Archive | Commentary

The Indian government appears to have abandoned even the remnants of neutrality, and thrown in its lot with the U.S.-Israeli side. What explains this stand?

To make sense of present developments it is essential to understand the dialectic of continuity and change in U.S. imperial grand strategy.

Imperial violence was not invented by Trump. It has been an integral part of this nation’s relationships with the rest of the world from its beginning. However, Trump is more direct in saying out loud what former presidents hesitated to acknowledge, instead either keeping it hidden from public view, justifying it as self-defense, or employing subtler means of intimidation.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel has even attempted to hide the fact that this aggression is being carried out to facilitate a regime change that they would find amenable to their goals of total domination of the entire region of West Asia militarily, economically and politically, and to deprive the Palestinian people under occupation and facing an ongoing genocide of support for their capacity to resist and free themselves of this unlawful occupation.

Brazil’s left, headed by the ruling Workers’ Party (PT), has long been a leading voice in Latin America against U.S. interventionism. When the United States launched its military action to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2025, the Brazilian government and the PT joined a global chorus of shock and denunciation of this […]

After the Trump administration illegally kidnapped the legitimate president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on January 3, 2026, we saw two distinct and divergent responses from Venezuelans. On the one hand, the Venezuelan diaspora, especially in the United States, celebrated President Maduro’s kidnapping and bombing of their birth country. They congregated […]

The death of James Petras—the American sociologist whose writings influenced generations of critical thinkers across continents—passed through the world almost like a whisper. A scholar who spent his life exposing the violence of power, the inequalities of global capitalism, and the illusions of empire left this world with little noise beyond small circles of readers […]

Tech billionaires and the Trump administration, with the apparent support of most of the capitalist class, are betting big on artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, AI investments have become the primary driver of US economic growth. But this is a losing bet for us. The AI boom is not sustainable. And because it is delivering […]

Interview with John Bellamy Foster on his new book, “Breaking the bonds of fate, Epicurus and Marx Epicurus”.

In the mountainous coffee-growing region of Morán municipality, in Lara state, generations of campesino families have built their lives growing coffee. Steep slopes, misty mornings, and hard physical labor are part of daily life in this territory, where coffee is not only a crop but a way of organizing time, work, and community. In recent […]

The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at the hands of U.S. imperialism marks a new and extremely serious escalation in the sustained aggression against Venezuela’s sovereignty. Far from being an isolated or exceptional event, this episode is part of a prolonged offensive that combines economic and financial warfare, political […]

We’ve been keeping an eye on the Hercules Gymnasium…there’s this Lichtenfeld kid, already a champion wrestler, takes a particular interest in street fighting. Understands that there are no rule books, this isn’t sport, it’s Nazis who are out to kill us, and the less well-mannered we can be about it, the more effective. –Thomas Pynchon […]

In a recent editorial, the Washington Post characterized Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s diplomatic mission to Beijing as a “shortsighted” attempt to “troll” President Donald Trump. The critique suggests that Canada is blurring the line between pragmatism and naiveté, trading long-term security for a “show” of strategic partnership with a “dictator.” According to this view, […]

On October 21, 2025, four British newspapers headlined the same story, claiming that a Cambridge study had shown that Frederick Engels was grossly mistaken on the class divisions in Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845.

Robert Longa is a founding member of the Fuerza Patriótica Alexis Vive, a Venezuelan grassroots organization promoting communal construction. Based in Caracas’ 23 de Enero barrio, Longa has played a central role in building El Panal Commune and in advancing a strategic vision of communal power as the backbone of the Bolivarian Revolution. This conversation […]

On December 29, 2025, the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) celebrated its 65th anniversary in Havana. I was part of a delegation convened by Dr. Rosemari Mealy that attended the celebration along with 240 representatives of solidarity organizations from thirty-two countries around the world. Together we defied the escalating U.S. efforts to […]

The year 2026 marks the eighty-third anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad. The battle was not merely a decisive military engagement in the Second World War, but a historical rupture that reshaped the trajectory of the 20th century. Fought between August 1942 and February 1943, it marked the first total strategic defeat of Nazi Germany […]

The Council on Foreign Relations shrinks the political imagination of learners and deploys the interests of the elite among an increasingly precarious American populace.

Hoel Le Moal: Marx seems to have been obsessed with the question of communal property throughout his life. In your article “Marx and Communal Society for the July-August 2025 issue of Monthly Review, you quote Marx in his Grundrisse as saying that “as a member of the commune, the individual is the private proprietor” of a “particular plot of land.

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 […]