Category Archives: Books

The Burden of Atrocity

We are years into a 13 year Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, officially underway since May 2012.  If that math seems messy, it is one small indication of the  long, deep, and still confounding legacy of that war.  Faculty member Penny Lewis wrote about our memory of the class dynamics of the antiwar movement in her book, Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Cornell University Press, 2013), and returns to the subject in a review essay published in Jacobin and Salon this past week. 

Testifying in 1971 as part of the Winter Soldier Investigation, a war crimes hearing sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton distinguished the American war in Vietnam from other conflicts:

There’s a quality of atrocity in this war that goes beyond that of other wars in that the war itself is fought as a series of atrocities. There is no distinction between an enemy whom one can justifiably fire at and people whom one murders in less than military situations.

Concluding this thought by reflecting on the experience of soldiers and veterans, Lifton observed, “Now if one carries this sense of atrocity with one, one carries the sense of descent into evil.” Continue reading The Burden of Atrocity

In Solidarity: Working-Class Organization and Strategy in the United States

Featuring Kim Moody
Friday, May 2, 2014 – 7:00pm

The New School, room 404
66 West 12 St
New York, NY 10011
See map: Google Maps

Haymarket Books and Jacobin Magazine are hosting a labor panel featuring Labor Notes founder Kim Moody, “one of the leading intellectuals of the labor movement” according to Robin Kelley, as well as working class activists in the fields of education and low-wage-work.

The panelists will sketch a picture of the state of US labor today. They will draw out the challenges facing labor, from neoliberal restructuring to overcoming racism and sexism. And perhaps most importantly, they will point the way forward for a rank-and-file union movement that can win real change.

Speakers at this event:
Virgilio Oscar Aran (Laundry Workers Center)
Emily Giles (MORE)*
Sarah Jaffe, moderator
Kim Moody
Tim Sylvester (Teamsters Local 804, President)

*Affiliations for identification purposes only

The event will also celebrate the release of Kim Moody’s new book of essays, In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization and Strategy in the United States. In his latest work, Moody takes up many of the important questions facing labor today:

Find out more

A People’s Art History of the United States

This book was initially listed in The New Labor Forum Spring 2014 Issue

By Nicolas Lampert
The New Press, 2013
A fascinating book examines the role visual images have played in activist movements throughout American history. The author was “particularly drawn to the examples . . . where the decisions made by artists were controversial and confounding” because “analyzing histories that are deeply complicated helps us learn.”