Archive | April, 2019

The phenomenal growth of the services sector has created a new generation of employees. For these workers, May Day has very little meaning—what they fail to grasp is that they cannot protect their future without knowing their past.

Monthly Review Press editor Michael D. Yates reflects on the state of U.S. labor in this special May Day interview conducted by Farooque Chowdhury.

A military uprising is unfolding in Venezuela after a handful of the police and armed forces freed Leopoldo Lopez and blocked a highway in Caracas.

They can be a force for change, explains Rachel Thain-Gray

“If [the U.S. invades the Venezuelan Embassy] tomorrow, it will send a message to the world that no embassy is safe in the United States… it’s a message that ‘if you don’t bow down to us, do what we tell you, put in the government that we’d like, we will take your embassy.” – Kevin Zeese

U.S. political opinion against China has two solid bases. The first is the longstanding racist and protectionist sentiment in the white working class; the second is a more recent anxiety about China’s economic prowess in America’s ruling elite.

Socialism is the rational alternative to the disaster that is capitalism. Its basic premise is that production and distribution should be organised to satisfy human need. Already we have the resources, the technology and the infrastructure required to provide every human with the necessities of life and more. So in one sense, socialism is the simple call for a rationally organised society.

The Jewish Labour Movement likes to date its origins to the Poale Zion organisation, which was founded in 1903. A socialist society, Poale Zion affiliated itself not only with the British Labour party but also with a wide range of anti-Palestinian Zionist organisations such as the World Zionist Organisation and the Israeli Labour party.

The history of empires amply demonstrates that in their phase of decline they become more violent and bloodthirsty, and that their leaders tend to be coarser and more brutal. Not only their leaders, as Donald Trump clearly demonstrates. Also its environment of advisors reflects similar devolution, becoming something similar to what Harold Laski, referring to the leaders of European fascism, called “outlaw elites”.

Among the encouraging political straws in the wind are the growing momentum in the United States and the United Kingdom, two leading carbon states, for something called the ‘Green New Deal’. I have some questions about it, but first of all it’s worth acknowledging how far it has climbed up the political agenda.

The government issued an arrest warrant request for the ex-security chief of the Guri Complex, who allegedly fled to the US following the March blackouts.

The headlines once again misrepresent the aims and consequences of a U.S. free trade agreement, in this case repeating the International Trade Commission’s claim that President Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) will boost U.S. growth and employment.

In the wake of Saturday’s debate between intellectual superstars Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson, an onslaught of mockery has appeared online satirizing the clash between the highly-memeable thinkers.

On 26 April 1937, twelve bombers of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria flew low over the Basque country of Spain in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). They tore down over the small town of Guernica, where they let loose their fiery arsenal. Almost two thousand people died in this defenceless town.

The most critical problem is that three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had been damaged and the 250 tons of more than 1600 spent fuel rods were “reckoned” to have fallen to the bottom of the reactor vessel after having melted at high temperatures. The radiation level there was too high for humans to possibly come close, let alone remove the molten nuclear residue.

With this article, the outstanding intellectual Abel Prieto, inaugurates in Granma the column “Cultura y Resistencia”, which will be updated every Friday.

We are writing to you from inside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC where we are taking action against a U.S. coup of the independent and sovereign Bolivarian Republican of Venezuela. The Embassy Protection Collective (Colectivos Por La Paz) is here with the permission of the Venezuelan government to show our solidarity with the Venezuelan people. The upcoming week will be a critical one, as we explain below.

Once seen as the vanguard of a new social order, the contemporary labor movement has been written off by many progressive activists and scholars as a relic of the past. They should not be so hasty. Rather than spelling the beginning of the end for organized labor, globalization has brought new opportunities for reinvention, and a sea change in both trade unions and the wider labor movement.

China formally invited Latin America to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative in January 2018, during its meeting with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Santiago, Chile, where the Chinese and Venezuelan chancellors shook hands. Since then, 16 countries in the region have expressed their intention to be part of this trade connection project and have signed agreements to do so.

ROAR published an article Can the Bolivarian revolution survive the Venezuelan crisis? containing the views of different professors, but with only two worth reading: Dario Azzellini’s and George Ciccariello-Maher’s. Of the others, Raul Zibechi appears to be the chosen faux left commentator committed to repeating U.S. ruling class propaganda against Venezuela.