Archive | October, 2021

A caricatured account of Althusser’s intellectual trajectory might read something like this…

Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera, Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, and Dominican Republic’s President Luis Abinader are the active top politician implicated in the leak.

Welcome to Renegade Inc. With China’s increasing wealth, Western investors want some of the action. One of those investors is a bullish gentleman called George Soros.

Imperialism began when the colonizing powers had already divided the world between themselves. The only way to expand from that point on was to re-divide the colonial territories, which inevitably meant war. Such redivisions were at the roots of the First and Second World Wars.

The picture presented in the volume is one of the Leninists’ Lenin (with partial exceptions), but he and his co-editors certainly did not aim at conveying a composite historical account that would include every possible voice from Russian Orthodox priests’ through neoliberal pundits’ and new right fascists’, to the Vatican’s or the Taliban’s conception of Lenin and his historical role.

MARXIST theory develops with changing times, as capitalism itself develops, which is why it remains a living doctrine. On the question of the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary process that leads to the transcendence of capitalism, there have been significant developments in Marxist theory, which I propose to discuss here.

For the past 15 years, I have witnessed how the Israeli army cuts Palestinian communities from accessing water in order to expel them and take their land.

The most important election result is hardly discussed in the media—and when it is, then with satisfaction or joy. It is, in fact, a truly sad result. The Left (DIE LINKE) missed the red line level of 5%—but was miraculously saved by a special rule; if three or more delegates of a party win out in their own districts—with those first crosses—then their parties and their proportionate lists are saved, just as if they had reached 5%.

Each year in September, the heads of governments come to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City to inaugurate a new session of the General Assembly.

Collective struggles by labouring class communities–in and beyond the workplace–have the capacity to generate real human developmental gains for these communities. Consequently, these struggles and the labouring classes that pursue them, should be considered as developmental.

Anna Kornbluh joins Money on the Left to discuss the politics of form and literary realism as theorized in her provocative book, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019). In The Order of Forms, Kornbluh lays bare the problematic “anarcho-vitalist” underpinnings of neoliberal discourse which, she argues, also inform much  critical theory and left critique.

European responses to extreme weather demonstrate post-industrial nations have much to learn from people in the Global South, writes Aranyo Aarjan.

An interview in the Guardian (9/7/21) made waves—not because of something it said, but because of something it didn’t say.

A socialist forum on China and the Left, sponsored by the Qiao Collective, was held in New York City on September 18, 2021.

To continue the marginalization of Black and, more recently, Muslim groups, you do not have to suddenly turn society upside down or challenge the dominant religious white or secular culture, or even, as in Nazi Germany, change citizenship and property ownership rules—in contrast to periodic historic assaults on certain white ethno-religious groups, who, by comparison, have sometimes enjoyed bourgeois, socioeconomic class power.

In order to commit murder or mayhem under this program, vouchers must be submitted within one week prior to the actions contemplated or within a month afterward. Persons who commit violent acts without valid vouchers will be asked to enter into Voluntary Consent Agreements to desist from unauthorized murder or mayhem, and up to one tenth of any ill-gotten gains will be donated voluntarily to the charity of their choice, without any implication of admission of guilt.