogical-historical fashion.

Like all Marxian historiography, this, then, is a story of origins and of the dialectic of continuity and change. It presents a largely unbroken genealogy that extends, though in complex ways, from Darwin and Marx to the explosion of ecology in the 1960s. Part of my argument is that the socialist tradition in Britain from the late nineteenth to the midtwentieth century was crucial in this. Not only was this the main period of the development of British socialism, but in the sciences the most creative work was the product of a kind of synthesis of Darwin and Marx along evolutionary ecological lines. The British Marxist scientists were closely connected to those revolutionary Marxist thinkers involved in the early and most dynamic phase of Soviet ecology (nearly all of whom were later purged under Joseph Stalin), but unlike their Soviet counterparts, the British left scientists were able to survive and develop their ideas, ushering in fundamentally new socioecological and scientific perspectives.

A common criticism of Marxs Ecology from the beginning, raised, for example, in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism right after the book was published, was that, even if Marx had developed a powerful ecological critique, this had not been carried forward in subsequent socialist thought. There were two answers to this. The first was Rosa Luxemburgs statement that Marxs science had reached far beyond the immediate movement and the issues of the time, and that, as new contradictions and challenges arose, new answers would be found in Marxs scientific legacy. In fact, it is true that Marxs perception of the ecological crisis of capitalism, based in tendencies of his time, was far ahead of the historical development and movement, which in some ways makes his analysis more valuable, not less. But the other answer is that the presumption that there was no socialist ecological analysis was false. Indeed, ecology as a critical field was largely the creation of socialists. I had already tried to explain this in the epilogue to Marxs Ecology, but much more was needed. The challenge was to uncover the history of socialist and materialist ecology in the century after Marx. But doing this was a huge undertaking since there was no secondary literature to speak of, except in some respect Helena Sheehans marvelous Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.

I commenced the archival research for The Return of Nature in 2000, around the time that Marxs Ecology was published. The idea was always to explore further the issues brought up in the epilogue, focusing on the British context. But at the same time, as I began this work, I also took on the position of coeditor (and eventually sole editor) of Monthly Review, and that naturally pulled me back to political economy, which governed my work for years. Moreover, when I wrote on ecology in these years, I had to deal first and foremost with the immediate crisis. So, I could only work on an intensive project like The Return of Nature at times when the pressure was off, during short vacations from teaching. As a result, the work proceeded slowly over the years with innumerable interruptions. I might never have finished the book except for constant encouragement by a few friends (particularly John Mage, to whom the book is dedicated), and the fact that the ecological problem came to loom so large that, for Monthly Review itself, the ecological critique became as important as the critique of political economy, making the development of systematic historical approach more necessary than ever.

However, the bigger reason the book took so long was that these stories were not known and it required an enormous amount of archival research and pursuit of obscure sources, including works that no one had read for more than half a century. Great works were cast aside and grew moldy in obscure corners. Other writings were not published or had appeared only in hard-to-find places. The role of thinkers such as J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, Hyman Levy, and Lancelot Hogben in the development of ecological thought was, despite their earlier prominence, then unknown or forgotten, in part a casualty of the internecine struggles within Marxism itself. Also forgotten were the great left classicists such as Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson, and Jack Lindsay. With all of this to deal with, grasping the vast scope of the analyses, placed in their proper historical context, took time.

But the historical linkages, as you say, were definitely there. The story leads in the end to figures like Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson, and also to Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Steven and Hilary Rose, Lindsay, and E. P. Thompson (who became Britains leading antinuclear activist)all of whom were immensely impacted, although in different ways, by this intellectual and political inheritance. In answer to your question on how this history can help us in todays struggles, perhaps the most succinct response is the statement of Quentin Skinner, who I quote in the introduction of The Return of Nature, who says that the only purpose of such histories is to demonstrate how our society places limitations on our imaginations. He adds that we are all Marxists to this extent.

AP: Marxs Ecology mentions how your own internalization of the legacy of Georg Lukacs (and Antonio Gramsci) prevented you from using the dialectical method for the realm of nature. You point out how, due to this common weakness, Western Marxism had partly abandoned the field of nature and the philosophy of science to the dominion of mechanist and positivist variants of thought. However, The Return of Nature begins precisely by questioning some assumptions about Lukcs central to the departure of Western Marxism from the dialectics of nature. What conditions delayed so many findings of this importance? What were the main effects that these assumptions had on Marxism, particularly in relation to ecology?

