O’Brien should really read up on Marxist-Leninist works. The people’s position is the fundamental political position of Marxist parties. People are the creators of history and the true driving force behind historical progress.
Author Archive | Eds.
Paralysed companies rescued by an ‘army’ of volunteer workers
The 2270-strong Productive Workers’ Army has recuperated 14 state-run firms that had been run into the ground.
1978: Ernest Mandel – Rosa Luxemburg and political economy
The Accumulation of Capital was published in 1913, and it was probably only after completing her magnum opus that Luxemburg resumed writing her Introduction to Political Economy. Interrupted once again, now by the outbreak of war, she continued to work on the Introduction during her stay in prison in Wronke, in the German province of […]
Indian poet and activist Varavara Rao shifted from prison to hospital due to deteriorating health
The health of the 79-year-old poet has deteriorated alarmingly over the past few weeks. He has been in prison since late 2018 in the Elgar Parishad case which critics say is aimed at silencing dissent in India.
Leaked documents show police knew far-right extremists were the real threat at protests, not “ANTIFA”
We’ve seen the way that the police responded to nonviolent civil disobedience at Standing Rock or in Ferguson versus the laissez-faire approach they’ve used in a number of these white supremacist riots. They clearly can regulate their behavior. Why they choose not to when it’s groups protesting police violence is what I think local government […]
Cuba in the last stretch of the Pandemic
Cuba is only a few days away from ending its coronavirus quarantine. Except for Havana, all the other provinces are free of the contagion and have begun moving toward a new normality.
How Settler Colonial States use incarceration as a tool of dehumanization during the COVID crisis
Incarceration is a manifestation and continuation of chronic and interwoven structures of oppression
Police surveilled George Floyd protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies.
Turin grants honorary citizenship to head of Cuban medical brigade (+ Photos)
The Municipal Council of Turin granted the honorary citizenship of that city in the region of Piedmont to Dr. Julio Guerra, head of the Cuban medical brigade that helped fight COVID-19 there.
Macron wounded, but still eyeing austerity
The second round of the French local elections, at the end of June, was bad news for president Emmanuel Macron, whose candidates did very poorly. In response, Macron switched prime ministers, replacing high-profile operator Edouard Philippe with an unknown right winger, Jean Castex, whose previous experience consisted mostly of being mayor of a town with […]
Mask-to-mask instruction may be more problematic than distance learning
People talk about the upcoming school year as if we have a choice between in-person classes or distance learning.
U.S. ruling class demands deadly reopening of schools
The ruling class, having worked out its strategic response to the pandemic in February and March, has carried out an unrelenting assault on workers ever since. The working class must respond with equal determination and ruthlessness. It must fight for the socialist overturn of the capitalist system, which threatens the lives of millions of workers […]
In Commune: The Panal 2021
Third episode of VA’s “In Commune” series, focusing on the combative Panal 2021 Commune in Caracas.
Collective care is our best weapon against COVID-19
As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps around the world, statist and capitalist structures predictably continue to fail us in many ways. Underlying that failure is the stress on individual responses: stockpile, isolate, and care for yourself.
The parlous state of poverty eradication
The world is at an existential crossroads involving a pandemic, a deep economic recession, devastating climate change, extreme inequality, and an uprising against racist policies. Running through all of these challenges is the longstanding neglect of extreme poverty by many governments, economists, and human rights advocates.
BAR Book Forum: Andrew J. Douglas’s “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society”
This book sets out to challenge some of the assumptions that undergird what I call the competitive society—that is, a society marked by winners and losers, a world in which Black people are routinely expected to bear the burden of loss and defeat.
USA: ‘Qualified immunity’ is how the Police state stays in power
Make no mistake about it: this is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.
Instead of freeing elderly prisoners in response to Coronavirus, Cuomo created a prison nursing home way upstate
THE ADIRONDACK CORRECTIONAL Facility is tucked away in the mountainous North Country of New York State, less than a two-hour drive from the Canadian border. Three years ago, it was converted to incarcerate teens aged 16 to 17, automatically prosecuted as adults under pernicious state law. As of this May, in response to the coronavirus […]
Racism, capitalism and rebellion
I want to start by acknowledging the significance of what has happened in the last ten days. We’re now in the midst of what we can definitively say is the biggest wave of mass protests in the United States since the 1960’s
Two months of gains, but a huge jobs deficit remains, and deepening pain is on the horizon
Today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows two months in a row of payroll employment gains, an increase in jobs of 4.8 million in June on top of 2.7 million in May. But, because so many jobs were lost in March and April, we are still 14.7 million jobs below where we […]
