Stephen D. Shenfield | Author and Translator
Waste and want: Grapes of Wrath revisited
- Published on 01 August 2010
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In his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 25), John Steinbeck described how food was destroyed during the Great Depression:
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people come for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges… A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships… Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out [with nets]. Slaughter the pigs and bury them…
And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must be forced to rot.
Letter to a new Jewish mother
- Published on 01 October 2016
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I hear that you just gave birth to your first child – a healthy baby boy. Mazel tov! I also hear that everything is going well, just as it should be. You have no cause for worry.
This should be a happy time for you. And so it is, I am sure.
Well, a happy time on the whole.
No, not altogether happy. Not one hundred percent. There is a fly in the ointment. Something does worry you, however you may try not to think about it. Now and then disturbing images intrude, unbidden and unwelcome.
Memories of a childhood in mental hospital
- Published on 24 January 2019
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Even today children are locked up in mental hospitals where they are deprived of loving care and normal social interaction and subjected to cruel pseudo-treatments like psychiatric drugs and electro-convulsive therapy. The author, currently a prisoner, recalls the two years that he spent in such an institution as a young child.
Fully automated luxury communism
- Published on 18 April 2019
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Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019)
This is a very important book. It is due out in June.
Aaron Bastani, co-founder and senior editor at the alternative media organization Novara Media, argues that current technological advances are on the way toward overcoming scarcity and making ‘luxury communism’ – a society of abundance for all – possible for the first time. What Marx foresaw as the hypothetical result of further development of the productive forces is now rapidly turning into reality. On this basic point the author is in full agreement with the World Socialist Movement, although there is scope for debate over exactly when a society of abundance became or will become possible.
Pizzagate: pedophilia in high places?
- Published on 19 October 2017
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Over the winter of 2016--2017 a spate of stories appeared in the mass media about a scandal called 'Pizzagate'. The authors of these stories warned that 'far-right crazies' were spreading 'fake news' or 'fake conspiracy theories' about sexual abuse of children by highly placed pedophiles -- in particular, by prominent figures in the Democratic Party establishment such as the Podesta brothers (John Podesta was chairman of Hilary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign; Tony is a highly influential lobbyist).
