We are, the 1960s radical generation, now once more marching, marching, sometimes it seems mostly with the Millennials by our side. And here comes the ghost of Herbert Marcuse, who was so much with us the first time around.
Archive | 2017
The struggle for a decent life
The typical working-class family would need an additional $91K+ per year in New York City just to break even on a reasonable standard of living.
Thugs and journalists
The repetition of words like “thug” and “gang” in media coverage of anti-fascist demonstrators suggests the degree to which mainstream journalists, and centrists more widely, understand challenges to the state in the same euphemisms with which they express their own deep anti-blackness.
We are all Venezuela – João Pedro Stedile
Deep down, the dispute is not over Maduro’s government. The dispute is over the oil rent, which was illegally appropriated by US companies throughout the XXth century, and by a minority of Venezuelan oligarchs who lived like maharajas! And that is over.
Quebec independence a key to building the left in Canada
The Canadian state is historically based on the theft and occupation of indigenous lands and the genocide of their peoples. The state that resulted is thoroughly integrated within global imperialism.
Venezuela’s Citgo provides free gas to Harvey rescue teams
Venezuela has provided free gas to rescues workers, firefighters and police in their efforts to help victims in areas affected by Harvey, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
Another privatization fail: 5 things you don’t know about school lunches (but probably should)
One thing is clear: school lunches have a long way to go, and there’s no simple solution in sight. As school districts struggle to balance costs with meeting federal nutritional standards and other requirements, students are left to weather the storm with lackluster food choices that may not be having the positive effect on their […]
United Nations finds Iran in total compliance with nuclear deal
Trump and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, have regarded Iran and the agreement with suspicion, with Trump threatening to withhold certification of Iranian compliance, and saying in an interview in July, “If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago.”
Painters union fights to free member from immigration jail
Imagine being arrested and detained for months just for showing up to work. That’s what happened to construction workers Hugo Mejia and Rodrigo Nuñez on May 3, when their company sent them to work on a hospital inside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California.
Facebook’s advertising machine
The US market evidently has a powerful influence on social trends elsewhere in the world. It has been shown not only by the popularity among youth of wearing low-hanging trousers and baseball caps backwards—although, thankfully, these trends have, like, faded—but also by how a system designed for an elite US university, Harvard, could end up […]
Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the future of radicalism
“I have spent most of my life studying Marxist ideas and have identified with groups that have not only embraced Marxist-inspired critiques of the dominant socioeconomic order, but have also struggled to understand the co-constitutive relationship of racism and capitalism.”
A tale of many cities: potholes in the road to municipal reform
As a growing number of groups on the left have begun dabbling in local electoral politics—most notably via the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA-backed candidacies)—we would do well to heed the warning of Juan Gonzalez about the “consultant class” (currently in the employ of Mayor de Blasio). The allure of corner-cutting political consultants, corporate […]
People are radicalizing the Bolivarian Revolution
For those confused by the recent headlines on Venezuela, this is a point worth explaining. The so-called ‘peaceful’ ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrators of the opposition had made threats against those who planned to participate in the Constituent Assembly elections, leaving many people fearful to vote in their own communities, particularly those with a strong opposition presence. This […]
An interview with Timir Basu on the 50th anniversary of the Naxalbari Uprising
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the “Naxalite” revolutionary peasant uprising in northern India, named for the locale in which it first appeared, Naxalbari. What follows is an interview with a prominent Bengali intellectual who recalls his youthful foray into the countryside to organize poor peasants.
As Arkema plant burns, six things we know about petrochemical risks in the wake of Harvey
In many ways, Harvey is unprecedented. Yet, we live in a world where our president revokes policies that ensure our infrastructure is storm ready, where climate mitigation efforts have stagnated, and where disaster relief efforts often don’t reach those that need it most. We must do better.
Freedom rider: Joe Arpaio is no aberration
Even most leftish white Americans like to think that their country is good and its institutions are fair and equitable. According to this wishful thinking human rights abuses only happen in faraway places and injustices here are resolved by reining in a few bad apples. The facts say otherwise and prove that the United States […]
Awareness of the non-viability of capitalism grows with each passing day
In Marx there is a concept of an alternative to capitalism that provides a foundation for the needed effort to reinvigorate anti-capitalist movements. But a richer, more adequate understanding of socialism that addresses the realities of contemporary capitalism today still awaits us.
Ernest Mandel: a life for the revolution
This documentary looks back at Mandel’s life and 60 years of struggles: from the Civil War in Spain to the fall of the Berlin Wall, with segments on Algeria, Che Guevara, Vietnam, the 1960-1961 Belgian general strike, May 68, Portugal, Chile, feminism, workers control, the Sandinistas and more.
Fascism in the United States
The combination of the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag is a standard feature of the Right’s iconography—the linkage between a desire for White domination with a rehabilitation of the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy. This period of great economic instability has produced some truly morbid symptoms.
![The rule of the market in East-Central Europe is absolute [Interview].](https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Gaspár-M.-Tamás--200x200.jpg "The rule of the market in East-Central Europe is absolute")
The rule of the market in East-Central Europe is absolute
Nobody can say that liberal democracy has not liberated some people and that some kinds of servitude have not been obliterated. But the current system has run into a number of contradictions.
