Archive | Commentary

Shaking the World: Reports from Revolutionary Venezuela is a new biweekly column by Cira Pascual Marquina for MR Online, offering frontline analysis of imperialism, popular power, and revolutionary struggle in Venezuela. There are moments when geopolitics stops being an abstraction and becomes something you feel in your body. In Caracas, January 3 was one of […]

The 47th Summit of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), held in Malaysia in October 2025, was a pivotal moment in the ongoing attempts by the United States to redefine the socioeconomic trajectory of Southeast Asia. While much analysis of the Summit has focused on the impact of US tariffs, there has been less […]

India’s neoliberal turn since the 1990s has accelerated deindustrialisation; as the global order shifts, the country’s left must seize any openings to push for autonomous national development.

José Antonio Kast’s resounding victory in Chile’s runoff election last December is bound to have a profound influence on the country. Two radical variants of Pinochetism—one led by Kast and another, even more extreme, led by Johannes Kaiser—converged to form a solid neofascist force, joined by the standard-bearer of a political fiction called the “democratic […]

What has occurred is a grave violation of international law and of Venezuela’s sovereignty.

A little after 2 am Venezuela time on January 3, 2026, in violation of Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, the United States began an attack on several sites in the country, including Caracas, the capital. Residents awoke to loud noises and flashes, as well as large helicopters in the sky. Videos began to […]

For those who lived through Richard Nixon’s lurch toward authoritarian rule, the period after his reelection in a landslide in November 1972 was frightening. (And it was a real landslide, with 60 percent of the vote.)

Over the years, the Center has trained thousands of popular educators. Marilín explains how the educators often find themselves in complex situations. “The Christians see us as communists, and the communists see us as Christians—though some of the latter recognize we are more communist than they are.”

The immanent dialectic of the ancient Greek materialist philosopher, Epicurus (341-270 BCE), helped inspire the nineteenth-century ideas of Karl Marx, forming the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

It is widely understood today that the United States is confronted with a pervasive neofascist threat. Evidence of this is visible now throughout society, not least of all in Donald Trump’s White House itself.

According to a report in the Times of India (November 23), the United States has asked European countries to restrict immigration in order to preserve “Western Civilization.” Many in the Third World would find the term “Western Civilization” laughable, especially if it is used in the sense of denoting something precious and worth preserving. The atrocities […]

Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority.

US president Donald Trump rumbles fatuously on as his phony “peace” plan for Gaza unravels, the US/NATO war against Russia sinks ever deeper in the mud of Ukraine, and his bunker-buster blow failed to put a dent in Iran’s nuclear program. In the United States he has sent federal agents in military gear to grab […]

Major tech companies–OpenAI (GPT), Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), Meta (Llama), and xAI (Grok)–are spending heavily to boost the computing power of their respective large language artificial intelligence models. The companies claim that this spending will transform them into systems that businesses will happily pay to use and, in the near future, lead to artificial general […]

When Nietzsche discovered Stendhal it was rather late in his life, but he remarked that reading Stendhal was “one of the most beautiful strokes of fortune of my life.” This is exactly how it felt for me to discover Michel Clouscard. It was Marx who woke me from a dogmatic slumber out of left-Nietzscheanism; Clouscard […]

I was reflecting on the wisdom I acquired in one of my early college classes, “Introduction to American Government,” and subsequent historical readings. First, the conventional wisdom of American political life was that Vice Presidents are rarely of any administrative or political consequence. Generally, sitting Vice Presidents represent the United States at funerals of foreign […]

What defines global capitalism today?

Summary This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes money as an inexhaustible and malleable public institution. According to DPF, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and […]

On October 8, 2023, the Israeli war machine, armed and financed by Washington, launched the first genocide in history to be broadcast live before the eyes of the world. As we enter October 2025, the second year of this open genocide, neighborhoods in Gaza continue to be leveled, hospitals bombed, and children condemned to death […]

Big tech, ever on the hunt for new markets for their generative AI systems, are pushing hard to get them into U.S. public schools as well as colleges and universities. Their interest goes beyond short term profits—it is also about “grooming” a new generation to accept, if not embrace, the world big tech seeks to […]