The Digger

 April 26th, 2019 Review of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 by Michael Joseph Roberto by Chris Wright / April 26th, 2019 Fascism is usually thought of as a quintessentially and almost exclusively European phenomenon, as having begun with Mussolini, culminated with Hitler, and been eradicated in World War II. The U.S., in particular, is thought to have been largely immune to it, given the absence of mass movements similar to Nazism or Italian Fascism. But there exists a different narrative, or at least there did in the 1930s, before it was buried under an avalanche of patriotic American propaganda and liberal historiography. According to this alternative understanding, the U.S. was falling victim to fascism already in the 1920s—though a different sort of fascism than in Europe. Long-forgotten Marxist journals such as  The Communist ,  The New Masses , and  Labor Notes  (unrelated to the  cur...

APRIL 26, 2019 Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Book Cover I was in Hawaii to discuss ‘history from below’ together with that powerful practitioner of said history, scholarly abolitionist, writer, and colleague, Marcus Rediker.  How is ‘history from below’ to be distinguished from similar forms of history writing, such as people’s history, radical history, labor history, social history, not to mention African American history, or women’s history?  One distinction is that since ‘below’ implies ‘above,’ this practice of history always carries with it a notion of relationship as in, for example, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”  Our conversation on history from below only began on the last day of my visit, Saturday, 20 April, a week after arriving in Honolulu, a week to learn about ‘above’ and ‘below’ in Hawai’i and what lay hidden by them, the commons. Rediker and I meantime participated in several events con...

April 26,2019 A FEDERAL COURT IN TEXAS   issued   a ruling  on Thursday afternoon preliminarily enjoining enforcement of Texas’ law banning contractors from boycotting Israel. The court ruled that the law plainly violates the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. Following   similar decisions by federal courts in Kansas and Arizona , the ruling becomes the third judicial finding – out of three who have evaluated the constitutionality of such laws – to conclude that they are unconstitutional attacks on the free speech rights of Americans. The case was brought by Bahia Amawi, a longtime elementary school speech pathologist in Austin, Texas, whose contract renewal was denied due to her refusal to sign an oath certifying that she does not participate in any boycotts of Israel. In December, The Intercept was the first to  report on her case  and the lawsuit she brought, and also produced a video documenting her story: Video by Kell...

Thursday 1:07pm SEE MORE:  BERNIE SANDERS BURLINGTON, VT—Expressing their utter disgust and disappointment over the candidate’s remarks, supporters of presidential contender Bernie Sanders went on the attack Thursday, laying into the Vermont senator for his criticism of mistakes made by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. “These deeply misguided comments make it crystal clear that Sanders just doesn’t understand what the Sanders campaign was all about,” said Sanders loyalist and 2016 campaign volunteer Greg Birch, one of the legions of supporters who took to Twitter and Facebook to condemn Sanders as a “centrist phony” and question his motivations for challenging the methods favored by their candidate of choice, Bernie Sanders. “How dare Bernie say that Bernie didn’t do enough to reach women and African American voters? He clearly doesn’t know the first thing about what Bernie stands for. But if he wants to obsess over the past and quibble about sem...

APRIL 26, 2019 In 1989, in the midst of the collapse of the Soviet Union and just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama argued, famously, that we had reached  “the End of History .’ Echoing Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberal capitalism, Fukuyama averred that the triad of free markets, liberal democracy, and consumerist culture had become universal, enveloping the planet so thoroughly as to flatten historical time. There would be no more revolutionary upheaval, no more transformative social change. An ever-expanding capitalism, governed by some variant of representative democracy, was the only game in town, and it was here to stay. I was fifteen when Fukuyama penned “The End of History,” and – as much as I am loathe to admit it – I am a child of neoliberalism. I was born at the end of 1974, just as New York City entered its fateful  descent into fiscal crisis . I grew up in Baltimore during the Reagan years, a witness to ...