Archive | December, 2018

  • Trump

    Trump wants $716 Billion by 2019 to pursue “aggressive defense” against China

    As if to highlight the American government’s real position on world peace, and Trump’s true position on Russia, just as peace talks between North and South Koreas are reaching their zenith (peace talks that occurred just as the North developed a ballistic missile that can deliver a nuclear payload to the U.S., and the promise of Mutually Assured Destruction- a coincidence, surely) it seems Trump is getting ready to ask for a sharp increase for the 2019 US defense budget.

  • Elrond

    The Council of Elrond

    Foucault, Chomsky, and Fanon are all radical leftists in one way or another.

  • Photo credit: FARC

    Leader of the former FARC guerrillas to run for President of Colombia

    Last Sunday, January 27, the Alternative Revolutionary Force of the Common (FARC), which is the political party formed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army (FARC-EP) guerrillas, launched the presidential candidacy of Rodrigo Londoño, alias Timochenko, setting a new cornerstone in the political history of Colombia.

  • Let them eat crack (photo credit: Bansky)

    Utopia and populism

    My view is that liberal critics of populism, standing on their heads, get it wrong. If made to stand on their feet, they’d have to admit that populism actually represents the failure of liberal democracy.

  • Image: OnceAndFutureLaura/Flickr

    A farewell to Omelas: remembering Ursula Le Guin

    I had a friend who as a child wrote to Ursula Le Guin. He was feeling miserable, bad things had happened to him and he wanted to run away to Earthsea. He told her that he felt ashamed that he wasn’t facing up to life, felt it was a failing that he just wanted to live a fantasy.

  • Photo: Partido dos Trabalhadores

    A trial for Lula and Brazilian democracy: What’s next for Brazil?

    Brazil has just taken another step toward the dismantling of its democracy. On January 24, an appeals court confirmed a previous ruling against former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party), sentencing him to over 12 years in jail.

  • MLK Blvd and Malcom X Blvd

    Bill Fletcher Jr. on Black Marxism

    Veteran labor activist Bill Fletcher jr. talks about how capitalism is based on the slave trade and colonialism, the Black contribution to Marxism, and the need to organize.

  • Mexico's First 'Seduction School', Rape Culture and Femicides | Analysis | teleSUR English

    Mexico’s first ‘seduction school’, rape culture and femicides

    On Sunday, the international press agency EFE did not have enough words to praise the not-even-that-new initiative of a Mexican “seduction school”, lamenting that this kind of workshop remains largely “taboo” in the country.

  • The post movie poster (Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon.)

    The Post should be viewed by current editors of The Post

    I was afraid that The Post would give us a Hollywood film version of the publication of the Pentagon Papers and manage never to say what was in the Pentagon Papers. I was afraid it would be turned into a pro-war movie.

  • Public domain image from Trevor Paglen

    An open letter to our community on congress’s vote to extend NSA spying from EFF executive director Cindy Cohn

    Today, the United States Congress struck a significant blow against the basic human right to read, write, learn, and associate free of government’s prying eyes. 

  • Caracas Distrito Federal Venezuela

    A socialist development strategy for the 21st century (Part 1)

    1. Introduction Capitalist development is based upon labour exploitation and environmental destruction. Through sexism and racism it has established second class citizens who are doubly-exploited. Democracy under capitalism is of the ‘low-intensity’ variety—where decision over economic resource generation and use are off-limits to the majority of the population, and where political systems facilitate the (mis)representation […]

  • Poster of Lenin celebrating The Decree on Peace

    Bolshevism, Balfour and Zionism: A tale of two centenaries

    November 2017 marked the centenary of two of the most decisive events in the twentieth century: the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and the Balfour Declaration in Britain.… At loggerheads were two mutually exclusive political objectives: the one to promote worldwide, anti-imperialist revolution; the other, to further British imperial interests in the Middle East.

  • Cities woo Amazon to become second HQ (photo credit: CNN money)

    Amazon is a 21st-century digital chain gang

    When Amazon announced plans to locate a $5 billion, 50,000-employee complex as its second headquarters somewhere in North America, state governments and municipalities fell over themselves offering billions of dollars in tax abatements and corporate subsidies to secure the prize.

  • Mainstream media and imperial power

    Noted journalist and filmmaker John Pilger’s collection of work has been archived by the British Library, but deep-rooted problems of Western media create an increasingly difficult landscape for ethical journalism, as Pilger explained in an interview with Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico.

  • A statue of Jose Marti in New York

    The soul of the revolution

    Jose Marti was a renaissance man — journalist, poet and leading figure in the Cuban struggle for independence. OLLIE HOPKINS explains his relevance in today’s Cuba

  • Automobile Factory Production Motor Industrial

    Marx and historical materialism

    Karl Marx was a materialist – more than that, he was a historical materialist. Marxists, in order to establish their credentials in political arguments, frequently claim that they are giving a materialist analysis of a phenomenon. The claim that a materialist analysis is being provided both attests to the Marxist credentials of the argument, and validates the attitudes and actions that follow from that analysis.

  • David Harvey

    Leading Marxist scholar David Harvey on Trump

    For the past year,, we have all experienced an intense sort of political vertigo. Of course, part of this is due to the fact that Donald Trump is president and constantly scoops the story of the latest outrage about himself by performing yet another outrage just as we start discussing the previous one.

  • Marx

    How should socialists understand finance: remembering the lessons of Capital

    For those on the Left, finance seems like a bourgeois pastime. Many of us outright despise the stuff. While the petit bourgeoisie drool over dividends and diversification, we prefer to focus on crisis and class.

  • Time is money

    Value, credit and crisis: Reading Marx out of context can lead to confusion

    A literalist, out-of-context reading of Marx can get one into trouble, or at the very least, leave you hopelessly confused. For help, I look to David Harvey. Perhaps the preeminent expert on Marx’s Capital in the English-speaking world, Harvey meticulously reconstructed Marx’s approach to money in his major treatise, Limits to Capital (1982).

  • MLK Poor Peoples Campaign Poster 1968

    Martin Luther King’s radical anticapitalism

    In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”