JBF: Maybe I can explain this somewhat through my own intellectual development. When I was an undergraduate, I studied the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Marx, Engels, V. I. Lenin, and Max Weber fairly extensively, as well as thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Mszros, Ernst Cassirer, H. Stuart Hughes, and Arnold Hauser. So, when I got to graduate school, I had a pretty good general idea of the boundaries between Kantianism/neo-Kantianism and Hegelianism/Marxism. I was therefore surprised, in participating in courses on critical theory, to find that the very first proposition taught was that the dialectic did not apply to nature, based primarily on the authority of a footnote in Lukcss History and Class Consciousness, where he had criticized Engels on the dialectics of nature. Only by rejecting the dialectic of nature, it was argued, could the dialectic be defined in terms of the identical subject-object of the historical process.

Of course, Lukcs himself, as he later pointed out, had never totally abandoned the notion of merely objective dialectics or the dialectics of nature, which he referred to elsewhere in History and Class Consciousness. Indeed, in his famous 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukcs, following Marx, insisted on a dialectical mediation between nature and society via labor as metabolism, and in that sense on a dialectics of nature conception. The same argument was made in his Conversations with Lukcs, which I read in the early 1980s.

It was in this context that I internalized, to some extent, at a practical level, without ever fully embracing, the Western Marxist philosophical notion that the dialectic was applicable only to the human historical realm and not to nature (or natural science), which was given over to mechanism or positivism. I came to see the historical dialectic in terms of the Vician principle that we can understand history because we have made it, as advanced by Marxist historian E. P. Thompsoneven though I recognized that, at a deeper level, this was not entirely satisfactory because human beings do not make history alone, but do so in conjunction with the universal metabolism of nature of which human society is an emergent part. But my interests in the 1980s were mainly geared toward political economy and history, where such issues seldom arose. As far as the human historical realm was concerned, it was easy enough to bracket the question of the dialectics of nature.

It was when I turned more directly to the question of ecology in the late 1980s and 90s that this problem became unavoidable. The dialectics of nature could only consistently be set aside on idealist or mechanical materialist grounds. Still, in writing Marxs Ecology, I consciously avoided, for the most part, any explicit, detailed consideration of the dialectics of nature in relation to Marx, given the complexity of the issues, which I was not then prepared to address, though clearly Marxs concept of social metabolism took him in that direction. Thus, in the epilogue to Marxs Ecology, I simply referred to Marxs reference to the dialectical method as the way of dealing with the free movement of matter, and how this was part of the inheritance he had taken from Epicurus and other earlier materialists, mediated by his studies of Hegel. As an epistemological approach, I indicated, this could be defended as heuristically equivalent to the role that teleology played for human cognition in Kant. But the wider ontological question of so-called objective dialectics, as this appeared in Engels (and in Lukcs), and its relation to Marx, was mostly avoided (left implicit) in my book.

I did not address the dialectics of nature explicitly in any detail until 2008, in a chapter that I wrote for a book on dialectics edited by Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (later included in The Ecological Rift). Here, I was still caught in what I called the Lukcs problem, even if I understood that, for the later Lukcs, Marxs metabolism argument offered a broad pathway out of the whole epistemological-ontological dilemma. (While another pathway, I argued, was to be found in what Marx had called the dialectic of sensuous certitude represented by the materialism of Epicurus, Francis Bacon, and Ludwig Feuerbach, and incorporated into Marxs early work). Yet, my approach there, even if arguably a step forward, was in various ways inadequate. Part of the difficulty, as I came to understand it, lay in the philosophical limitations (and at the same time much greater scientific scope) of a materialist dialectic, which could never be a closed, circular system as in Hegels idealist philosophyor a totalizing system consisting exclusively of internal relations and windowless monads. The dialectic for Marx was open, not closed, as was the case for the physical world itself.

The question of the dialectics of nature was to be central to The Return of Nature. One element was the study of the later Lukcs, particularly The Young Hegel and the Ontology of Social Being. A key factor here was Lukcss treatment of Hegels reflection determinations, which helped me understand the way in which Engelss dialectical naturalism had been inspired to a considerable extent by the Doctrine of Essence in Hegels Logic. Another element affecting my views, going back to Marxs Ecology, was the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar, especially his Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. But at the heart of my project in The Return of Nature was the close scrutiny of Engelss Dialectics of Nature itself (as well as Lenins philosophical writings), which had untold depth. This allowed me to chart the influence that Engels exerted on subsequent thinkersmost notably, in terms of the dialectics of nature problem itself, on Needham, Christopher Caudwell, and Lindsay. In addition, William Morris in the arts and Haldane, Bernal, Hogben, and Levy in the sciences offered a variety of powerful insights into dialectical and materialist ecology.

