Archive | Commentary

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 […]

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.