A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred. Our imaginations can barely encompass the speed or scale of the catastrophe. Gone California, gone.
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
The difference between the U.S. and China’s response to COVID-19 is staggering
In Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, he reports on interviews he did in February and March with U.S. President Donald Trump about the coronavirus.
Which way?
Ups and downs in Germany are less dramatic than in Minsk or the USA, now suffering under the corona pandemic, terrifying forest fires and worrisome election-fever. But Germany, too, could veer left or right.
Fighting evictions: The 1930s and now
Out of the 110 million Americans who pay rent for housing, by 2021, some 30 to 40 million will face eviction. Such mass homelessness would be an unprecedented social catastrophe with possible revolutionary consequences.
The U.S. is determined to make Julian Assange pay for exposing the cruelty of its war on Iraq
On September 7, 2020, Julian Assange will leave his cell in Belmarsh Prison in London and attend a hearing that will determine his fate.
Dossier no. 32: One hundred years of the communist movement in India
Through their self-effacing work, the communists have galvanised hundreds of millions of people into action in order to bring about far-reaching changes in society.
Essays in memory of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019)
‘Once they are taken to be ideas about a historical world-system, whose development itself involves “underdevelopment,” indeed is based on it, [Marx’s theses] are not only valid, but they are revolutionary as well.’
Two faces of time in the modern era—Immanuel Wallerstein and his intervention on the issue of cultures in conflicts
By redefining a range of categories, Wallerstein seeks to reconstruct the scenario of the world, using a kind of political economy of culture to replace various Enlightenment thoughts—the presuppositions of various social sciences and their classification systems.
The nonexistent peace in Colombia
Class struggle in Colombia will escalate as the hopes of the peace deal are continuously shattered by the blood and gore of political killings. Without any material policies, the guarantees of the Peace Agreement have turned out to be hollow.
Why U.S. political scientists are arguing that Evo Morales should be the President of Bolivia
Three political scientists from the United States closely studied allegations of fraud in the Bolivian election of 2019 and found that there was no fraud. These scholars—from the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University—looked at raw evidence from the Bolivian election authorities that had been handed over to the New York Times.
Under capitalism Black Lives are adrift and vulnerable
Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois.
Mirror mirror and politics
“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” Nearly every German knows the story of Snow White. Currently, the question of who is “fairest of them all” faces nearly every German political party or, in modern terms, who can attract more votes in next year’s election.
Love in the time of Coronavirus: We are in this together
In some ways, it is true that we are in this together. We are all facing a global pandemic. We are keeping the most vulnerable among us safe by trying to follow the advice of public health experts. But, when it comes to looking out for one another’s best interests, we are not in this […]
The tragic assassination of Colombia’s sports hero Patrón, lover of football and his Afro-Colombian community
Patrón lived in Chocó in northwestern Colombia, where 96 percent of the people identify as Afro-Colombian or as part of the Emberá Indigenous community. Chocó is treated as a backwater of the country, with no real infrastructure in the province’s expanse and little social policy to enhance the lives of its population.
Will there ever be elections again in Bolivia?
On November 10, 2019, President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia announced his resignation from the presidency. Morales had been elected in 2014 to a third presidential term, which should have lasted until January 2020.
COVID and Kafala
To imagine that a country as structurally classist as Kuwait could have ever succeeded in fighting a pandemic that was born from exploitation and thrives on inequality is the kind of naivety one dreams of achieving, so comforting must it be.
Saul Williams on Trump & the politics of fear
Saul Williams On Trump & The Politics Of Fear
The paranoid president
Trump’s rhetoric adheres to a longstanding tradition of political paranoia. To understand it, twenty-first century radicals could benefit from an unlikely source: the postwar writings of Richard Hofstadter.
The Internationalist Lenin. Self-determination and anti-colonialism.
In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.[1] The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled.
How the U.S. failed at its foreign policy toward Venezuela
On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams.