AP: Lukacs also noted how the division of alienated labor served to increase the disciplinary divisions of knowledge according to the needs of functional specialization of capital. As a philosophy of praxis, Marxism is proposed as a totalizing project, among other things, to recompose the many varied rifts that capitalism had expanded or imposed: nature and society, but also science and art. A central theme of your new book is the existence of parallel approaches to ecology and socialism in science and art. How did these links contribute to materialist ecosocialist thought? And how can they help us rethink this interaction in relation to ecology and the ecosocial crisis we face?

JBF: In writing The Return of Nature, Morriss statement in News from Nowhere that there were two insurmountable forms of knowledge, the sciences and the arts, was constantly on my mind. All of the Marxist thinkers concerned with ecology crossed these boundaries in various ways, so the parallel developments had to be examined in any genealogical-historical account. Clearly, the analytical development of ecology as a science and its relation to the dialectics of nature evolved mainly through the scientific stream. But it was hardly possible to isolate this from socialist aesthetics.

Thus, Lankester was friends with Morris and the pre-Raphaelites. Hogben took the main inspiration for his socialism from Morris. In Morris, we find an analysis rooted in the conception that all unalienated work contains art, a notion he drew from John Ruskin, but to which he added depth via Marx. Morris also reproduced independently of Marx the notion of the social character of all art. Caudwell brilliantly captured both the aesthetic and scientific strands of the overall ecological critique. His aesthetics drew on the concept of mimesis based in Aristotle and in the radical British classical tradition of the Cambridge ritualists represented by Jane Harrison, which Caudwell then merged with materialist dialectics. Caudwells powerful approach led to George Thomsons extraordinary analyses of the origins of poetry and drama.

This whole aesthetic-ecological development on the left culminated with the Australian Marxist Jack Lindsay, who due to his enormous range of classical, literary, philosophical, and scientific studies was to bring together notions on the dialectics of nature, drawing on both aesthetics and science. It is no accident that thinkers like Lukcs, Mszros, and Thompson thought so highly of Lindsay, whose work is not sufficiently valued, perhaps because navigating his corpus of 170 volumes, extending from the ancient classics to literature, poetry, history, and the philosophy of science is simply too daunting.

AP: Engels is a key character in your new book. For a long time, within certain Marxisms, Engels was accused of having vulgarized Marxs thought, but you point out the relevance and complexity of Engelss dialectical materialism for a social and ecological critique of capitalism. Although increasingly recognized, you can still find a certain disdain for Engels and for his works ties to Marx. How did this happen? How do we contest these positions from the standpoint of Marxist ecological thought?

JBF: I remember hearing David McClellan speak in December 1974, not long after he had written his biography on Marx. I was completely taken aback by an extraordinary tirade against Engels, which was the core of his talk. This was my first real introduction to the attacks on Engels that in so many ways came to define the Western Marxist tradition in the days of the Cold War, and which have carried over into the post-Cold War era. All of this was clearly less about Engels as a thinker than it was about the two Marxisms, as Alvin Gouldner called it. Western Marxism and, to a considerable extent, the academic world claimed Marx as their own, as an urbane thinker, but for the most part rejected Engels as supposedly too crude, casting him in the role of spoiler, as the person who had created a Marxism that had nothing to do with Marx, and who was thus responsible for the economism, determinism, scientism, and vulgar philosophical and political perspectives of the Second International and beyond, all the way to Stalin.

It should not perhaps surprise us, therefore, that while we can find hundreds, even thousands, of books and articles that mention Engelss Dialectics of Nature, there is hardly anything to be learned from them because they either treat his views in a doctrinaire way, as in much of the old official Marxism, or, in the case of the Western Marxist philosophical tradition, simply quote a few lines from Dialectics of Nature, or sometimes Anti-Dhring, so as to establish his vulgarization of Marxism. Others, like Terrell Carver, who has written extensively on Engels, devote themselves not to furthering an understanding of Engelss work, but to the systematic severing of Engelss work from that of Marx.

