KPFA - Against the Grain

Gene-guided healthcare has taken U.S. medicine by storm, promising precision, targeted treatments to myriad illnesses. It has also proved very profitable. James Tabery traces how genetic medicine vied within the federal government with another approach to healthcare — one emphasizing the social and environmental determinants of health, such as whether you live in a polluted neighborhood — and triumphed over it. He argues that private industry has benefited, while public health has suffered. Resources: James Tabery, Tyranny of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and Its Threat to Public Health Knopf, 2023 Photo credit: Dave Titensor The post The Price of Gene-Based Medicine appeared first on KPFA.

The full-length interview with the British philosopher and educator Peter Cave, focusing on four thinkers profiled in his new book: Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Arendt. Peter Cave, How to Think Like a Philosopher: Scholars, Dreamers and Sages Who Can Teach Us How to Live Blooomsbury, 2023 The post High-impact Philosophy appeared first on KPFA.

Ours is an era of breathless talk about innovation, technical change, and disruption –- all for the presumed greater good. But what if the focus on relentless innovation has obscured the more important work of maintenance and care? Historian Lee Vinsel discusses the trajectory of technical innovation and its valorization, as well as the devaluing of maintaining what already exists. (Encore presentation.) Resources: Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most Currency, 2020 The Maintainers The post Hyping Innovation, Neglecting Maintenance appeared first on KPFA.

Historian Priya Satia discusses the complicity of historians in British imperialism and challenges the linear narrative of history. She explores the work and impact of E.P. Thompson, addresses the importance of memorialization and reparations, and delves into the history of British colonialism in Punjab.

They shut down the Las Vegas strip, when the casinos were operated by the mafia, and waged a grassroots fight against racism and poverty. The struggle of African American poor mothers for welfare rights in Nevada is a story with lessons for our times of punitive austerity. Historian Annelise Orlick has documented one of the forgotten but key social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. Resources: Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty Beacon Press, 2023 The post Organizing Against Poverty appeared first on KPFA.

What makes one group of people show up and stand up for another group’s interests? Manijeh Moradian describes how what she calls affects of solidarity spurred Iranian student leftists in the U.S. to become active in Black liberation, Palestine liberation, and other radical movements and struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s. Manijeh Moradian, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States Duke University Press, 2022 The post Solidarity Across Difference appeared first on KPFA.

State-ownership of the means of production and a planned economy appear to be the hallmarks of Marxist thought, along with the notion that revolution necessitates passing through socialist and communist stages. But, as Peter Hudis points out, these ideas don’t originate with Marx. He discusses his Critique of the Gotha Program, in which Marx most fully expounds his conception of life after capitalism, and the gap between Marx’s vision and that of his later followers. Resources: Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Introduction by Peter Hudis) PM Press, 2022 The post Marx’s Communism Before Marxism appeared first on KPFA.

Revolutionaries in one country can inform and inspire rebels in another. Kevin A. Young examines the impact of Vietnamese and Chinese revolutionary strategies on El Salvador’s guerrillas in the tumultuous 1970s and ’80s. Among other things, he describes how conceptions of “prolonged popular war” were adopted and adapted by the FPL, the FMLN’s largest faction. Becker, Power, Wood, and Zumoff, eds., Transnational Communism across the Americas University of Illinois Press, 2023 The post (Re)making Revolution appeared first on KPFA.

The call to abolish the family and liberate its members has been one of the central pillars of the radical left historically. Yet today that venerable tradition is almost forgotten, abandoned with the ebbing of the Sixties. Sophie Lewis renews the argument for abolishing the family and replacing it with collective forms of care. Resources: Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation Verso, 2022 The post Family Abolition appeared first on KPFA.

Why was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt so critical of mainstream Zionism? What did her criticisms have to do with how she understood nationalism and historical antisemitism? According to Jonathan Graubart, Arendt sought to delink Jewish nationalism from Israel’s state project; she also condemned Herzlian Zionism for subscribing to a view of eternal antisemitism. Jonathan Graubart, Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs Temple University Press, 2023 The post Arendt on Zionism appeared first on KPFA.