Archive | Commentary

Deborah Veneziale provides a useful analysis of the 2024 US elections.

Billions were spent both on aid to the Zelensky government…as an urgent defense necessity to counter “the Russian threat.” This threat has appeared and reappeared in Germany in 1914, the 1930s, after 1945 and now again, louder than ever, with similar barked Prussian commands: “Achtung! Die Russen kommen!” as dangerously false as ever, and often followed by eastward expansion, invasion and, far too often, catastrophe, with atomic annihilation an added danger this time around.

The BRICS declaration presumes that the international institutions in their current state are flawed because they are dominated by imperialist countries and are not representative enough; but they are flawed because their very essence is flawed, no matter how they are governed.

Steve Ellner: “The basic contradiction of capitalism is at the point of production, the contradiction between the interests of the working class and those of capitalists.”

While so many in the world hold their breath for Harris or Trump it would also be wise to keep an eye on Germany. A sharp eye!

Book Launch: “The Dialectics of Ecology”

Professor Saibaba’s life, or rather, Sai’s life, for that is what his friends called him, cannot be adequately understood without situating him in an authentic history and “present as history” of the Indian society of which he was a part.

Chinese scholar Wang Hui looks back at the twentieth century, which was born out of the multiple revolutions in the peripheral areas of the world, including China.

Forty years later, Lehlohonolo Kennedy Mahlatsi looks back on the Vaal Uprising in South Africa, which marked a turning point in the growth of mass-based organizations throughout the country and the mass rejection of apartheid colonial rule.

Despite all the many years, those who hated the GDR still hate it today. Indeed, they seem to fear it, and continue almost daily to revile its memories—like kicking an old horse cadaver which might yet bite or strike out with a hoof or two.

John Bellamy Foster speaks with Daniel Tutt about the work of István Mészáros and Paul Baran, contemporary irrationalist tendencies in left ecological thought, intensifying global class struggles, and the continued relevance of Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952), recently reissued with an introduction by Enzo Traverso by Verso in 2021.

Andy Higginbottom reviews Adam Hanieh’s crucial new book, Crude Capitalism.

Tings Chak and Vijay Prashad take stock of seventy-five years of the Chinese Revolution.

Most worried of all are the people in eastern Germany, the one-time German Democratic Republic founded so hopefully almost exactly 75 years ago, October 7, 1949, and buried—triumphantly for a large number—41 years later, on October 3, 1990.

This dossier catalogues the immense cultural production of the Telangana armed struggle in India and how it inspired the people to participate in cycles of protest against colonialism, monarchy, and landlordism, building on the idea that art and culture are both produced by the class struggle and, in turn, produce the class struggle.

Owen Schalk details how Canada’s policies—the hostile moves toward geopolitical opponents, efforts to decrease economic ties to China through critical minerals exploration, and hundreds of billions of dollars in projected military spending over the next decades—do not make Canadians safer.

Is the AfD a fascist party? Björn Höcke, its boss  in Thuringia, one of its three best-known national leaders and its main rabble-rouser, has never concealed his admiration for Germany’s days of swastika glory.

Kevin Potter analyzes the punishing memory culture surrounding Palestine activism at the University of Vienna.

Baldwin theorizes whiteness as the psychology of empire.

Kyle Ferrana details the brutal legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.