I remember looking at Karl Padovers Letters of Karl Marx and wondering why it felt like such an arid empty work, despite the fact that it was filled entirely with Marxs own words. I realized it was because almost all the letters were to Engels and Engels was left out of the book, so it is a one-sided conversation, as if only Marx counted and was simply talking to himself. The Marx-Engels correspondence is definitely a two-sided conversation, and takes on much of its brilliance as a continual dialogue between these two magisterial thinkers, who together founded historical materialism.

In terms of Marxian ecology, Engels is essential. Because as brilliant as Marxs analysis was in this regard, we cannot afford to ignore the vast contributions of Engels to class-based epidemiology (the main subject of his Condition of the Working Class in England), to the dialectics of nature and emergence, to the critique of the conquest of nature, or to the understanding of human evolutionary development. Engels critical appropriation of Darwin in Anti-Dhring was fundamental to the development of evolutionary ecology. The emergentist materialism developed in Dialectics of Nature is central to a critical scientific world view.

AP: Monthly Review has always shown great sensibility to the revolutionary struggles of the third world. Lenins theory of imperialism, together with that of monopoly capital by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, dependency theory (in Ruy Mauro Marini and Samir Amin, among others) and its dialogue with world-systems analysis, or the contributions of Mszros, among many other influences, have been essential for the elaboration of your specific ecosocialist critique. Unfortunately, and to some extent in connection to the limitations of Western Marxism, the link between ecology and imperialism has been often underestimated in other Marxist and ecological currents. Some have even considered imperialism an outdated category to deal with global capitalism. Why is it that this separation between geopolitics and ecology remains so strong in certain sectors of the left? Is a different approach to these matters possible?

JBF: In my generation in the United States, impacted by the Vietnam War and the coup in Chile, most of those drawn to Marxism came to it by way of opposing imperialism. It was partly for this reason that I was attracted early on to Monthly Review, which, practically from its birth in 1949, has been a major source of the critique of imperialism, including dependency theory and world-system analysis. Harry Magdoffs writings on imperialism, in The Age of Imperialism and Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present are central to us, as well as work on imperialism by Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Che Guevara, Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, and a host of others. The fact that the most revolutionary perspective in the United States has historically come from the Black movement, which has always been more internationalist and anti-imperialist in its perspective, has been crucial in defining the radical U.S. left. Yet, with all of this, there have always been major social democratic figures in the United States, such as Michael Harrington, who have made their peace with U.S. imperialism. Today, some of the representatives of the new movement for democratic socialism regularly turn a blind eye to Washingtons ruthless interventions abroad.

Of course, none of this is new. Variants of the conflict over imperialism within the left can be seen as far back as the early socialist movement in England. H. M. Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, and George Bernard Shaw, one of the leading Fabians, both supported the British Empire and social imperialism. On the other side were figures associated with the Socialist League, such as Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Engels, all of whom were anti-imperialists. It was the issue of imperialism that was most decisively to split the European socialist movement at the time of the First World War, as recounted in Lenins Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Within the New Left in Britain from the 1960s, imperialism was a major source of contention. Those who identified with the First New Left, such as Thompson, Ralph Miliband, and Raymond Williams, were strongly anti-imperialist, while the Second New Left, associated in particular with the New Left Review, either saw imperialism as a progressive force in history, as in the case of Bill Warren, or tended to downplay its significance altogether. The result, particularly with the rise of globalization ideology in this century, was a dramatic decline in studies of imperialism (though accompanied by growing cultural studies of colonialism and postcolonialism) in both Britain and the United States. The logical outcome of this is that a figure as influential today in the left academy as David Harvey has recently pronounced that imperialism has been reversed, with the West now on the losing end.

All of this takes us to the question of the very weak performance on the left generally in developing a theory of ecological imperialism, or unequal ecological exchange. This is a product of the systematic failure to explore capitalisms ruthless expropriation of the resources and ecology of most of the world. This is about use value, not just exchange value. Thus, the famines introduced in India under British colonial rule had to do with how the British forcibly altered the food regime in India, shifting the use values, metabolic relations, and the hydrological infrastructure essential to human survival, while also draining away Indias surplus. Although this process of ecological expropriation has long been understood by the left in India, and in much of the rest of the Global South, it is still not fully grasped by Marxists in the Global North. An exception is Mike Daviss excellent Late Victorian Holocausts.

Similarly, the massive expropriation of guano from Peru to fertilize European soil, which had been robbed of its nutrients (a manifestation of the metabolic rift), was to have all sorts of long-term negative developmental effects on Peru, and included the importation of Chinese laborers under conditions that were often characterized as worse than slavery to dig the guano. All of this was tied to what Eduardo Galeano called The Open Veins of Latin America.

What this tells us is that the issues of ecology and imperialism have always been intimately related and are becoming more closely intertwined all the time. The Ecological Threat Register 2020 report from the Institute of Economics and Peace indicates that as many as 1.2 billion people may be displaced from their homes, becoming climate refugees, by 2050. Under such historical conditions, imperialism can no more be analyzed independently from the planetary ecological destruction that it has brought into being than the planetary ecological crisis can be addressed independently from the imperialism in which it is being played out today. This was the message that Brett Clark and I sought to convey in The Robbery of Nature, and that the two of us, together with Hannah Holleman, endeavored to explain in our article Imperialism in the Anthropocene, published in the JulyAugust 2019 issue of Monthly Review. In that article, we concluded: There can be no ecological revolution in the face of the current existential crisis unless it is an anti-imperialist one, drawing its power from the great mass of suffering humanity. The poor shall inherit the earth or there will be no earth left to inherit.

AP: As we have seen, interest in Marxs ecosocialism has grown greatly in recent decades. But, of course, this goes beyond Marxs historical context. Why is it important for current ecological thought to return to the ideas of Marx? And what are the challenges for Marxist ecological thought today?

JBF: Marxs ecology is a starting point and a set of foundations, not an end point. It is in Marxs thought above all that we find the foundations of the critique of political economy that was also a critique of capitalisms ecological depredations. This was no accident, since Marx dialectically presented the labor process as the social metabolism (the mediation) of nature and society. In Marx, capitalism, in alienating the labor process, also alienated the metabolism between humanity and nature, thereby generating a metabolic rift. Marx took this to its logical conclusions, arguing that no one owns the earth, not even all the people in all the countries of the world own the earth, that they simply have the responsibility to care for it and, if possible, improve it for the chain of future generations as good heads of the household. He defined socialism as the rational regulation of the metabolism of humanity and nature, so as to conserve as much as possible on energy and promote full human development. There is nothing in conventional or even left green theoryhowever much capitalism may be questioned in partthat has this unity between ecological and economic critique, or as comprehensive a historical synthesis. Consequently, in our planetary emergency, ecosocialism has come to rest inevitably on Marxs foundational conception. The environmental movement, if it is to matter at all, has to be ecosocialist.

But, of course, I would not have written The Return of Nature, which focuses on the century following Marx and Darwins deaths, if socialist ecology simply began and ended with Marx. It is crucial to understand how socialist dialectical, materialist, and ecological perspectives developed from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century in order to grasp the historical theory and practice that feeds into todays struggles. Our task now is not simply to linger on the past, but to pull all of this together to engage with the challenges and burdens of our historical time. Marx serves to demonstrate the essential one-ness of our political-economic-ecological contradictions and their basis in the present alienated social and ecological order. This helps us unmask the contradictions of the present. But to carry out the necessary change, we need to do so with an eye to how the past informs the present and allows us to envision necessary revolutionary action.

The purpose of Marxian ecological thought is not merely to understand our present social and ecological contradictions, but to transcend them. Given that humanity is facing greater dangers than ever before and is on a runaway capitalist train headed over the cliff, this has to be our chief concern. Facing up to the planetary ecological emergency means we must be more revolutionary than ever before, and not be afraid to raise the question of altering society, as Marx said, from top to bottom, starting from where we are. The piecemeal and reformist approach of most environmentalism, which puts faith in the market and technology, while making its peace in large part with the prevailing system, with its unceasing, totalizing ecological destruction, will not work, even in the short run. There is now more than a century of socialist critique of the ecological contradictions of capitalism, which has enormous theoretical power and points to a different philosophy of praxis. In our current growing recognition that there is no choice but to leave capitalisms burning house, we need the deeper theoretical understanding of human, social, and ecological possibility, of freedom as necessity, offered by ecological Marxism. As Doris Lessing, who appears briefly in The Return of Nature, stated in her introduction to The Golden Notebook: Marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other. This is the revolutionary capacity we most need today.

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The Return of Nature and Marx's Ecology - Monthly Review

George Bernard Shaw once observed that all - [sic] he referred to - as "progress," - depends upon the unreasonable man or woman.

His argument was that the reasonable man/woman adapts themself to the world whereas the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to themself. In the current political crisis surrounding our ongoing - should've been settled two plus weeks ago plus election, I find myself at a loss as to what he meant by "progress" in that adage as I watch the machinations of the defeated sitting lame duck president and the cult of Covidiot unreason that panders to him and his unlawfulness and supports this.. frankly, Tripe.

What used to be the party of Lincoln almost in its entirety in the body politic refuses to admonish this dangerously reckless, feckless despot and his refusal to accept the votes of the American populace on Nov. 3, almost three weeks ago; something never seen by myself as a septuagenarian. Note: my milestone birthday only slightly preceded the election!

Now via telephone the sitting lame duck, attempting to coerce a Republican election canvasser in a predominantly African-American Wayne County, MI. into not certifying the election results. Note: she attempted vis-a-vis a sworn affidavit the following day to reverse her prior first, non certification, then certification! WTF?

Enter Lindsey Graham: the most disingenuous yet.Threatening a secretary of state! 52 US Code - 20511 could slap his ass in jail for 5 years for his collusion with this scheme. Trust he's all lawyered up on the taxpayer's dime.

Jon St.Laurent No. Bridgton, Maine

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Letter to the Editor: What used to be the party of Lincoln - Daily Bulldog

The socialist says, Lets talk about it. When you get into socialism you will be told by the communist: My way or youre dead. Communism is the goal.

The state will determine who is allowed to have children, which children are to be born and when it is time to die.

A quote from George Bernard Shaw: I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner, but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.

Health care for the elderly? No elderly, no problem.

Communist tactic: Accuse your opponents of your own evils. The DNC/CPUSA are examples of all the names they have called President Trump. They are the liars, hypocrites, frauds, homophobes, bigots, racists. Donald Trump is an honest man, a man of moral integrity. He is a leader! One of We the People.

President Trump, stay the course. This past election is a fraud put forth by the DNC/CPUSA and the RINOs. It is intended to destroy this great nation and turn it into a communist state.

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Letter to the Editor: First socialism, then communism - North Platte Telegraph

In last Sundays Inquirer, Pastor Nicolas ORourke, the organizing director of Phillys Working Families Party and a leader of the local progressive movement, penned an op-ed confirming that, now that the election was over, the jockeying for political IOUs had begun.

It was our work, our connections with voters, and our vision that brought [Joe Biden] to victory, ORourke wrote. Biden owes our movements a great deal of thanks for getting voters out to the polls for himAs usual, the Democratic Party played to a mythical swing voter while taking Black and brown voters for granted.

In a post-election joint statement, local progressive and Democratic Socialist leaders, like Councilmembers Helen Gym, Kendra Brooks and Jamie Gauthier, as well as state rep Liz Fiedler and State Senator-elect Nikil Saval, echoed ORourkes clarion call.

Tell me if this isnt an apt description of what we need right now: A liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism.

Politics is about understanding when you have leverage, and then cashing it in. Make no mistake what ORourke et al are up to. Some might call it spin; theyre going about the business of trying to build leverageeven when the facts arent on their side. Because any fair-minded analysis of the election has to conclude that, yes, Trumps petulant voter fraud claims are specious, but so too are these progressive victory laps.

The truth is, Bidens outperformance of Hillary Clinton in the pragmatic center of our politics was the difference between winning and losing. According to exit polling, Biden won independents by 14 points (Trump won them last time) and won 64 percent of self-described moderates. He also did eight percentage points better than Clinton with working class voters. He took 36 percent of white voters without a college degree, up 6 percentage points over Hillary. Not only that, Biden significantly outperformed Hillary among seniors and in the suburbs. Despite record turnout of 65 percent, on the other hand, Philadelphia actually produced less of a plurality for Biden than Hillary had posted.

This tells us a number of things. For one, that Bernie Sanders was wrong when he proffered that, if only ever more progressives turned out, a new majority would emerge: The key to this election is can we get millions of young people who have never voted before into the political process, many working people who understand that Trump is a fraud, can we get them voting?

Related from The Philadelphia Citizen:

I Call Them Momola and the Mensch

Catching up with Delaware Rabbi Michael Beals, also known as Joe Bidens rabbi

Ruy Teixeira, the progressive demographer, explained the difference-maker in a smart New Yorker autopsy. The theory that Biden would win, to a great extent, because he could reduce the white, non-college deficit turned out to be true, he tells John Cassidy.

In other words, the masses arent as progressive as the progressives would have us think. We need more data on this, but it seems likely that, as vulnerable swing state congressional candidates have complained, calls to defund police, embracing socialism, and a seeming tolerance of looting were a drag on down-ballot Democrats. (Sanders and his local acolytes are keen to tell us that public opinion polls show a majority of Americans supporting Medicare for All, for example, but they leave out that, when told that such a program would result in 160 million Americans losing employer-based healthcare and the obliteration of the health insurance industrywith its tens of thousands of middle class jobsit kinda loses its progressive appeal.)

It should come as no surprise that, post-election, a phalanx of interest groups are now boxing each other out in the hopes of cashing in their chits. Its natural, on some level, harkening back to the famous JFK quote: Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. Its also a sign of the times. Politics has become a short-term I got mine game.

But beyond all the spin, there just may be a harbinger of hope in this years election results. It will take some doing, but Biden has the opportunity to be the first politician since Robert Kennedy to build a coalition driven by both African-American and white working class support.

In other words, the masses arent as progressive as the progressives would have us think.

This was the strategy presciently laid out two years ago for Democrats by Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive, independent think tank. In a Century Foundation report titled The Inclusive Populism of Robert F. Kennedy and an op-ed in The New York Times, Kahlenberg held up Kennedys stirring 1968 presidential primary campaign as a model for a worker-based, multi-racial political coalition thatand tell me if this isnt an apt description of what we need right nowoffers a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism.

Yes, Kennedy was the beloved brother of a martyred president, but, during his inspiring run of primary victories prior to his tragic assassination, hed found a message that resonated with groups that had long been purposely set against one another. And so this scion of a dynastic family set out trying to persuade both groups that they were stronger together. We have to convince the Negroes and the poor whites that they have common interests, RFK told legendary New York newsman Jack Newfield.

Related from The Philadelphia Citizen:

Winning and Losing On Election Night

Whos up? Whos down? And is there a path forward for a President Biden to change the tone of our politics?

And so we got Kennedys populism without racism when hed call out wealthy tax cheats on the stump, just as we got his liberalism minus the elitism when hed call himself an Opportunity Democrat and argue for rewarding work rather than perpetuating a welfare system that, he held, had demeaned its recipients. Hed hold up the innovative public/private economic revitalization program hed instituted in Brooklyn as an example of what it means to invest in people, at the same time that hed condemn the lawlessness of looting without apology, always reminding voters that law-abiding inner city residents and businesses deserve the same expectation of safety as those in the suburbs.

Kennedy was a uniquely gifted politician, with a more finely-attuned ear than even his brother. (If youre unfamiliar with the 68 Kennedy campaign, read Jules Witcovers account of it, 85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy, or just check out this moving video.

Rather than pander, he challenged the voter, as at Notre Dame during the Indiana primary, when Kennedy was booed by his anti-war base for wanting to abolish college draft deferments. Youre getting the unfair advantage while poor people are being drafted! he bellowed. Once, when asked by a college student who was going to pay for the social programs he was proposing, he responded, you are, before connecting his response to an ethos his otherwise odious father had instilled in the Kennedy brood: To whom much is given, much is required.

This was, in its frankness and its soaring, heartfelt rhetoric an atypical campaign. Kennedy would close his stump speeches by appealing to the inner idealist in all of us: As George Bernard Shaw wrote, Some men see things as they are and say why/I dream things that never were and say why not? (During a torrential downpour in Indiana, the candidate ad-libbed: As George Bernard Shaw wrote, head for the buses! he yelled, leading a run to shelter.)

Could Kennedys upstart and ill-fated 68 campaign provide something of a roadmap for Joe Biden, a way to unite Blacks and working-class whites on a common agenda? Kahlenberg thinks so. During one of the debates, Trump was goading Biden and saying he wouldnt even say the words law and order, Kahlenberg said when I caught up with him earlier this week. And I thought Bidens response was pitch perfect, and something right in keeping with Robert Kennedy. He said, Im for law and order, with justice. A lot of Democrats wont say the words law and order because theyre afraid of sounding racist. Of course, when Trump says those words, it is racist. But Biden putting those three things togetherlaw, order and justicewas perfect, because its where Americans are.

Biden has the opportunity to be the first politician since Robert Kennedy to build a coalition driven by both African-American and white working class support.

Building such a coalition wont be easy, of course. It would mean that progressives, when in conversation with whites who shower after work, would have to resist the urge to effectively say, What you dont understand about yourself is by telling a middle-aged factory worker he is privileged. It would mean that AOC, et al give up trying to force utopian policies on those who represent unsafe districts. It would mean being okay with universal policies that disproportionately benefit African-Americans, as opposed to those that directly target African-Americans; think, student debt forgiveness or the $15 minimum wage as opposed to reparations for slavery, likely a non-starter without control of the U.S. Senate.

For Biden, it would mean governing from the middle outsomething he was clear about in the election, and rewarded for, especially by African-American voters. Rather than paying back individual groups by pursuing, say, D.C. statehood and the slashing of federal police funding, hed do well to prioritize an infrastructure plan that puts Black and White workers to work, together.

If he does that, and if progressives dont go to war with the Biden administration, which would only presage the surrendering of the House in 2022, they will be embarking on a vision first given voice by a star-crossed pugilistic idealist in the turbulent Sixties: You know, Ive come to the conclusion that poverty is closer to the root of the problem than color, Bobby Kennedy said then. I think there has to be a new kind of coalition to keep the Democratic party going, and to keep the country together: Negroes, blue-collar whites, and the kids.

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Is Joe Biden the new RFK? - The Philadelphia Citizen

C

oronavirus is a battle against pathogens and spike proteins. But it is also a battle against misinformation and anxiety. Now that a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech could be approved next month, and a large trial of the Oxford/AstraZenica vaccine has shown it is effective, public trust is suddenly imperative. Foolish fictions or unnecessary anxiety about vaccination are no longer just odd theories touted by people ignorant of medicine. They could be much more dangerous than that.

There is a lot to be done before we can safely land back in the lives we once led. An approved vaccine will be a major logistical challenge for a government that hardly inspires confidence on that account. Storage will be needed for those vaccines that are only stable at minus 70C. Mass vaccination centres will have to be established rapidly, in sports halls and car parks, to match 10 million doses to the public. Even if capacity is built for 1.2 million doses to be administered a week, it will take five months to vaccinate everyone over the age of 65.

Yet the major problem might be rhetorical. Research by the Vaccine Confidence Project has that, in this country, only 52 per cent of people are confident that vaccines are safe. One study found only a third of British people would be willing to get a coronavirus vaccine. The same is true elsewhere. A Gallup poll found only 58 per cent of Americans willing to be vaccinated and only 54 per cent of the French are currently happy to take the jab. A sceptical public could yet prevent herd immunity through vaccination which looks like our best option to beat the virus. The Prime Ministers Covid communication has been erratic, veering between baseless optimism and apologetic gloom about lockdown. Flanked by his chosen scientific experts, Boris Johnson now faces a task of persuasion. He needs to take on each objection to the vaccine and calmly debunk them.

People will naturally worry that safety might have been compromised in the tearing hurry for a vaccine. In fact, the current researchers are standing on the shoulders of many who have gone before. The existing technologies are being adapted to Covid-19. Science does not start with a blank sheet of paper every time. The process of regulatory approval has, indeed, been speeded up, but that does not mean its hurdles have been lowered. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is emphatic that this is not the case. All vaccines approved will be closely monitored, as is the usual practice, and then reviewed in a years time.

Mr Johnson needs to show us that the chance of death or serious side-effects are undetectably small. The process has included the large trials, with 30,000 volunteers in the case of Pfizer and Moderna, in which side effects, which usually manifest quickly, would have shown up. The Prime Minister will also have to educate us in the prevalence of coincidence. During a mass vaccination programme some people will die of heart attacks and strokes on the same day. It will be easy for anyone looking for false associations to suppose that one event caused the other.

Along the way Mr Johnson will have to remind the public that there is no reputable evidence to link vaccination programmes with autism, no spooky links to 5G masts, and no evidence that children can be overloaded with vaccines and no evidence that vaccines help to transmit epilepsy, diabetes, or hepatitis. All that conspiracy theorists need these days is an internet connection and their lie can travel the world before the truth has got its boots on.

The anti-vaccine band have a recognisable strategy. In any range of scientific studies there are likely to be outliers, studies which stripped from context, appear to suggest that a vaccination is unsafe. Or, if no such experiment is available, they select refuted studies and appeal to the authority of pseudo-science. If they do not have even that to go on, they make it up.

Vaccination is, in fact, one of the greatest contributions to public health that has ever been devised by human ingenuity. The late Victorians introduced compulsory vaccination in Britain in the face of clever flapdoodle from high-profile fools such as George Bernard Shaw. The anguish averted is incalculable. Smallpox has been eradicated worldwide and polio and measles are close to extinction. We need to be calm about Covid. We can just about glimpse the road out of the woods. Lets take it.

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The vaccines are on their way. Our next task? Persuade people to take them - Evening Standard